#but GOD i want to get my fucking hands on people's intellectual property sometimes

[vulpinesaint]

the sheer number of incredibly intricate worlds and characters that i have created with people who i am no longer friends with so that i can no longer talk about those characters or use those settings. i only got half the dog in the divorce do you know what i mean

[purekesseltrash]

Chapter 12 of Bury Them Deep, the final chapter, is out!

Fave Excerpt:

Mezou jammed his hands inside of his coat pockets, unsure of what to say or even do besides grin like an idiot.  Tokoyami came to a stop finally and stared at Mezou, mouth open as if he was about to speak.  He gaped for a moment more before a distinctly annoyed look came across his features.  “Fuck,” he hissed, “I had a whole speech that I was thinking up on the way here and suddenly I have found my mind to be a blank slate.”

Mezou laughed, unable to help himself, “I don’t need speeches.”

Tokoyami stepped forward to grab at Mezou’s coat, his grip firm and his face honest, “You deserve them.  I fear I am an incurable romantic and this is simply how I function.  But my words have fled like cowards and the only part of the speech that I can remember is this, but it is the important part.  Let me take you on a date.  A real one.”

“I’d like that,” Mezou said softly.

Fun Facts:

- Hand to god, I had not decided on names for all of Shouji’s siblings until I had to write them.  Thank you, Japanese Name Generator.  Though Makoto is another Sailor Moon reference.  I also had not know that Shouji’s mom was where he got his artistic eye from, though I am glad for it.

- My favorite Hip song is ‘Lake Fever’ or ‘Scared’.  I thought that the lyric in Lake Fever was ‘You whispered Courage’ for the longest time, legitimately until I checked the lyrics to write the pivotal fucking scene only to find out that no, it was ‘hurry’.  It all worked out, thank GOD.

- IDK if anyone noticed, but I ship them as Tokoshouji, as opposed to Shoutoko.  I like the idea of Tokoyami being one taking the initiative better and it seems to fit his character anyway.  I don’t see this dynamic often and it drives me nuts because I could write an ESSAY on why it works so well.  Idk.

- Not even gonna lie, the last Mic segment made me cry.  It was like my final good bye to everyone reading, it’s personal.  And it’s basically me peeking out there, as opposed to just Mic.  For all of hockey’s shitty aspects, it’s the best game in the world.  I love it and I want it to be good and I will do what I can to make it be good.

More stuff under the read more about my future plans with this universe:

- So I have written a chapter and a half of an Erasermic prequel, basically telling the story of what happened when Shouta retired and ended up drugged to the gills and numb to the world at Hizashi’s doorstep, despite the two of them not having seen each other in legitimately over 10 years.

- I also have a side story of Kirishima and Bakugou, both with an idea of how they got together as well as what happens to them when they get to the NHL.  (Spoilers:  Kirishima does not have a good time as the first out and gay NHLer.  He basically gets buried in the minors despite being legitimately good.  Eventually he finally quits hockey way too young.  Bakugou meanwhile is a generational talent and is legit too good to bury in the minors.  When Kirishima retires, Bakugou flies to Tokoyami and Shouji’s house, where Kirishima is licking his wounds, and is like ‘Marry me.’  Kirishima tells him that he’s only going to say yes if Bakugou proposes with a Cup ring and Bakugou is like ‘Bet’.

- I also have one in mind on Ojiro and Shinsou.  They had an amicable breakup when they graduated, both understanding that the life of a hockey wife wasn’t gonna work for Ojiro.  Ojiro went on to meet a super cool alt girl through the info sec community and they got married and had a daughter.  They end up splitting up amicably when their daughter is around 7 and split custody without much of an issue.  Ojiro works remotely and lives in what is basically a lake cabin up in northern Minnesota.  He and Shinsou have kept in touch and when Shinsou finally retires, he comes to visit Ojiro.  The fic would go over them meeting up again.

- And then, of course, there’s Shouji and Tokoyami.

They get their shitty apartment in Atlanta.  Kenta helps them with the deposit and also goes with Shouji as he tries to find one.  Shouji ends up getting taken on by Orca, a buddy of Loder’s who generally doesn’t take Midwestern farm boys on as apprentices but he makes an exception, despite the fact that his work very afro centric.  Shouji is a nice guy though and a damned hard worker and has a good eye so Orca keeps him on for a long while.  Shouji still ends up picking up a bunch of odd jobs here and there, mostly grunt work like putting up drywall, but it gets him and Tokoyami through the absolute agony that is legal school.

Tokoyami goes into intellectual property law.  He knows how much work goes in to art and creative stuff and he wants to protect people like Shouji.  He ends up making a pretty nice living and they’re able to pay off the credit card debt that they accumulated during Tokoyami going through law school.  Shouji actually starts doing pretty well for himself too, mostly with his pottery but still with some sculpture.  Eventually Tokoyami proposes that they move to Raleigh, both because it makes sense for both of them and their jobs and well... because they have a hockey team.

Shouji never gave up hockey.  He had some years right after college where he did struggle to even look at his gear.  He had told his parents that he was gay and not going to the NHL over the phone as they were planning to come to his graduation, because he just couldn’t take them wasting money when he knew that they would never want to talk to him again.  Unfortunately, he was right.  Kenta still came to his graduation though and had two bullhorns that he slammed the entire time that Shouji was accepting his diploma.  He even brought Shouji his own pride flag and insisted on taking a picture with him holding it.  He posted the picture on his facebook with a very bold pronouncement that he was very proud of the first Shouji to get a college degree and how anyone that had a problem with his little brother could take it up with Kenta.  Still, Shouji went through some real mourning with the loss of his family and he took a small break.

But then he came back to it, once they started to get a little extra spending money.  He found a beer league group in Atlanta and started to really get back into the game, researching ways to improve in his downtime.  It got a little weird sometimes at the beer league games because sometimes Shouji would forget that he’d decided to wear eyeshadow or would forget that he had on entirely wrong undergarments but everyone accepts that goalies are weird so it was accepted.  Eventually he ends up having people ask him to coach for their kids, which he is loathe to do until Tokoyami points out that it’s better than Shouji do it, as someone who knows how damaging expectations and pressure can be, than anyone else.  So that becomes a little part time job of his.

Everything isn’t perfect for Shouji and Tokoyami.  Nothing is perfect.  Tokoyami is a borderline hoarder and Shouji can’t stand mess and that causes them to fight enough that they wisely seek counselling. But they’re happy.  Tokoyami eases up on the goth stuff and accepts his accent a bit more, though he still dresses in dark colors, especially for court.  Shouji actually gets to play around a little with the whole genderqueer thing and makes up for the time that he spent avoiding anything that would make him seem too gay.  And they still work really well together, becoming the pair that everyone from college kind of groans at, because they’re so ridiculously in love, but also envies.

They get season tickets to the Carolina Hurricaines.  You’ll see them with Tokoyami in a Devils jersey and Shouji with one of many from his massive collection.  Tokoyami will make comments here and there during the game, showing that he does actually listen when Shouji talks about goalie stuff and they only ever miss a game for gallery openings or work events.  Otherwise, they are there in their seats, holding hands and watching the game.

Feel free to ask me any questions!  I’m more than happy to talk about this, if you couldn’t tell.  (Also, I do have some half written smut so uh.... yeah.)

[docholligay]

Please rant/rave (well, we already know which one it will be here) about Harry Potter!

GEE I HOPE THIS WAS WORTH WAITING FOR

OH MY GOD. The level of hatred I have for Harry Fucking Goddamn Potter, the culture around Harry Fucking Potter, extending its poisonous tentacles even to the concept of young adult fiction, fantasy, and the United Kingdom as a country and people. 

When you being on this, you may think, “Oh, Doc will explain that Harry Potter sucks because JKR hates trans women” and I will say, oh no, dear reader, that is a fantastic reason to hate the author, and I really suggest we all continue to hate her, and perhaps not purchase the QUEEN’S TONNES of officially licensed merchandise and movies and theme parks that give her stupid little fucking hands all that cash, but no, that is not why I hate the work. There are a number of great works done by terrible people, and the further out the lens of history gets the truer this is. 

I hate Harry Potter because it fucking sucks, and mentally stifled an entire fucking generation. 

“Well, Doc, Harry Potter was really there for me when--” Oh my god I could not fucking care LESS about your personal emotion connection to “orphan wizard boy turns out to be a rich aristocrat yet somehow less woke than Cinderella though” I have personally emotional connections to hot fucking garbage pails of media properties, and if someone came barreling through talking about the myriad ways in which they were horrible, I would be like, “Oh, you aren’t fucking wrong, pal” 

Harry Potter gained wild ass popularity in part due to its magnificent sorting system of Smart, Brave, Evil, and Other, because there’s nothing liberals like more than being able to put everyone’s personality into an easily labeled box, which is why astrology is so popular, or for the intellectuals, Myers-Briggs, which is just as fake but with the veneer of science. This allowed people to give into the tribalism they so desperately liked to pretend they did not possess, and also allow them to write thinkpieces about “The misunderstood Hufflepuff” or “Slytherins aren’t all bad!” or really anything that allows them to write a very real piece about their very imagined oppression for being a part of a totally fake house in a children’s book. Excellent use of your sociology degree, Kai, I thought the addition of phrases like, ‘Content of socialization” and “axes of oppression” really spoke to the struggles you face when wearing a green and silver scarf. 

The other reason it became popular is that it’s essentially wallpaper paste formed into characters. I have read all of the books, and I could not tell you even remotely what Harry’s defining personality traits are other than “protagonist”. In American, at least, a large part of it was the fascination with all things British, with the idea of boarding school and prefects and uniforms that aren’t inexplicably chinos and polo shirts for nine year olds. It allowed children to project onto something so bland that it could be anything. And for children, THAT’S FINE. There is a great deal of bland media made for children, but what I’m speaking to is the fandom, which is largely well over the age of 18. 

Because if we look at the books, are they...actually good? Was it good, or did I experience it as a child? I mean, honestly, on a literary level, are they, or was it just like we all watched Friends, we did it because everyone else was doing it, because I have a distinct memory of a series that involves such greats as “magical geegaws with poorly defined rules that are quickly forgotten despite being able to solve later problems quickly” or “Everyone loves Harry or is a bad guy, or secretly loved Harry all along” 

Oh, speaking of, man, if this was an actual well-written book, wouldn’t it have been wild to have Snape’s whole thing be to teach us that sometimes people do good things for the wrong reasons? Instead of naming your fucking child after the guy who ‘protected you’ because he still wanted to bone your mom? “After all this time” “Always.” 

While all this could have been explained, we have Quidditch added into the mix instead because 20 pages of the goddamn Puppy Bowl is exactly what I was looking for while I was waiting for JK to move the goddamn ball on literally any of these actual magical concepts. 

Harry Potter is a fucking trust fund baby, star quarterback, who grows up to be a cop and marries his high school sweetheart. (Speaking of, why were we shocked that JKR turned out to be a piece of shit when this was and always has been the conclusion of Harry Potter? Why are liberals so fucking into this series that upholds structures like it ain’t no one’s business? It’s a series that opines that those beneath us “Muggles” should be kept in the dark from us) Literally, he finds out he is a wizard and has a dragon-guarded fucking VAULT OF CASH. At 11. It’s such a series for little tyrants, you are special from birth and need do nothing to prove it, here is a letter certifying as such. Oh, not only are you rich and the greatest seeker and have excellent quips, but also your parents were not only rebels, but the best of rebels, and so deeply involved that your parents were killed by the big bad personally, again, because you are so special. His mother’s love literally saves his ass over and over again, because he was SO SPECIAL. He fought Voldemort FROM THE BEGINNING, and WON.  It’s literally the most privilege baby fantasy in the world. 

“But Doooooooooooc, it’s for chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren” 

A) Yeah, and you’re 32, you’re making my fucking point about Harry Potter setting an entire generation up for intellectual failure to launch. 

B) Okay, and? I can think of a bunch of kids’ books off the top of my head that in no way require specialness to be given by birth so as to roll out the red carpet for master protagonist. The Hunger Games. Watership Down. A Series of Unfortunate Events. The Chronicles of FUCKING NARNIA, about which I have only a small handful of particularly kind things to say. I’ve never read Percy Jackson, but it’s my understanding that despite his being a literal demigod, the attitudes of the supporting cast are allowed to fall between the extremes of “Appreciates Percy” and “naughty or will learn” Harry does nothing to improve himself even after knowing that he is HUNTED BY THE BIG BAD! “I won’t do this because I don’t like Snape”. So There” which, again, if this series were written with the slightest bit of care or know-how, could be a humbling fucking plot point! BUT NO THAT WOULD BE NAUGHTY. 

But the real reason I hate Harry Potter so much has everything to do with the fandom surrounding it, and how it intellectually stunted a generation of adults. The promise of Harry Potter was that it was supposed to make a new generation of readers, and so the popularity of them was pushed, and so there was discussion of teaching them in schools, but I tell you fucking what, I know a whole lot more folks who grew up reading Harry Potter that never advanced beyond reading YA, or even just rereading the entire series every year and that’s pretty much them done and dusted. 

In the attempt to recapture whatever it was about Harry Potter that attracted children (A lot of it was your peers doing it. I read them all as they came out, and it was literally the equivalent of watching the game so you could talk at the water cooler. That was never going to be recaptured) people, who by this time were likely in their teens, kept getting recommended stuff at the same and same level. No one ever felt pushed to read things that are challenging, to read things that have some of the concepts or themes of Harry Potter but maybe complicate. I know FAR more adults who read adult books that aren’t into Harry Potter, even if they were as children, than the reverse. 

But Doc, why is reading only books meant for 14 year olds a problem??? I mean I suppose I can’t convince you that comfort is not the job of literature or of life, it is the job of an easy chair, because Americans especially are decadent as fuck about being comfy cozy all the time and if anything causes them distress or pain it should be immediately avoided. But Maybe I can convince you that you’re fucking up these books for actual ass children who deserve to have their own writing section without adults bringing their fucking asses into it. They deserve their own spaces. There’s a number of YA editors who have talked about the difficult space YA now occupies because since Potter’s blowup, it’s no longer a niche category, but basically “adult easy reads” and so they have been buying books that are more about the tastes of adult buyers than of literal 14 year olds. 

Is that not...sad? To anyone else? Honestly, and this is not part of the essay because it’s a broader reaching problem, but CHILDREN’S MEDIA IS NOT FOR US. CHILDREN’S MEDIA IS NOT FOR US. CHILDREN’S MEDIA IS FOR FUCKING CHILDREN. The fucking 40-23 set really needs to get their shit together and grow up a little bit and engage in some fucking adult media, and maybe, if we support what we’re actually looking for FOR ADULTS, it will come to us. No one is saying you can’t read Harry Potter or watch some Cartoon Network show, but like, search your heart and come the fuck on. Engage in something more complex. If not for yourselves, for the kids getting shoved into simplified adult stories. It should not be about us. 

ANYWAY, my larger point is that it was Harry Potter, a badly written series about a magical boy who was chosen and magic and also rich and also a favorite of the headmaster and also more clever than most adults and also spoke the same magical snake language as the big bad and was also star quarterback, but at least there was a system in which you could buy a scarf in block colors and feel like you belonged to a team. 

(But not a sports team! lol handegg! I’m cool I don’t get into sports! Except Quidditch.) 

[tipsydipsydo]

Prompts

➳ his room in the crowded dorm

➳ "it'd be better if they watched."

➳ "then let's give them something to talk about."

Pairing: Yoongi x Reader

Gender of the Reader: female

Word Count: 910

Rating: 18+

Genre: Smut

Warnings: Dirty Language + Dirty Talk; Multiple Orgasms; Overstimulation; Oral (f); Insecurities; Mentions of Fingering; Mentions of Squirting; Exhibitionism-Kink; Mentions of (vaginal) Sex;

A/N: I liked your choosed prompts really much, anon 💕 Exhibitionism-Kink we are coming~

I hope you'll like it!

[Links]

NSFW Drabbles

My official Masterlist

「© tipsydipsydo」

This following story is my intellectual property and belongs only to my blog tipsydipsydo.tumblr.com!

I’ll not accept any kind of reposting, stealing or using/editing my work!

That includes reposting my content on other social media platforms too, even when you link me as the original author.

Thank you.

"O-Oh my god, Yoongi! Oh fuck, I can't... I c-can't take it a-anymore, I-I need-", you whine in a really high-pitched tone, didn't thought that you can even reach such a high octave. Your hips are moving uncoordinated forth and back, you don't clearly know if you want to pull away from Yoongi's sinful lips or press your swollen and oversensitive pussy even more into his face. How good that you're completely alone in the dorm right now, so the other members can't complain about that you're so fucking loud.

"Hm? What's the matter, Babygirl? Do you need to cum? Is your pretty pussy already so oversensitive that you have to cum after three minutes all over again? Hm... because you're already so wonderful sensitive, what about to get your fourth orgasm with my fingers in that sweet and tiny pussy hole of yours?", ask you Yoongi teasingly in a deep raspy voice.

His hands are slowly moving down from your thighs to hot and messy center, just alone his hot breath stimulates your clit, make you squirm under him.

You can instantly guess what his personal goal is, especially after giving you already the third or fourth orgasm. You're always so oversensitive after that and when the long delicate digits of your personal devil would finger fuck you right then, you'd definitely loose your sanity by your next high and gonna squirt all over his hand.

God, he loves to see you falling apart for him, giving him a noticeable proof how good he's making you feel.

And after that, what the Maknaes said yesterday at the Dinner table to him, he needs a good amount of proof that he's able to satisfy your sexual desires.

In opposition to your boyfriend's plans, you know that you can't take even more overstimulation today and with it, that particularly just the thought of squirting right now, gives you feelings of panic instead of pleasure.

"Y-Yoongi, wait! Please wait for a second! I-I love it so fucking much that you're so eager to please me, really. B-But you seems to be like... a little bit too eager today? Like, you just gave me three incredible orgasms in the last twenty minutes a-and now you want to make me squirt on my fourth orgasm... I don't think I could take even more overstimulation without a short break. And besides that... is something up? Are you angry or mad? I-I mean... it's feels like that you have to win some kind of competition I don't know about and like you're collecting the number of my orgasms to break a new record. Baby, tell me. What bothers you?", you ask him breathlessly, closing your legs and pulling a little bit from Yoongi's dangerous Tongue and fingers away.

An uncomfortable silence returns to Yoongi's dorm room. Your Boyfriend needs a moment to think about the things you said, pressing his lips into a straight and thin line before he sighs heavingly and answers your question. Simply because you're right with your guess, even when Yoongi didn't like to admit to it.

"The boys, especially the maknaes, are teasing me constantly how our sex life must look like. Why did you chose me, a guy who acts sometimes like a eighty years old grandpa. How I'm able to satisfy your sexual needs when I normally advoid every kind of sportive activity, that our sex must be very lazy, boring and really unsatisfying for you. Just stupid shit like that. I know, they don't really mean it, they just tease me back when I give sarcastic comments...", reveals Yoongi the truth to you and shrugs a little helplessly with his shoulders. You notice a little blush on his cheeks and how he advoids your eyes.

"...and even when you didn't want to, it makes you feel like you have to prove that you're more than capable to satisfy my desires, right? Just for your own conscience, hm?"

"Yeah, maybe. Seems like that.", says Yoongi simply, a little taciturn. He don't really like it to talk about his insecurities but that's okay for you.

A little dirty smirk appears on your lips, Yoongi cocks his eyebrow questioningly. There came a naughty Idea into your mind, just the thought of it lets the arousal between your legs run down your inner thigh.

"...then let's give them something to talk about~", you wisper and wiggle with your eyebrows.

"Hm? What do you mean?"

You stand up from the bed and walk towards the door of his room, pressing the handle down and let the door swing wide open.

"Let's give them some real stuff to talk about~ I think, it'd be better if they watched. Then we could make sure that they get definitely the proof they needed so badly. Hopefully they would learn their lesson to not underrate my Daddy as well...", announce you when you return back with a smug smile, placing yourself into his lap.

"Fuck, that's so sexy... so my little naughty princess likes it to get fucked when other people can watch her?", growls Yoongi into your earshell, clearly turned on from your idea

"Uhm, maybe... I hope they're coming back from their work out really quickly."

[out-of-jams]

Direct Message || Part one || kth

↠ Direct Message ↞ “Never in a million years would you have expected Kim--motherfucking--Taehyung of world famous Bangtan Sonyeondan, the biggest boyband in the entire world, to find it. To watch your whole cover of his song, Winter Bear, and actually like it. And not just like it.

He posted a link on Weverse for everyone else to see it too.”

Word Count: 1.1k

Warnings/Genre: Fluff. Drabble series. Language barrier!au. Idol!Taehyung. Youtuber!Reader. Bad language. Somewhat social media!au.

A/n: Just a smol series. And yes, this is completely inspired by that one post Tae made on Weverse with a link to that girl’s yt channel. LOL. Also, this is kind of a part of the Cheers If You Agree universe!

All of my works are purely fiction. Everything I write is my intellectual property and therefore belongs to me. ©out-of-jams. Do not copy or repost without permission.

                             | Next | Masterlist | 

“Holy shit.”

There was no word in the history of the English language that could be used to describe what you were currently going through.

“Are you literally fucking kidding me?” Your voice, so high pitched that you were pretty sure only your next door neighbor’s demonic chihuahua could hear it, barely left your parted lips. Because you couldn’t believe what you were staring at. To be honest, you weren’t even sure if you could believe it despite the clear proof in the form of your phone. If you weren’t sitting on your bed, you were pretty sure that your legs would have collapsed right out from under you.

“This is..is...” Shaking, you lifted your hand to bring the brightly lit screen closer to your face. No matter how many times you swiped up to refresh the page with trembling fingers, it didn’t change. It was still there. Your fucking face! Well, the thumbnail at least.

You blinked.

Again.

Again.

Refreshed the page.

Again.

Yup, still there.

A link to YouTube of a video that you’d just recently uploaded stared back at you unwaveringly. You hadn’t thought anything of it when you’d made it, had just figured that it’d be like any other cover you’d uploaded throughout the past year. And you hadn’t been expecting a whole lot of views either, seeing as how your channel was still relatively new and all. When you’d clicked “upload” and closed out of the page, you’d figured that you’d go back and check in a few days to see how it was received. If people had liked it.

Sometimes you would get very nice, encouraging comments from people. And even though it was a slow climb, your subscriber count went up every couple of days. You’d been singing for years, as long as you could remember honestly, but you’d only just gotten the confidence to put yourself out there last year. Hell, the only reason you started posting in the first place was because your friends all but threatened bodily harm if you didn’t do it.

“You’re so talented, dude. Don’t let that go to waste.” Your best friend had told you one day over coffee. “Or you’ll regret it when you’re old and dusty.”

You hadn’t thought you’d become overly famous or anything. Just branch out and share your music with other people.

Never in a million years would you have expected Kim--motherfucking--Taehyung of world famous Bangtan Sonyeondan, the biggest boyband in the entire world, to find it. To watch your whole cover of his song Winter Bear and actually like it. And not just like it.

He posted a link on Weverse for everyone else to see it too.

When the green little notification that he’d posted something had first slid into view on your screen, you hadn’t thought much thought of it. Taehyung was incredibly active on the app and would spam it all the time with ridiculously funny selcas or respond to army’s posts in his free time. So you’d just brushed it to the side to check on later. Fighting the lag of millions of other people to try and translate what he posted wasn’t something that you were interested in at that moment.

Even if he ended up deleting it later, you were pretty sure that someone on Twitter would have taken a screenshot and it’d circulate around at some point. It wasn’t that you didn’t care, you just didn’t check every single thing the members posted to the app the moment that they were uploaded. Therefore, you hadn’t really given it a second thought.

Until your best friend and fellow army blew your phone up with over a dozen messages, completely interrupting your lazy Netflix binge. Most of them hadn’t made any sense, had just been a string of nonsensical key smashes with the occasional “!!” tacked on. Since she was stuck in a movie theater with her boyfriend, she hadn’t been able to call you without causing a scene. So she’d resorted to flooding you with texts until you responded.

Why she’d even been checking the Weverse notification in the darkened theater in the first place was a mystery to you. Especially since you knew she’d been dying to see that movie for weeks. Whatever it was. But that didn’t matter, not when she’d piqued your interest with a text saying, “WEVERSE HUGHIH NOW.” You’d figured that Taehyung must have just posted a thirst trap or something again.

But you’d been wrong.

Flooding in right beneath his post were hundreds of comments. Some were in English, others in Korean, and the rest in languages that you had no idea how to read. They varied in reactions too, and everytime you started to read one, the page would glitch out and another would take its place.

He hadn’t put any text in the post, just the link.

What the hell was that supposed to mean? That he liked it? He had to have, right? Otherwise he wouldn’t have posted it. Unless...well, unless he absolutely hated it and wanted to send army after you to--

Shaking your head to get rid of the onslaught of extremely unrealistically anxious thoughts, you watched the amount of comments and cheers to the post skyrocket. If just his post was getting so much attention, what would that mean for…?

Immediately you switched apps and opened up YouTube. Navigating to the video only took a minute, but felt like hours and your heartbeat pounding in your ears didn’t help. Especially not when you pulled up the same cover and could do nothing but freeze in shock.

“Oh, my god.” Not only did you have over a hundred thousand views already, but subscription notifications were going off every two seconds.

Setting your phone down onto your bed, you watched with unseeing eyes as the screen went dark from inactivity.

How the hell were you supposed to respond to the comments? Were you even supposed to? You’d never spoken a word to Kim Taehyung in your whole life. In fact, you’d only ever been to a handful of BTS concerts. But you knew how crazy some people could get. Would they start thinking you were dating him or something just because he’d shared a link to your video.

Fuck, you really hoped not.

Your phone lighting up snapped you out of your thoughts. You’d turned off all push notifications for comments and subscriptions, so you reached for it without a second thought. And stared down at the bright screen with bewilderment.

Whatever the rest of the message was got cut off there. Who the..? 

With a shrug and curiosity needing sating, you swiped it open.

[mysticalmusicwhispers]

HELLO... i am back

yes aditya gets a treat because otherwise indus is going to murder him and then transfer him far far away and never unground him ever and we can't do that to a baby. also i hope no actual murder of chickens occur in their plot thing but it could also be something Worse so Yikes!

i wish yao didn't know what a hickey is but. welp he would. actually this makes me propose a situation (nsfw-ish? implied nsfw?): nyo china buys encyclopedias for yao to read and one very old one has a section with a full diagram of sexual intercourse. it isn't porn, it's those diagrams where the skin is missing and serves as a view into the organs of the human body but just in a... position. so 8 year old yao reads all about sex and goes to nyo china being like "hey so sex is for making babies right? so if i want children i have to have sex right? there's no opting out of it?" and nyo china is like fuck it the kid might as well get his sex ed + introduction to adoption stuff now since he knows about it already. then the next day a teacher has a badly hidden hickey and yao is trying to figure out how the fuck that happened before he remembers that certain animals bite each other during sex and asks nyo china about it.. and then boom. (the encyclopedia part was unfortunately inspired by irl events 😔)

but anyway imagine yao mistranslating the code.. and being like "wtf why do you want to BITE people" and india + iran being like ??? and then they get an unfortunate sex ed that night (baby! yao's mildly inaccurate version: "sometimes weirdos like biting each other during sex many animals do this as well and this is called a hickey. sex is this thing that adults do for fun and sometimes to reproduce. but you should only bite other people and have sex with them if all of you are interested and not just because you want a baby, because there are other ways of getting one. if they try to have sex with you or bite you or touch you in Bad Touch areas you should -" "kill them? and get an adult later?" "yeah exactly" "how do you know this tho??") then yao probably tries to find the sex encyclopedia to bring to school to show india and iran but nyo china threw it out because it was 20 years out of date and said that pluto was a planet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

also YES MISS VIETNAM DESTROY THE PROPERTY OF THE RICH... CUT HIM DOWN TO SIZE imagine getting 2 entire ass houses at 18 lol and there was actually a person who was going to get a mercedes in my class. apparently his parents were buying 2 and wanted him to pick the one with the colour he liked more as a gift at 18 and keep the other for themselves. he asked us which colour Mercedes was better, someone accused him of being a braggart, and then there was so much drama... i am glad i am no longer in that class. rich people.

also yeah miss vietnam is definitely one of those nice but strict teachers!! she'll definitely be kind to everyone but she won't tolerate bullshit and god knows yao is full of it. but also imagine vietnam teaching india's class and then yao pouting to india about the assignment he got a b on (a slight improvement from the c) only to be met with "what? she's so nice and smart lol you're just an asshole i kind of want to make friends with her tbh" and yao's like How Dare You Backstab Me Like This? but yes she really forces him to Think instead of just letting him be and that's very good for him!! and she gets an intellectual outlet too :D

also yeah like linh is going to struggle.. how do you write "he's a complete asshole but tolerable and intellectually fun after a while" in a GOOD manner?? this rec letter will probably be full of phrases like "a spirited personality given to debate" or something

This is also a late reply :’)

I wasn’t really thinking about anything specific for the plot; I was really just trying to find a word that was slightly similar to hickey and decided on a dead chicken lmao. But honestly, it would probably be something like “I’m going to bring a (dead) chicken to class for show and tell and you two need to act horrified and cause a ruckus because it would be fun and it would scare the other kids :)”. (this is probably bullying, so in an effort to make them slightly better kids, an alternative plot is that a stray cat has been coming to their school and in order to make friends with it, they feed it a whole-ass dead chicken Nyo China got from the butchers and was planning to cook for dinner. The teachers are horrified and confiscate Yao’s backpack for fear of germs and salmonella.)

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OH MY GOD nyo China, miss, please, he’s young. But the encyclopedia reading is so accurate o-o small and independent Yao + voracious reader + lots and lots of books about Everything + nyo China’s hands-off “it’s never too early to know” caretaking/parenting strategy = what other things has he been exposed to... (let’s face it he’s probably said the F-word or insulted someone in Mandarin without meaning to, but came off as a disrespectful little chaos ball) BUT THE BADLY HIDDEN HICKEY and the ANIMALS BITING EACH OTHER salk;fsdl;ksdjl way to unconsciously roast your teacher lmao. I love nyo China’s no-nonsense way of approaching Strange Questions Asked by Eight Year Olds but I do not know how to feel about her very direct answers 😭 Also, I am very sorry for your personal loss 😔.

Scene 3 is 100/10 canon now. “weirdos who bite each other during sex” Yao thinks hickeys are weird, and good for him. Also the little summary!! Of course Yao pass on everything he knows to India and Iran... at least it’s not a fucked up version of sex-ed, even if it may have some small inaccuracies. rip outdated encyclopedia. Also “ ‘kill them? And get an adult later?’ ‘yeah exactly’” GOOD nyo china thank you for doing at least one thing correctly

also your class is crazy??? A MERCEDES oh my god... how do his parents love him so much? My parents probably wouldn’t even trust me with a second hand from 2005 lmao. Also, wtf rich kid, why would you be crowdsourcing opinions for YOUR car? (ngl I kinda think he was bragging too 😂, but drama? Do all these people have nothing else to do besides gossip smh)

Vietnam has a blacklist of Confirmed Assholes she needs to keep an eye on and Yao got on the list in the first few days after being very tryhard and simultaneously arrogant, so he just assumes she’s naturally mean because he never saw the other side of her. But then he starts hearing reviews from his friends who all say she’s their favorite teacher so far and he’s all like “????? Excuse you???” Also yes go get her friendship Aditya hopefully it will mellow you out a little as well “A spirited personality given to debate” YES YES YES! That sounds like such a nice phrase but it’s just code for “loves to argue with me and that’s cool I guess”. The recommendation makes Yao glow (to admissions) despite how much Vietnam thinks it’s bad and also how much bs-ing she thought she did. Admissions officers think Yao’s amazing and contributes greatly to the classroom environment and Vietnam is like “yeah, in a way, as long as you don’t mind someone who thinks every word you say is somehow wrong and will fight you to prove it lol. just take him, I’m trying to get rid of him”

Since there’s essays involved I’m assuming she teaches either history or literature? Kinda on the fence because I feel like she’d be good at giving a no-nonsense version of history filled with interesting details and prompts that make you think (and also hosts monthly debates on controversial issues), but I also want Yao to be as un-confident as possible in his abilities in her class, and I feel like he would be less comfortable/sure of his answers and thoughts in a lit class than a history one. I’m not sure though

[tricktster]

Where am I? The uncanny valley, my friend.

There is a trope in horror that I particularly love, where the protagonist realizes they are Seeing Something That They Were Not Meant To See. Maybe they open the freezer in the basement that their spouse always keeps padlocked and find a collection of severed fingers, or maybe they gaze on the unspeakable tentacled geometries of an eldritch god. No matter what The Thing is, though, the bell can’t be unrung. They can’t go back to living their life the way it was before they saw The Thing, and even in the happiest of scenarios, the ones where they get out alive, their discoveries haunt them in every frozen dinner or plate of calamari. 

I am in The Villages, the largest gated over-55 community in the world, and as a non-retiree, I was Not Meant To See This Place. 

Figure 1: Honestly some of the better art here.

Here is what happened: My parents, whom I love dearly and respect to my core, announced essentially out of the blue a few years back that they would be purchasing a house in The Villages, Florida, a retirement community that essentially occupies an entire county in central Florida. This was something of a surprise, since my parents, heretofore, had always presented as rational actors. I frankly never imagined they’d live in any gated community, much less The Villages. 

I have now visited my parents in The Villages on three occasions, and each time, I have found myself somewhere mid-visit wondering if I actually know these people at all. My parents are both tremendously intelligent professionals who are highly regarded in their northeastern community, where I was born and raised. Growing up, my parents emphasized to me and my brother the importance of education and intellectual curiosity, but also hammered home that we were to be kind, generous, empathetic, environmentally conscious, and aware of the greater world. They (particularly my mom) are crunchy as hell. As kids, my mom used to take us for walks in the nature preserve and help us identify different plants, animals and mushrooms with field guides. When we went on vacations, we went to Yellowstone and hiked, or we camped in the rainforest at eco-tourism sites. My parents were early adopters of hybrid cars. They’re passionate about music and art, architecture and history. They bought a home in the tackiest place on earth.

When I think Central Florida, I think thick forests and swampland. There’s a certain romance associated with half-rotted trees covered in Spanish moss, and pools of still water only occasionally disturbed by primordial carnivores:

Figure 2: You know, this kind of thing.

The Villages, on the other hand, look like this:

Figure 3a: For fuck’s sake.

Figure 3b: Christ.

How bad is the aesthetic in The Villages? Let me put it this way: If Tim Burton decided to make a movie about gated Floridian retirement communities, and they shot it in The Villages, when I got around to watching it, I’d be like, jesus, Tim, going back to the well with this one, huh, we get it, it’s a parody of a soulless, conformist, suburbia. Oh, a “Declaration of Restrictions has been created for each individual neighborhood, which regulates design and operational aspects, such as landscaping, repairs and maintenance, placement of satellite dishes, hedges, etc. An Architectural Review Committee controls the composition and consistency of the exterior of the residential properties within The Villages.*” Fuck you, Tim, try something new, I’d say, very smugly because I am very smug.

Oh, but wait, Tim would say, what if I told you there were forty-eight golf courses within The Villages? What if I told you there were three “town centers,” and one is designed to look like it’s an old town from the American Southwest, and one’s designed to look like a coastal tourist town, and one of them is actually designed to look like the fucking Wild West, is that choice enough for you, huh? What if I told you that every place in The Villages is accessible by golf cart? What if I told you that ridiculous old men would trick out their golf carts to look like they’re sports cars?

Figure 4: WE GET IT, TIM.

In short, The Villages is a ridiculous place. It is a theme park without rides, a clear-cut swath of swampland transformed at great expense into a facsimile of a 1950s suburb where the citizens are permitted to live their lives free of  meaningful community responsibilities. It is, at its worst, a dull and soulless celebration of wastefulness and excess, centering around one of the most historically exclusionary, and least environmentally sound, “sports.” It is all camp, and all artifice. You can go to one of three town squares every night and hear one of the rotating live bands perform, generally in front of large crowds of seated people while one or two brave couples sway awkwardly on the dance floor. Sometimes, a handful of line dancers emerge for a song to do an uncomfortable, unsmiling routine that looks more like solemn ritual than joyful performance. You can do this all while housing a three dollar Long Island Iced Tea to the dome. 

Needless to say, it’s also super white here and the politics are off-the-charts awful.

Figure 5: A picture I took last night of a store selling honest-to-god oil paintings of a slimmed down Donald Trump enjoying various leisure activities with historical figures.

Oh, and let’s just address the elephant in the room: Rumor has it this place is horny as hell, with a population that’s just riddled with STDs. I can’t find anything to substantiate the popular story that this is a hotbed for swingers, it’s just a rumor everyone I talk to seems to know about. However, given that management in The Villages certainly knows about this rumor, since everyone else in the continental US does, it seems absolutely fucking bananas bonkers that they let the promotional magazine I found in my parents’ living room go out with the following headline: 

Figure 6: Are we still doing phrasing?

I just don’t get it, man. I straight up can’t figure out what my parents see in this place, much less why they’d want to own property here. It doesn’t comport with the intelligent and engaged people I know them to be? Sometimes, it just feels almost disappointing, like the way I’m sure they’d feel if I’d chosen to go to a party school for college. 

But look, kids, I’m here venting about this insane place to you guys because I’m NOT venting it to my parents, and I’m not telling my parents that this whole gated community can blow me, because this place isn’t for me. As a non-retiree with a decent amount of punk rock sentiment left in me, I Was Not Meant To See This Place, but while I’m horrified (and oh, lord, am I horrified) by a lot of The Villages, I’m choosing kindness towards my parents and leaning into it. For whatever reason, they love it here, and they want their family to love it too, so when they asked hopefully for the hundredth time if me and my brother and sister-in-law would come down to visit, we said yes. When they asked if we’d play golf with them, I swallowed my huge distaste for the Dumbest Game of All Time, and I agreed that the manicured lawns were beautiful in their own way, and the landscaping was impressive, and I spent several hours trying to hit a ball into a hole for some fucking reason.

Here’s a fun fact about The Villages: get up early enough, and you can find alligators ambling across the golf courses, locating the next water trap to spend their day in; the biggest are fifteen feet long. The American alligator has existed in and around Florida for around eight million years, but the family alligatoroidea has existed since the late Cretaceous - 70 million years ago. Alligators have seen the dinosaurs reign and die out, and gone on to survive the rise of birds, mammals, and relatively recently, humans.

When I’m in The Villages, sometime it keeps me sane to think that whenever this garbage place collapses, the gators will swim through the wreckage and hunt in the same place an oil portrait of a slimmed down Donald Trump once hung.

[forsetti]

On The Myth of American Individualism

In light of people completely, and sometimes arrogantly, defying public health recommendations to address a pandemic in the name of “Freedom” and “American Individualism, I thought I'd repost this article I wrote in 2012.

Recently, New York Times resident hack pundit, David Brooks, wrote an article arguing that Republicans are the party that “celebrates work and inflames enterprise”.  The GOP come from a long lineage of hard working, God fearing individualists that can be traced back through American history from Mitt Romney to the first Pilgrim who stood, buckled shoed, atop Plymouth Rock. Here are his opening two paragraphs: “The American colonies were first settled by Protestant dissenters. These were people who refused to submit to the established religious authorities. They sought personal relationships with God. They moved to the frontier when life got too confining. They created an American creed, built, as the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset put it, around liberty, individualism, equal opportunity, populism and laissez-faire.

This creed shaped America and evolved with the decades. Starting in the mid-20th century, there was a Southern and Western version of it, formed by ranching Republicans like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Their version drew on the traditional tenets: ordinary people are capable of greatness; individuals have the power to shape their destinies; they should be given maximum freedom to do so.”

For Brooks, America was built by hard working people who cowered from a smiting God, lived like Ted Kaczynski , didn’t accept handouts and loved the soft reach around from the Invisible Hand.  From this great tradition sprouted great men who were the salt of the earth, ordinary men who lived off the fruits of the sweat of their brow.  People like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, two men who grew up in luxury, went to topflight prep schools and colleges, were able to walk into business with a long list of powerful, influential people already in their contact lists and didn’t fuck up and when they did, had other doors and opportunities open for them because of who they are and who they knew.  I highly doubt that John Q. Colonialist could get a government bailout to safe his business (Romney) or have one failed business after another yet have people willing to throw money and opportunities at you over and over again (Bush).  

On the claim that Republicans are the party of work and this tradition has been passed down from John Smith and Patrick Henry to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Belle Starr, I call “Bullshit!”  This country was discovered, settled, expanded, progressed and rose to the world’s greatest economic power because of the community, not the individual.  This love affair and worship of individualism in America is not based on its history or facts.  It is a complete myth.  A myth that has become a fundamental underlying principle of today’s Republican Party.  A myth, that Jim Jones-like devotion to has resulted in horrible, often progress stifling, policies.  It is an even more deeply rooted myth in conservative lore than Ronald Reagan being a tax cutting, small government, hard line hawk.

The first wave of immigrants that came to America came for economic, not religious reasons and they didn’t migrate to our shores to frolic in the Fountain of Laissez-Faire. They were employees, mostly indentured servants, of major trading companies who sent them here to harvest resources like timber and furs.  They were “company men”, not individuals who were looking to forge a new life by braving the elements or testing their mettle. The manner in which they worked and lived was communal.

The next wave of people coming to America was the religious immigrants.  For Brooks, this meant the hardworking, God fearing Protestants who sired America’s work ethic, loved the eight pound, six ounce baby Jesus and who planted the love and respect of individualism into the country’s psyche where it grew and flourished for three hundred plus years and can now be seen in the standard bearers for the Republican Party. Unfortunately, “There goes another wonderful theory about to be brutally murdered by a gang of facts.” (author unknown).

There certainly were groups of very devoutly religious people who came to America during this time. However, what Brooks conveniently omits are the multitude of the other groups that also made their way across the Atlantic to avoid the religious persecutions and heavy handed dogma in Europe. Atheists, Deists, Agnostics, etc., left Europe for the New World because of the religious environment in Europe.  Being part of the religious wave didn’t mean you were religious, it meant you left because of religion.  There were just as many, if not more, non-religious, non-fundamentalist immigrants to America during this period than the “Forebears of Freedom and Republican/American Greatness” as Brooks would have it.  This group played as much a role in America’s formation as a country and culture, if not more, than the Puritans or Quakers.  Some of the non-religious people who played a bit part in the formation of America include: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith…

The fundamentally religious in early American history was not the dominant group and it was not individualists.  They in fact were the opposite.  They were communal socialists.  In order to afford ship passage to America they often pooled their money together to ensure they could travel as a group. They formed settlements where they helped build each other’s homes, businesses and defenses.  They had community storages and would mete out food and other resources as necessary.  They didn’t cut off someone who was sick.  Instead they would get together and, as a group, figure out the best way to address this or any other problem. What they didn’t do is as they were ascending the gangplank of the Mayflower wave to each other and say “Good luck!  Maybe I’ll see you around.”  They stayed together, worked together and helped each other.  They didn’t abandon the sick and weak or withhold food or shelter.  If you want to see the modern day version and descendants of the early religious settlers to America, visit the Amish community in Ontario Ohio or Lancaster Pennsylvania.  The Amish, Mennonites and similar groups have been the ones to continue the traditions of the early settlers.  One word that is never used in describing these groups or their members is ‘individualism’.

Not to mention that there were a lot of other settlers in the early America who were not the Protestant, white New Englanders yet had just as much impact on society and culture then and now.  The Spain heavily influenced Florida, California and the American Southwest.  France’s influence was felt all along the Mississippi River and Great Lakes areas.  To ignore or deny these groups’ impact on American culture in favor of a tiny sliver of white, New England Protestants, is intellectually dishonest.  Brooks takes a sliver of early America, ascribes general characteristics to it that were not true and then claims these traits are what made this country great.

Let’s fast forward a dozen score years or so to the early 1800’s and visit another group of people touted as the champions of The American Spirit of Individualism-The Pioneers.  You know the salt of the earth, lovers of capitalism and all things holy, the people who settled the West and spread the seeds of rugged individualism like they were John Holmes at Burning Man. According to people like Brooks, the Pioneers were the hardworking, Bible toting, individualist progeny of John Smith, William Bradford and Adam Smith.  Again I call “Bullshit!”  Hardworking? Absolutely.  It was pretty difficult to not have to work hard to survive during this time unless you were filthy rich.  The technology at the time was better than it was in colonial times but it still wasn’t good enough to diminish the day-to-day demands of life in the 1800’s.  Individualists?  Hell no!  I don’t even know where this idea came from.  Even the most cursory look at this era shows quite the contrary.

Remember the stories and pictures of the Pioneers moving across the Great Plains along the Oregon Trail? Did they make this trek one wagon at a time, as individuals?  No. There is a reason they were called wagon trains because they moved as groups.  When they arrived at their intended destinations did they head off in different directions and go all Jeremiah Johnson?  No. They either joined settlements already in progress or started their own, as a group.  They moved as a group, built communities as a group, defended their properties and families as a group…  I come from Pioneer stock.  My genealogy tree has a branch that goes back directly to Brigham Young (of course with 56 kids from 16 of his 55 wives, you can’t swing a dead cat along the Wasatch Range of Utah without hitting someone who is related to Brigham).  Every single aspect of Mormon history, from moving to and building up Nauvoo Illinois, to crossing the prairie, to Brigham leading the faithful into the Salt Lake Valley through Emigration Canyon and pronouncing “This is the place”, to building Salt Lake City was a group, not an individual activity.  It was so communal and such a collective effort that Marx and Engels would have been “Whoa, lighten up a bit, let a brother get some alone time.”

One argument against my take is-“These groups had to band together for pragmatic reasons.  There were extenuating circumstances and variables that forced them to operate as a group in order to survive.”  My response to this critique is-“Yeah.  Your point being what?”  Either working together, spreading out risks and rewards works and yields positive results or it doesn’t.  What the reasons are for doing so are irrelevant.  It doesn’t and shouldn’t matter what the reasons are for opting for the group versus the individual approach.  I fail to see how changing the reasons either changes the efficacy or the results.  Another way of looking at it is to ask the question, “Do you think they could have achieved the same results via the individualism route?”  There doesn’t seem to be any historical evidence to support that they could.  I’m skeptical that the Pioneers didn’t know how to deal with the big issues they faced and followed the community approach to problem solving out of ignorance, stupidity or tradition.  If you think they could have achieved the same or better results by acting as individuals, I would need to see some evidentiary support to back up this position.

The next defense of individualism is along the lines-“That was then, this in now.  The world has changed so the need for the community approach has diminished in importance and has been replaced with the superior, individualism approach.” There are two main problems with this argument.  First, Brooks and the defenders of individualism are not saying, “The community approach WAS the driving force behind early American exceptionalism but now it is the individual.”  The view they hold to be innately true is that it WAS individualism that made America great. Individualism brought to this country by God fearing, religious freedom seeking, hardworking  Europeans, passed down through the generations or absorbed by some sort of osmosis where the trait, like blond hair to Scandinavians, is dominant in conservatives.  Brooks and company might admit that the community approach played a role, just not THE role in making America great.  It was individualism that built that.  Uh......., no.  

Second, the “but the circumstances have changed and the individual plays a fundamentally more important rule” argument is also bullshit.  Certainly the nature of the problems have changed.  We don’t typically worry about packs of wolves, marauding Indians, small pox, the plague, dysentery, being snowed in an unable to get food for weeks in today’s society.  We live in a much more technologically advanced world where these types of problems have adequately been addressed and dealt with.  When it comes to many of the problems and situations that faced the early settlers, we will never face them.  Why?  Because are Founders and those that came after them, as communities, found solutions to those problems.  But, just because those problems either don’t exist or are rare does not mean that we currently are sans problems.  With the advancement of technologies, the world has expanded where people are not limited to living in a small area of the world most of their lives, where commerce and ideas travel around the world at an unbelievable speed.  We’ve gone from regional to a world economy. While the small, regional problems of the past have been handled, there are larger often global problems that need our attention.  I don’t see how, if individualism couldn’t properly deal with the small, regional problems, it can possibly take care of larger ones. If anything, the larger problems need a larger community.

Imagine a small town in Nebraska in the late 1800’s whose local bank is having a cash flow problem.  The town needs the bank so they come together and as a group, deposit enough money to keep the bank going.  Fast forward to September 2008 where the large banks and financial institutions in the U.S. who have branches across the country and all over the world and also have deep, financial ties to other countries’ banks.  They have a serious cash flow problem.  One of these banks was Bank of America. Imagine the B of A branch in Minden Nebraska, population 3000.  It doesn’t matter how community minded and organized the kind citizens of Minden are, nothing they do can safe their local bank from collapse because it belongs to a much larger entity.  So, in order to address the problem, the definition of community needs to expand. The financial problem was nationwide so it took the entire nation to adequately address the U.S. banking problem.  The global financial problem took the global community to address and fix it. It is not that individuals have not made significant contributions but outside the arts, very few have had a big impact on the economy or culture of America.  What makes America great and the advantage we have over just about every other country is our diversity. Homogeneous societies can accomplish a lot and often quickly because as a group, they think pretty much alike.  Their greatest limitation is thinking outside their cultural box.  America, with its wide diversity of cultures always has voices outside the box providing input.  This is a major force behind our innovations and progress the past couple of hundred years.

Name a major economic event in America’s history that was the result of individualism.  There might be some but the majority are ones undertaken by either groups or the government (group) for the betterment of its citizens (huge group).  Louisiana Purchase, Seward’s Folly, Transcontinental Railroad, Interstate Highway System, Tennessee Valley Authority, Space Race, WWII, GI Bill, Erie Canal, St. Lawrence Seaway, Panama Canal, Hoover Dam…all were paid for by the group, built by groups and benifitted groups of the population.

Individuals who have been put on the pedestal of individualism didn’t accomplish what they did by themselves.  Edison is thought to be one of America’s greatest inventors (Tesla was much better but Edison was a better marketer). Growing up, the image of Edison was him laboring long, arduous hours by himself in is laboratory. The reality is he had a very large team of some of the world’s top people working in his lab in Menlo Park and was heavily funded.

Individualism is important and certainly has played a role in America’s rise to power.  But, individualism didn’t have the starring role in “Making America Great”. That role was played by a cast of thousands.  Individualism was a bit player whose name wouldn’t come up in the end credits until half the audience had already left the theater.

[holy-mountaineering]

This spread is for @lesbianfrannyglass

Thanks for the donation and waiting so long, my life is chaos right now.

Tonight you’re getting the full Qabalistic Tree of Life Spread that I do and you I believe are pretty familiar with by now. What I’m going to do is go through and briefly explain each card, its position on the Tree, and then I’ll give you a summary/synopsis of the spread as a whole, that’s where the divination part happens.

Think of this spread as a sort of quantum map, or even the land of a regular map, everything is happening at once, in each place. It’s important to think of yourself as moving “through” the map but you are also simultaneously everywhere at once. For the sake of this specific experiment, think of this as a map. Maybe a human body, we’ll jump around.

Where we’re starting the journey from is Kether, the monad, the first sign of creation. We’ll call this your hometown, since it is where you’re from originally. Here we have the The Knight of Swords, the fiery part of Air or acting on thinking.

This is the breeze blowing the forest fire across a road. Our Knight has a sword in each hand as he dive bombs a fixed point. He has his airy bird friends in tow and his steed is as fixed as the rider.

You understand what you must do. Now, you must gather all available force to throw at your new focus.

In Chokmah, which is like your freeway getting you out onto the road out of  your hometown is the 6 of Cups, Pleasure. 

For reasons I call this the plumbing card. The water is not flowing freely as though it is pouring, it has been pumped through a series of tubes intricately woven together to fill the cups placed in the shape of a hexagram. Emotion and connectedness to life are intentionally being directed by unseen but invited forces. Someone who wasn’t looking closely could see nothing but knots and chaos and even wonder how the damn thing worked in the first place. Those people are squares and should be avoided at all costs. 

Do what gives you pleasure that also instills clarity. Center on the best you can feel even if onlookers can’t appreciate what you’re doing connoisseurs (and you) will dig it.

In Binah, which is ruled by Saturn and for the sake of this reading we will call the first stop on your roadtrip. You haven’t really arrived anywhere but you’re stopping and getting a chance to repack your car in a more efficient way. Sitting in Binah is the fan favorite, the 5 of Disks, Worry. 

Like all of the 5s in Tarot, this is the microcosmic or human number . Don’t believe me? Stand up, stick your arms and legs out and counting your head, congrats, you’re a pentagram. Lord knows people worry like motherfuckers about how they are going to get by in the “normal” world, so there is a stress and strain in this card that everyone late on a bill can understand. This is the worry that you’ll get your intelligence (Mercury) smothered by the laborious strain of Taurus. This is, like all 5s a human limitation issue. 

Well it won’t unless you only see your limitations and make it happen. Be smarter about you material situation so you don’t have to work harder.

In Chesed which is ruled by Jupiter and again for the sake of this experiment we’ll say involves your influence and benevolence in your current trip is the mindfuckery boy, the Prince of Swords, the airy part of Air. 

This is pure mind, “reason run amok.” The entire card is made up of strange and fragmenting geometric shapes like the prince’s world is coming apart at the seams. The humanoid creatures pulling his chariot have no fucking idea what they’re doing and the prince himself is in an awkward pose. 

Don’t think yourself into discord. Sometimes when you look too deep at unnecessary or mundane details you’ll fucking lose your shit. Furtherly, focus on doing one thing, stay with that single thing until it is done. I suggest breath work and controlling breathing specifically.

Across the Tree in Geburah, which is Mars Town, where you find your drive and what you’re trying to accomplish/conquer is the homefront, the 4 of Disks, Power or the Fortress or the island. 

This is “squaring up” with the material world or your everyday normal money/job/school/housing parts of life. The 4 or square is the next shape when the 3 or triangle is expanded. You are now expanding in 2 dimensions, you’ve made it passed the threshold, how do you proceed?  The Fortress is a castle or private physical place of isolation and security/safety. Your private property and you base of operations to expand out in the world must be firmly secured, since most accidents happen at home. From Liber AL it is mentioned that you should “(C)hoose ye an island, fortify it, dung it about with the enginery of war…” That is to say, for our illustration, protect your base of operations in your material world.

There is one entrance and around the fortress is a mote, this is so you may go about the world doing your business but you can return and bring the bridge up when you’re done fucking around with the outside world.

In Tiphareth, the Sun and center of gravity holding all this in place, the heart pumping the blood through this, your heart is the Ace of Cups, the root powers of water which is emotion, connectedness to living things, and intuition. 

 This is the geyser of the aspects of water exploding into existence. The Ace of Cups can be like the yearly floods on the   Nile was to ancient Egyptian/Kemetic people that once a year had their fields simultaneously wiped out and fertilized. There is great danger in unbound Love, it tends to get consuming and people fear being consumed. There is a secret meaning to the joining of two to make none, but this isn’t really the place for that. 

 The uncontrolled waterfall of feeling, it can flow and be a clearing force or flood. If you’re not prepared for such water, you might get washed away, if you are it might wash away the cobwebs and your stagnancy. 

In Netzach, Venus town, where you have the realization about how this is going to change you as a person with a personality is the overflowing 9 of Cups, Happiness. 

I call this ‘mutually beneficial relationships’ or expanding influence (Jupiter) going or being pulled both ways (Pisces). Each cup has its own source but everything is flowing into each other down to the base of the 3x3 structure. There is a lot of water and all it represents and it hasn’t reached its peak yet and is still driving upward and outward.

Cultivate relationships and connective feelings that aren’t lopsided or just giving/taking. Keep building  you’re not done yet.

In Mercury Town Hod-ville, where all the Universities are and everyone has real intellectual shit going on is well, The Guy Himself, Mercury, I The Magus or Magician, Mercury, Beth which is a house, House of God, your body, your perspective, you.

The Magus has 4 tools, physical representations of the Elements which he hand crafted. Think of this as your tools or your skill set in your mind which you use to build your perception of the world.

The Magician also has the naysaying Ape of Thoth who follow him around contradicting everything he says. The is your doubt or “Pit of Because” which if you fall into you’ll “perish with the dogs of reason.”

So, you are in charge of what you are in charge of. You have the skill set to alter your Universe, fashion yourself tangible skills with what you know and your experience. You create your perception and can only influence it.

On the Moon in Yesod, the receptive and reflective place that is alot about the feelings that you’re picking up from all this is the easy does it Princess of Cups, the earthy part of Water. 

We could consider this the substance in water or water hitting substance head on. This is the idea of the canyon wall being ground down over the millennia by moving water. The nutrients and minerals in the earth are transported down river to the fertile delta. This is the natural, “following your feelings” within your daily life. Try not to fool yourself, follow your intuition, not just passing whims. Feel, don’t necessarily react immediately.

Go with what you feel and intuit, let yourself go with the flow, if you will. Allow your situation to move with your emotions and be patient with your progress.

Down here in Malkuth-istan, the everyday life mundane, waking up pooping, and going to work world is the large and in charge Queen of Wands, the watery part of Fire or how you feel about what you do.

This is ideally feeling great about what you do. The perspective on the card shows this Queen 10 feet tall and seemingly bulletproof. Her animal the cheetah, known for being fast and a spazz, is subdued under her calm hand. Her legs are spread and the wand of Bacchus  showing all her passions can be controlled.

If you want to feel good about this and what you do, control your knee jerk lower ego reactions. Choose Will not want.

So, you know what you need to get after, you see it clearly, it makes you very happy in a complicated way that maybe you  haven’t even unraveled yet, but you’re too focused on your limitations and how it all might go wrong for you. Don’t build your world around doubt. 

And Furthermore, don’t think you can influence the world how you need to by over analysing everything to the point where all joy in removed. Get yourself a personal and safe place that is yours to build your world, you need the space to not become mired in your over thinking. And the heart of all of this is that you can do this and WHEN you do, you will explode with the kind of love and joy that only you can tap into for yourself.

Now, I’m not saying it is time to ditch the stuff and ideas that don’t serve you anymore, but do that, that is what I’m saying. Allow yourself those healthy relationships where you’re not going the whole 9 yards for people who won’t get on the field. And your thoughts are your own, they’re awesome thoughts and your skills can take you to the places you need to go if you utilize them how you know. And back to that surrounding yourself with folks and energy that allows you to get what you need while giving what you can and getting to where you need to go. Drop the drama and folks that bring it. Find the substance in the feeling that allows you to move in the ways natural to you.

Ta Da! Hit me up with any questions and sorry for the wait!

[plunder-heaven-and-devour-god]

My emotional think piece whilst Notre Dame de Paris and crying and listening to the movie soundtrack

Not to be that absolute ASS BUT I HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING

I want to unearth Victor "biggest fuckboi in Paris" Hugo and beat him over the head with his own fucking shin bone for getting me so MELDRAMATICALLY IN LOVE WITH A BUILDING IVE NEVER EVEN BEEN TO.

I just finished the fifth part of Notre Dame de Paris and god I want to tell him

Even though you said :"this will kill that, the press will kill the edifice" you said that printing/press/writing killed architecture as the primary method for humanity to express/share/cement ideas for the masses and to enscribe themselves in history.

You said that the accessibility and the thousandfold architects in writers killed the edifice and in doing so became the second tower of Babel. Gutenberg's printing press became the second register of recording human thought.

Does he know that his book saved the edifice? His book instilled love for Notre Dame de Paris and restored it after centuries of mutilation and decay? HIS BOOK SAVED THE EDIFICE.

His supposed venom for architecture acted like an antidote in this one case and in this one case crippled his own argument.

Not to mention

I'd have to ask him what does he think about visual mass media becoming the third register of human thought? How would he feel if told that film and photography have killed Gutenberg? How would he feel if he know that writing had joined architecture in the grave he so cynically condemned it to.

How would he feel that visual mass media overtook the canon of his printed word. That his story has been superceded by context and reimagined several times on film? How would he feel if a a multi billion dollar American conglomerate rewrote and redistributed the story of Notre Dame de Paris and became the story in the public conscience? How would he feel knowing that Alan Menken's score is what first comes to mind first and not his words, or that of the actual edifice?

Yes all other arts are used to support architecture like masonry, sculpting, painting, and metalsmithing. But those he claims have become divorced from the edifice. They have done the same for the printing press. Being divorced from other arts those methods are no longer tethered to the recording of human thought in Hugo's mind. The author states that the exercise of architecture has become hollow without the weight of being the method with with humans record their world.

But

Unbeknownst to him they come back in other forms, in other methods, other arts to support and bolster the story and character of different facets of the story of human beings. He says architecture had died, but maybe it merely reincarnated. This new life is used to bolster another human register. If not the book of Notre Dame de Paris then the edifice, and if not the edifice than the 1939 film, if not that then the Disney version. They all congregate every now and again to support some core love and sentiment and continue to lay down the stones in a long winding and untoward present into the future.

Hugo both rails against and praises Gutenberg for the printing press. He also takes a seat amongst the writers committing this architectural murder.

But what would he say if I told him that the book exists in all it's different forms on the internet for free, and even more radical and enlightened version of free thinking. I got his book on the Gutenberg Project site where books entering the public domain are free. To quote Hugo's other french playwright counterweight "all for one and one for all". His work is up on the internet for free for all and more ironically carries the namesake of the man who he says enabled the murder of architecture.

More radical that the dogmatism of architecture, the accessible and far reaching appeal of writing, or even the new universality of the visual mass media. Is the internet the fourth tower of Babel? Or is it too early to tell if the web and social media count as just one more tier in an ever climbing skyscraper of visual mass media? What would he think of the way that we could consumed and recorded human thought when it is near effervescent in comparison to the stones that he praises? What about YouTube as a platform or Twitter? How will his story transform in this information age to bolster a cathedral bordering on eight hundred years? Where does that put us in his world view?

Although I do think these different iterations and transformations that his story has undergone would horrify him. The story's ability to stay relevant has these different methods of recording human thought to thank. Hunchback has gone through the story of the edifice, the printing press, and now visual mass media. (I'm also hardcore riffing off of Lindsay Ellis' great video that does a way better job than me expressing this.)

I think he'd be even more horrified to know that the Disney Version is so character centric that the focus if his original story has been relegated to support for the characters. In actuality, it should be the reverse, Hugo makes a whole book of a host of characters who exist to populate the cathedral. But in this day in age in the western world we are preoccupied with the power of individuals, not the towering and lofty mysticism of Catholic dogmas. The story now belongs to the characters and the individual instead of the edifice belonging to the people.

Architecture, in it's golden age according to him, was for the caste/the priest/history, and would the march of time it turned into the work of individuals and artists. And so has his own intellectual property, the public conscious does not remember ANANKE at the beginning of Notre Dame de Paris but they remember the inviduals, not the dogmas that the architecture so visibly preoccupied itself with, but with the individuals in it's story and the individuals who the story now belongs to.

What would he think?

Not once has a film adaptation, our modern human register as it were, accurately captured the story he made. Which is for better or worse, it's gone through the hands of American capitalists, movie monster buffs, and a German fleeing the Nazis.

What he would have wanted was what The Ark did for the Hermitage St-Petersburg. He wants an epic film made of one continuous shot of the arcades, cloisters, towers, and arches of Notre Dame in a succession of epochs with people milling in and out of frame in different period dress. That and a cacophony of music from the bells recorded straight from the bell towers.

Instead the dead guy got several movies about a melodrama between an ugly wretch, a Madonna whore, and a Catholic priest. And I wouldn't even say that Hugo likes his characters, more like populates the building with then. He tolerates them sometimes, sometimes he likes them, sometimes he hates them.

He writes about the burden and cruelty that Quasimodo endures but never gives him a happy conclusion, or any closure. He treats him as the public does.

His self insert character of Pierre Gringoire is infused with his dry wit, and often ridicules his own self absorbed poet's nature. He down right puts himself through the ringer and takes several too self aware jabs at himself.

He tries to make Clopin the king and noble but still puts forward this bigoted image of the Romani people. He makes him magnetic but does not feel back the thick veneer of discrimination. Why? Because Hugo makes it very clear it's about the cathedral and not the people.

Esmeralda gets the shortest end of the stick, balancing the whore/angel dichotomy equally throughout. She's made a vessel for want of the male characters and the reader. Not to mention she's not actually Romani but a poor stolen white girl who was made a part of Les Cours Des Miracles by an accident.

Frollo is strangely not as potent in this version, especially if you're coming off any of the film versions. He's austere, and the word 'learned' used over and over again, his quiet abuse masquerades as quiet charity but he is the front for a huge anti-clerical sentiment.

The individual is not Hugo's concern but the building. So I'd love to hear what he would say of what the building and the book have become.

[amorremanet]

omg u've watched rick & morty!! what are ur thoughts?

Well, with the caveat that I literally just watched all of it for the first time yesterday (barring a handful of episodes that I’d seen pieces of because they happened to play when my Dad fell asleep in front of the TV with Adult Swim on), and with fair warning that most of this is a lot of me being a pretentious nerd about philosophy?

I love Rick. I expected to either not love Rick, or to love him but in the detached, intellectual kind of way where it’s like, “I appreciate you as a character but any attachment to you is more of a morbid fascination with you and wondering what you’re going to do next” — but yeah, no. That didn’t last. It did take a while to get there (I mean, I could feel it happen, but I didn’t have to give up and accept it until the end of the Unity episode, with Rick’s onscreen bungled suicide attempt)

I hate myself for being so goddamn predictable and for having such a Type

But I’m so weak for both well-executed fictional douchebags and more so for the whole, “this person is a genius or somehow special, and it is actually a very miserable, lonely existence because one of the things that people tend not to understand about being deemed, ‘special’ in any capacity? is how much it sets you apart from all the people around you and fucks up your ability to connect with anyone without factoring in other shit like, for example, depression, [C]PTSD, substance abuse and/or addiction, and/or being on the spectrum (which can then fuck it up for you even more on top of being “special,” both in its own right and in terms of how it makes other people react to you)

“—and see, despite what a lot of people like Rick and Albus Wulfric Percival Brian Dumbledore [and sometimes me] try to say, it is actually horrible to have your ability to connect with other people compromised like that. Like, there is a wealth of evidence from several disciplines — psychology, biology and medicine, sociology, history, the list goes on — that shows how it is completely terrible for people not to be able to connect with others. It’s isolating, it’s lonely, and it will fuck you straight to Hell, psychologically speaking but WUBBALUBBADUBDUB, NO WORRIES FOR THE GENIUS, AM I RIGHT” trope

I also really love Summer, Beth, and Morty. For different reasons all around — and if I had to pick a favorite out of them, I’d probably pick Summer, though I will say that it’s really close between her and Morty — but I love them, they’re all a lot of fun to watch

Show needs more ladies. I could pretend that I’m saying this out of a sociopolitical conviction that having more gender diversity among the major recurring characters would be a good thing, but I’m totally not. I am 500% saying this because holy fucking shit, I want to have some goddamn femslash with Summer in it, but one of the only f/f ships available is Summer/Tammy

—which isn’t to say that I’m not open to Summer/Tammy, since it would actually fit pretty nicely into a trope that I love

Namely, the, “everything looks all chill and pleasant and domestic and happy, but it is, in fact, actually pretty deeply fucked up” trope (which was what I loved about, for example, the relationship that NBC!Hannibal painted between Hannibal and Jack Crawford for the early part of season two, though… pretty big difference in scale and emphases between these two ships)

—I’m just saying that I’d like a little bit of variety here, too, you know?

Jerry is the only main character that I’m just kind of, “meh, whatever” about, and I’m not holding my breath that the Beth/Jerry divorce will actually stick? But I personally wouldn’t mind if it did, because I don’t hate Jerry? But the nicest thing that I can say about him is either, “Well, he has a fair point sometimes, I guess. Statistically, it has to happen” or, “Well, I don’t hate him.”

To be fair? I wouldn’t say Jerry’s presence holds the show back — which I would say about some characters that I actually like, albeit from different things (like how I think The Joker needs to go on another ten-year hiatus like he did back in the mid-20th century because…… okay, he’s Batman’s most iconic villain, but atm, the world is sort of in a Joker hangover and he is actively holding back Batman, and by extension most of DC in all of its current media incarnations, because Batman is, duh doi, their biggest and bestselling property)

—and I think that Jerry definitely brings something to the show that helps enhance it, sometimes (e.g., I like how they use him as a foil to the rest of his family at different turns, like how he’s the bumbling loser sitcom dad who is super not-chill with most of the shit that’s out there in the bigger universe unless it’s nice to him like Sleepy Gary or the scammer aliens’ simulation thing, and who could be totally happy spending the rest of his life at Jerryboree vs. Rick, who is…… well. Rick;

or Jerry, the naïve egocentric loser whose view of what’s good or bad in any situation always comes back to himself and his family [but that is seriously a secondary concern to himself] vs. Morty, the naïve egocentric loser who is actually coming into his own and getting to not be a loser, and his egocentricity is more a product of him being a teenager who’s trying to orient himself in the universe than any deliberate lack of concern for other beings [like you see in both Jerry and Rick, though Rick is at least upfront about it], and who at least tries to do right by other beings, even sacrificing his own desires for them, like when he would’ve rather not killed Fart but did it to prevent Fart and its species from annihilating all “lesser” lifeforms)

I wouldn’t even say that Jerry is holding Beth back, which I felt like I was going to end up thinking when I went into this, since I had seen enough to know that Jerry is a bumbling sitcom dad (and bumbling sitcom dads usually hold back their spouses to some extent, and sometimes hold back everyone around them, too), and I’ve found some of their B-plots to be both interesting and pretty neat character pieces for Beth (like their B-plot with the deer in “A Rickle in Time” and looking at themselves across alternate dimensions, like in “Rixty Minutes”)

……I just don’t particularly care about Jerry as himself, so if he and Beth actually stay divorced and it maybe limits the amount of overall Jerry-time on the show, I don’t think I’d mind

I’m cautiously hopeful about the promise of Summer getting to go on more adventures and Beth maybe coming on any adventures at all, from Rick’s rant at Morty at the end of the Mulan McNuggets dipping sauce episode — especially for the Summer part.

One thing I enjoyed seeing with the progression of Summer’s character is how she embodies the whole, “teenager trying to figure themself out” thing, and how she’s trying to decide who she wants to be and where she wants to fit into the universe.

Originally, it was just the world — which we see really well in her relationship with Mr. Needful in “Something Ricked This Way Comes” — but now that she’s seen more of the multiverse out there, she’s trying to figure out where she can feel most at home there (it has to come down to how she feels about it, if the, “Nobody belongs anywhere” idea from “Rixty Minutes” still holds true)

—and I love watching that idea develop and play out in her relationships with Rick and Morty, and how those relationships are changed and tested by their adventures together and what Summer sees and experiences out there (like, learning that freedom means that people have the right to do things that suck, when she tried to free the planet from Unity, and actually coming to think that her grandpa is the bad influence on Unity), and I really love exploring the parallels and points of difference between her and Rick

oh my god, that is how you do an absurdist tv series RIGHT. seriously, most shows that try to go to the absurdist place are just pointlessly loud and asinine with no rhyme or reason to anything, and they think that this is the same thing as making the point that ~there is no inherent meaning~ when actually, they are making the point that they’re fucking obnoxious and don’t know how to tell a joke and try to cover it up in pretentious crap

(—for the record, I’m thinking of shit like Tim and Eric when I say this. It’d be really easy to bag on Family Guy, but the thing is that Family Guy doesn’t actually pretend to be making any philosophical kind of point about anything.

There isn’t any annoying, pretentious crap going on in Family Guy like there used to be in all of the Tim and Eric shows. I mean, there’s a LOT of crap, but it’s pandering, populist crap that has no creative integrity and is openly just concerned with grossing people out and getting away with as much as they possibly can, surviving on sheer popularity factor.

Shows like the Tim and Eric family wanted to pretend that they were deep and intellectual, when actually, they were just BAD and acted like they were bad on purpose like they were a bunch of baby Dadaists.

I would say, “all due respect,” but I have no respect for them)

like, I’m not going to say that Rick and Morty is a perfect series by any means, or that there aren’t things I wouldn’t have done differently — though, I had plenty of criticisms for Community and Dan Harmon has a much sweeter life than I do, so I think he can handle me having criticisms here (and I know nothing about his co-creator) — but

A big reason why I went, “Okay, fuck it” and just watched the series was that it combines a lot of things that I know I enjoy (sci-fi, magical realism, cosmic horror, dysfunctional family tragicomedy/dramedy/whatever, etc.), and I kept hearing and reading about the philosophical themes going on in the show and how they were both more overt than in most series but also handled with more finesse than a lot of other pieces of media where the philosophical ideas are just right out in the open

I’m very pointedly casting a judgmental sideways glance at you, Christopher Nolan.

I’m doing this because on one hand, I am really tired of how you handle all your big-budget attempts at having in-depth philosophical discussions in cinematic form with the grace, tact, and finesse of a huge steamroller, and how you don’t just shove the audience’s faces into all of your themes like Jerry shoving Snowball’s face into his own urine, but you then try to actively tell the audience at your movies what we’re supposed to think, rather than using your power as an ~auteur~ to start a conversation and trusting the audience to think for themselves

—like, my problems with JK Rowling have their own damn tag on my blog, but for fuck’s sakes, at least she knows how to start a conversation, rather than being a didactic pain in the ass with an over-inflated opinion of herself and her own creativity, Christopher fucking Nolan

(…which is pretty laughable, given how much he’s ripped off from other artists. Not built on or remixed or played with in his own way, but just straight-up ripped off)—

and on the other hand, I’m picking on him right now because Rick and Morty also picks on him not-irregularly, which makes me more inclined to do so, because that’s just a part of Rick and Morty’s text

Anyway, as I was saying.

In particular, I saw a lot about how the show plays with the tension between existentialism and absurdism — and I am going to super over-simplify both of these schools of thought right now, and how the show approaches them, but in general

Existentialism and Absurdism have a lot of things in common, and one of them is the idea that life is inherently meaningless and the universe is a cold place that can’t even accurately be called, “cruel” because that would imply that the universe gives a shit about individual lives, which it doesn’t

Where they most differ from each other is in how each school of thought deals with the ensuing question of, “okay, so what do we do about the fact that we live in this meaningless world in a meaningless universe where our lives and existences have no intrinsic value or meaning”

Existentialism can come in a variety of flavors, from the hella Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard and Russian Orthodox proto-existentialism of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to the massively misunderstood models of Friedrich “actually, he was AGAINST antisemitism and supremacist bullshit, and he would think most of the people who quote him in their justifications for being nihilistic douchebags are *jean ralphio voice* THE WOOOOOORST” Nietzsche and Jean-Paul “yes, Hell is other people, but not in the way that you probably think this quote is saying” Sartre

—but they all generally agree that, in the end? The universe may be devoid of inherent meaning, but human beings create meaning in all kinds of weird little ways, and the meaning that we create has value because it matters to us, and because we can build and do things inspired by that meaning which affect other people and the course of history and so on (and possibly to Jesus, if your name is Kierkegaard, though to be fair, I’m way oversimplifying him right now, more than I’m oversimplifying all the other shit in this discussion)

Basically, a good way to think of Existentialism’s (INCREDIBLY OVERSIMPLIFIED) approach to these questions is to think of the Nietzsche that you can find when you actually read any shit by Nietzsche. Like, when you actually read him, he isn’t saying that God is dead and life is meaningless so let’s everybody just be assholes to each other and the biggest douchebag on the proverbial playground gets to be the Übermensch.

He’s more saying that life is inherently meaningless until human beings go inventing meaning, but because we can invent that meaning through various systems, like friendships and family and civilizations, the inherent, fundamental meaninglessness of life, the universe, and everything is not a valid justification for being an asshole to people

Absurdism, on the other hand, does have a few different flavors and it’s associated with a few different creative movements in history, even though it wasn’t actually directly related to all of them — but its biggest luminaries are Albert “the stranger, the plague, the myth of sisyphus” Camus and Antonin “actually, he was a surrealist, but reading The Theatre and Its Double, it’s hard to tell that he wasn’t an absurdist, and it can start feeling a bit like the often arbitrary distinctions made between goth and emo, or between different flavors of goth or emo” Artaud

If you view philosophical schools as being on a spectrum (and you really probably shouldn’t, because it’s more complicated than that, but for the sake of the visual metaphor, let’s pretend it isn’t), then Absurdism is closer to Nihilism than most of the other schools that can get lumped under the big Existentialist umbrella (which both Absurdism and Nihilism can be and have been, depending on who you ask about the definitions all going on here)

Absurdism’s answer to the question of meaning or lack thereof is basically to flip the middle finger and blow a raspberry, because to the Absurdist view, there either is no inherent and guiding meaning to anything in the universe, or if it exists, then it’s so wildly incomprehensible to humans that its existence will not matter to us because we will never be able to understand it so everything will, effectively, still be meaningless to us — but where the Existentialists latch onto the idea of creating our own meanings by doing human stuff and attaching significance to it, whether fairly or not, for better and for worse, “Life wouldn’t be perfect without you, Unity, but it would be life”?

………Yeah, Absurdists instead go, “Fuck that noise. Trying to create meaning in the universe is an understandable refuge, as it can be terrifying to grapple with the fundamental complete lack of meaning — but it’s still ultimately cowardly, and the best way to exist in the universe is to acknowledge that your life has no meaning and the universe is hostile and the entire world has no point to any of this, and to continue living and thriving and leading a good life because fuck the universe, THAT’S why”

The Myth of Sisyphus is regarded as the foundational text of Absurdism by a lot of people, because it’s the essay in which Camus…… basically says everything that I just said but longer and with more argument, examples, etc.

In it, he also acknowledges the fundamental paradox at the heart of his philosophy, namely that accepting the meaninglessness of the universe and of human life is still aligning oneself with a system that ascribes meaning to all the fundamentally non-meaningful happenstance that’s all part and parcel of existing in the universe

His response to said paradox is, essentially, “Fuck it. No one else has any better ideas and anyone who refuses to lead an unexamined life [i.e., a life where they live only in a protective bubble of confirmation bias, ignoring as many of the things that they don’t like or find challenging as they possibly can; or in so many words, to be a Jerry, but also to be a Rick or a Summer in different ways]? Yeah, they will have their ideas, their ideals, their thoughts, their feelings, their beliefs, their values, and their philosophies constantly tested or called into question by literally any and all of the people, places, events, and things that they might ever encounter and engage with

“—so, really, the fact that I’m aligning myself with this rejection of meaning — which is itself a way of creating meaning in a meaningless universe — only means that I’m human and have to constantly question myself about that inherent meaningless thing or else I’m going to fall into the same cowardly cop-out that Dostoevsky did when he had Ivan Karamazov find God”

(……which. ……that’s. ……okay, Albert is missing some pretty big deal pieces of context in his reading of The Brothers Karamazov, and it’s fair to point out that good ol’ Fyodor didn’t actually think of himself as an existentialist because the term wasn’t in his vocabulary — but I do still respect that Camus went, “Yep, my philosophy here does have these internal contradictions and paradoxes” since?

Well. I mean, he’s right in saying that literally every human system of thought has internal contradictions and internal paradoxes and questions where it will get snagged and be forced to choose between its bedrock ideas and most treasured values — the debate of freedom vs. security is one of the most constant refrains of this throughout most of human history — but……?

Hey. At least he admits it and tries to deal with it, as opposed to people who act like their philosophies are totally unimpeachable and without question or paradox or anything that might be intellectually, ethically, spiritually, morally, emotionally, psychologically, etc. difficult for folks)

Regardless of the different conclusions, though? Absurdism and Existentialism both agree about the whole, “the universe is cold and can be harsh and it doesn’t give a fuck about humans or our lives, so what do we do now” thing — which comes up a lot in Rick and Morty, so we’re gonna unpack it a bit more

Like, given the massive difference in scale between THE LITERAL ENTIRE UNIVERSE and individual lives, which are but tiny specks of dust relative to the THE LITERAL ENTIRE UNIVERSE…… uh, can you really blame it for not caring?

I mean, for one thing, we’re assuming that universe itself is sentient (which?? it might be? it might NOT be? who the fuck knows? well, certainly not me, but I’d be super-interested if anybody else has any insights here) and that it cares about literally anything

—which……… again? If the universe itself is for reals sentient, then might care about anything or it might not, there’s no way to know for sure

But if the hypothetically sentient universe does care about things, then we still can’t really blame it for not caring about individual organisms with our individual lives, because there are hundreds of billions of us out there — like, fuck, there are almost 7.5 billion individual human lives just on Earth, and that is just the humans, it’s saying nothing of the other beings here who have different degrees of sentience, let alone all of the other lives that may or may not exist on other planets, in other galaxies, etc.

If the hypothetically sentient universe cares about things, then it probably cares more about particularly big black holes or solar flares (or for the more comic approach: it cares about whether the other sentient universes at sentient universe high school are gonna make fun of it for being the last one to get a pair of Univernikebok sneakers, or if the sentient universe it most has its proverbial eye on will go with it to the sentient universe prom)

Point being: the hypothetically sentient universe, if it really cares about anything, will most likely only care about things on its own scale and not on ours

Like, yeah, it sucks for us a lot of the time, because as the master, Douglas Adams, observed in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, having a sense of proportion can be actively detrimental to the psychological and emotional well-being of individual organisms, and being exposed to just how insignificant we are in the grand totality of all the things ever?

………Yeah, that can be a fate worse than death for us (unless we’re Zaphod Beeblebrox and can come out of the Total Perspective Vortex still thinking that we might as well be the center of the universe)

In a pretty fundamental way, most individual organisms are incapable of handling the idea that we are not actually that important. We can handle the idea that we’re not the literal center of the universe, but if you tell someone that they aren’t important in the grand scheme of things, it will not go well

On one hand, this is part of why you have sci-fi stories in which, for example, The Doctor goes, “Oh wow, in all my adventures, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before” or Dr. Manhattan realizes that individual human lives are actually more miraculous than air turning into gold because, as small as we are and as quotidian as our existences are (especially relative to a being who exists so far outside of our ability to comprehend things that he has essentially become a god), it is statistically more likely for oxygen to turn into gold than for each exact human being on Terra to exist in the exact way that they do

(—which is, y’know, part of the underlying theory that makes Rick and Morty’s mega-multiverse thing plausible. Because there really might be INFINITE alternate realities and timelines out there.)

(……and now I’m thinking about how Rick would most likely school Abed on how Jeff didn’t actually create seven alternate timelines when he tried to roll a d6 to see who would go get the pizza; there are, in fact, infinite timelines that could’ve resulted from that because there are all kinds of other factors at play, here

Like maybe Jeff rolled the d6 off the table and it somehow triggered Abed’s rolling boulder Indiana Jones model and then Pierce slipped on said model-boulder and broke his neck

Or maybe Jeff rolled the d6 in such a way that it landed down Annie’s shirt and she broke up with the Study Group because she was tired of everyone but Shirley constantly being up in her tits like that, even though it was legitimately an accident this time — not that anybody would necessarily believe Jeff Winger about that because he has a precedent here

Or maybe Jeff rolled the d6 in such a way that it landed down Annie’s shirt, but instead of her breaking up with the Study Group, the Study Group split into everyone who took Annie and whoever took her side (Troy, Abed, Britta, and Pierce) vs. Jeff and Shirley (because Shirley is one of the characters who I can most easily see defending Jeff over this legitimate accident, even possibly in timelines where it wasn’t an accident and Jeff totally meant for the d6 to go down Annie’s shirt)

Or maybe that thing I just said, except instead of it being a mostly realistic community college nonsense hijinks adventure, Jeff and Shirley band together to come back stronger and end up taking over the world as Queen Shirley and her loyal consort/legal adviser/“guy who pays her bodyguards because she has seen Jeffrey fight and knows that he cannot keep her safe in the way that she deserves”

Or maybe Jeff rolled the d6 and it turned air and certain miscellaneous objects into gold in La Casa Chez Trobed and the Study Group got filthy rich by selling all the gold but it drove a huge wedge between them because some of the things that turned into gold were like, Abed’s Batman costume or Britta’s lighter

Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, LITERAL INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, NOT JUST THE SEVEN OFFICIALLY CANONICAL TIMELINES WE SAW IN THAT EPISODE [—though that just raises once more the question of whether those timelines should really be considered official canon, because aside from the Darkest Timeline, they were all Abed’s imagined take on how things would be different if certain members of the Study Group were gone and reflections of how the group’s balance works]

But that’s beside the point)

On another hand, people’s inability to really deal with the idea that we might be insignificant is part of why, “you are important and you are valid” posts are so popular on tumblr dot hell. Like, there are a LOT of other factors in play there, too — especially because those posts are so often made for people who belong to oppressed and/or marginalized communities — but the underlying logic of those posts is to counteract human-created hierarchical systems (like those found in neoliberal capitalism) that prioritize certain kinds of people while dismissing others as, “invalid,” “wrong,” or, “unimportant and disposable”

Those posts try to counteract those hierarchies and promote a sense of mental and emotional well-being — or foster a sense of belonging, or several other vaguely similar options — by going, “no, all of that shit you’ve heard about how you’re unimportant due to how you are a member of this group, or how you engage in these unfairly maligned and harmless behaviors (like black girls wearing their natural hair)? it’s wrong. you are totally important and your choices are valid and you matter”

Which can totally be an encouraging message to hear and I’m not trying to disparage or criticize these posts at all (I could criticize them for other reasons, but that’s an entirely different post and for now, I’d rather not)

But when you put those posts into a conversation with literally cosmic-level shit — and, in the case of Rick and Morty, literally multi-cosmic-level shit, since we have a canonical mega-multiverse to consider in this show — they come off as pretty egocentric and anthropocentric (i.e., egocentric but focused on all of us people instead of looking at us in the context of the rest of the universe), because of the difference in scale

Those kinds of positivity posts can work (even if they don’t always work) because they’re operating on the human scale. They’re sort of stuck between the microcosmic and macrocosmic scales — which… is unfortunately pretty tricky terminology right now, due to the involvement of literal cosmoses in the Rick and Morty conversation?

But I’m using the terms that are related to the idea of microcosms (i.e., the smaller-scale ways that ideas and systems play out, such as in individual lives or small-group scenarios that can reflect the whole) and macrocosms (i.e., the larger-scale discussions here, like entire countries vs. life in one particular province, or life on Earth vs. life in Canada, or life in the Milky Way vs. life on Earth)

—so, what I’m trying to say is that those kinds of, “you are valid and important” positivity posts try to work on both the smaller, individual or small-group level (by talking to the members of certain specific groups but doing so in a way that also addresses the individual reader who sees a post while browsing tumblr), and the bigger, broader group level (due to how they tacitly address larger systemic issues of sociopolitical inequality, oppression, marginalization, and so on)

And their preferred mechanism of doing so is trying to reaffirm and emotionally support people who are taught by the different aspects of socialization, indoctrination, and social conditioning of neoliberal capitalism that they don’t matter — which is, what a shock (not really), psychologically damaging to hear and see, day in and day out, especially when it gets to be so blatantly fucking arbitrary as the divisions of society and social groups promoted by neoliberal capitalism

—none of which is actually of interest to Rick and Morty, at least not a big deal, pressing interest.

There is actually probably a lot of really cool meta to be milked out of how Rick and Morty engages with these kinds of immediately sociopolitical discussions and economic politics (e.g., the Meeseeks; Mr. Needful; “Look Who’s Purging Now”; how Rick-Prime and the Council of Ricks deal with each other; all of the, “Rick, Birdperson, and Squanchy are deemed terrorists for fighting the Galactic Federation, and lbr here, the Galactic Federation do seem like a bunch of dicks, even if it isn’t so cut-and-dry as that” backstory; Unity and its entire episode, full stop)

But for the most part, a lot of the philosophical noodling in Rick and Morty is concerned not with political philosophy, social philosophy, economic philosophy, etc., but with the metaphysical questions like, “why are we here,” “what are we,” “what does this all mean”

—and it works on an even bigger cosmic horror scale than Howard Phillips “racist grandpa of popular cosmic horror, Cthulhu mythos except he wanted to name it something different because he kind of though Cthulhu was a loser, blah blah fuckeddy blah blah blah, tentacle shit” Lovecraft

Like, the horror that Lovecraft intended to build into the Cthulhu mythos wasn’t the questionable writing or all of the racism (—I mean, he put that there pretty intentionally, but he didn’t mean for it to be horrific, even though he was so racist that other 1920’s racists were like, “Dude, that’s not cool”).

The horror that he intended to be there was the entire existence of the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods, who would characterize the greater universe as a place that is fundamentally hostile to us because it doesn’t give a shit about humans or Earth

—note that the GOO’s and EG’s didn’t really become evil ‘til August Derleth decided to fuck up everything by adding a Christian sense of morality, which is and will almost always be fundamentally anthropocentric, since Christianity rests on the premise that there is a being out there — let’s split the difference and call it Elohim — and it exists on the same unfathomably, overwhelmingly powerful level as all the weirdos like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Hastur, et al.… and it is actively concerned with the fate of humanity

—maybe it’s not actively concerned with the smaller, day-to-day minutiae of our lives, though that varies depending on which Christians you ask… but Elohim is still out there and actively concerned with us, and that’s why it actively intervened in human history and why it sacrificed its only begotten child — who was part of Elohim itself — for our benefit. Because, you know, all-powerful beings giving that much of a shit about humans doesn’t sound like a theory that is overly focused on humans

……except that it does, which is my point, here.

Lovecraft was working with the idea that humans are inherently NOT important and that the universe does not give a shit about us. It looks hostile and even evil to US because the GOO’s and EG’s do things that kill us and because they have the power to destroy our planet and end all life on it (and some of them may want to do that, though usually not out of active malice so much as, “that’s just their nature, it’s what they do and we are literally powerless to fully stop it. Postpone it? Eh, maybe we can do that. But we lack the ability to completely prevent it”).

For him, the big wide universe is horrifying because we don’t matter and no amount of, “you’re a star! you’re valid!! your choices matter and should be respected unless you do something that i don’t like personally uwu!!! you are important and loved and magical i don’t make the rules stay hydrated!!!!” style tumblr positivity posts will change that.

Also, there are tentacles everywhere and these gibbering fleshbags that consume everything in their paths and “humanoid abominations” that are described in really not-subtly racialized terms and who are the result of fish-people males (who are described in even less subtly racialized terms) breeding with (white) human women, because oh yeah, did we mention that he was a huge fucking racist

(I’m not kidding. Go read “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and try to tell me that he didn’t use specifically anti-black language and tropes to describe and characterize The Deep Ones and the Deep One/Human hybrid people)

(And if you want to read something of his that isn’t horribly racist, try “Pickman’s Model” — it has nothing to do with the Cthulhu mythos and the big reveal is probably one that you can see coming, but it’s one of his better stories overall, in addition to not being a huge screed against interracial marriage that’s gotten dressed up as a horror novella for Halloween)

For Derleth, the universe is horrifying because these creatures are actively evil and they’re coming to get us because we exist and they are evil

(This isn’t to laud or condemn either Lovecraft or Derleth more than the other, because frankly, both of them had some interesting ideas but also several shitty ones, both of them contributed immeasurably to the development of contemporary sci-fi, horror, and Gothic fiction but have also unwittingly held it back in certain ways*, both of them also had major flaws as writers, and both of them were also huge douchebags as people, albeit usually in different ways from each other.

[*: For example? I mean, I’m sure that Howard thought he was helping advance things by being a huge racist all over everything, but I’d disagree with that, since in addition to the racism — which is already bad enough — he unwittingly spawned a bunch of fans of these genres who won’t even acknowledge that he was a racist piece of shit (much less, whenever they recycle some of his ideas without trying to challenge them or change them, that they are themselves perpetuating a variety of racism that was too racist for most other 1920’s U.S. racists), and thus help spread and exacerbate racism in geek culture and communities……

……all because Lovecraft contributed a lot to the development of the genres here, and this apparently means that we can’t also point out that he was a huge racist because of reasons or something asinine like that.

Like…… no, Brad, that’s not how it works. HP Lovecraft contributed immeasurably to the development of contemporary sci-fi, horror, and Gothic fiction, and he was a massive racist. The statements are NOT mutually exclusive.]

Personally, I find Lovecraft’s take on the (a)morality of the Cthulhu mythos more intriguing while I find Derleth’s version kinda boring and overly simplistic, but the current state of Cthulhu mythos fiction — and mythos-influenced fiction, that isn’t actually set in the mythos specifically like Rick and Morty — wouldn’t be what it is without both of them, so they’re both historically important for the genre, and both of them also suck.

It’s like Rick mathematically proving that Morty and Summer are both pieces of shit, except that there is actual clear evidence — as opposed to Rick using math to make his feelings seem objective when they fundamentally aren’t — that Lovecraft and Derleth were both huge pieces of shit. Historically significant pieces of shit, sure — at least, they are if you’re into sci-fi, horror, and/or Gothic fiction — but they’re both huge pieces of shit)

—Which all goes back to the kind of level that Rick and Morty is working on when it approaches its metaphysical questions, because it’s working on a mega-multiversal super-cosmic scale that makes HP Lovecraft’s view of the entire universe look like it’s working on a microcosmic scale

Let’s break that down as simply as possible, so we’re all on the same page

Rick and Morty is an animated series on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block that initially seems like it’s a mix of wacky sci-fi adventures, wacky dysfunctional family hijinks like a traditional dysfunctional family sitcom, and jokes about sex, farts, genitalia, and violence

It not only approaches serious metaphysical questions in the first place, but does it on a scale that makes Howard Phillips “the universe is a cold, harsh, uncaring wasteland in which human beings are fundamentally insignificant and lbr, we’re all probably gonna die in the near future and there is fuck-all that any of us can do to stop it because we are up against powers that are way bigger, stronger, and smarter than us, most of which we can’t even begin to fully comprehend and none of which really give a fuck about ANY of us” Lovecraft

—Like, HP Lovecraft, the guy who’s talking about how the universe is so huge and unforgiving that we can’t even really fathom how huge and unforgiving it is, like there is more huge, unforgivingness than your body has room for

—yeah, the super-cosmic scale of Rick and Morty makes it look like HP Lovecraft is complaining about how Suzy didn’t ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance and she’s going with Janey instead and how dare she enrage his sense of white male entitlement by being a lesbian GAWD while Earthlings are making first contact with Vulcans, or there’s some looming Armageddon that will destroy the entire Milky Way, or something

The super-cosmic scale of Rick and Morty makes HP Lovecraft’s macrocosmic, universal scale look like kid stuff

—Which all goes back to the tension between Existentialism and Absurdism because not only does Rick and Morty make HP Lovecraft look like kid stuff in terms of sheer scale, it also makes him look like kid stuff in terms of how it approaches the same metaphysical questions that he was answering in how he built up the Cthulhu mythos

(……I mean, we may not like any of his answers, because he pretty much answers, “No” to any metaphysical questions we could come up with, even when he actually isn’t faced with a yes or no question? But he does provide answers to them, and those answers generally have big, nasty tentacles and they want to eat you and might also make your brain start leaking out your ears because you are just that fundamentally incapable of understanding shit about shit about even a fraction of their existences, much less the totality of them)

(HP Lovecraft sometimes makes Tara “My Immortal” Gillesbie look like she has chill, and frankly, comparing the two of them is an insult to Tara, because…… okay, sure, HP Lovecraft could spell, had a bigger vocabulary, and he influenced several major genres of fiction so much and so deeply that you’d need a series of monographs to get all of it documented…… but Tara wasn’t, afaik, an enormous racist douchebag who was such an edgelord that Kylo Ren would have told her to take some deep breaths and calm down and try to find her center

HP Lovecraft was exactly that kind of edgelord and to that same extent. So…… I’m just saying.)

Anyway, Rick and Morty makes HP Lovecraft look like kid stuff in its approach to the questions of existence and meaning and the horror of living in our fucked up universe (or literally any of the multiple infinite fucked up universes out there), because in all the places where HP Lovecraft would just start screaming at you about how everything is terrible forever and it’s all so scary and your mind can’t fucking take it?

Rick and Morty throws up both middle fingers and goes, “FUCK YOU, WUBBALUBBADUBDUB, WHOOOOO, LMAO COSMIC HORROR CAN’T FUCKING TOUCH ME, IT WISHES IT COULD FUCKING TOUCH ME, WUBBALUBBADUBDUB!!!”

To paraphrase one of the Wisecrack channel’s, “Philosophy of Rick and Morty” vids on Youtube: the show doesn’t ask viewers to be terrified of our own insignificance or the cosmic horrors out there that can and probably will attempt to destroy us; it asks us to laugh at them and shows how, really, they’re just as banal and silly as humans are (……most of the time)

The tension between Absurdism and Existentialism (and every so often, also Nihilism), as it plays out on Rick and Morty, is… kind of a lot

But it most often comes out in how the different characters all respond to grappling with their own existences, and the threats that arise against them, and, whether they:

want to die (like the Meeseeks and Rick)

or destroy shit but mostly Rick or whoever their creator is (like Abradolph Lincler, and Morty Jr. until…)

or try to channel their potentially not-good impulses into more constructive things

(like Morty Jr. when he decides to become a writer instead of destroying people — which is one of the single funniest moments in the series for me, personally, because… I’ve been saying since I was about twelve that being, “a creative of some kind!!” is one of the best ways to avoid giving in to any intrusive thoughts and not-good impulses that you’d rather not let rule you, and it was just like, “YEAH THAT’S RIGHT”

—or like Unity trying to help the people and planets whom it assimilates, and even leaving the people’s individual consciousnesses more or less intact and trying to better their lives by removing the shit like… y’know, race wars and pedophilia)

or try to impose some semblance of order on things to various effects

(like: the Galactic Federation,

the Council of Ricks,

the Evil Rick who was being controlled by the Evil Morty,

Beth in her own way,

Mr. Needful — since his whole shop is about him cursing people to be punished for their “sins” in a very direct and poetic justice-laden way that upholds the idea that bad shit should happen to certain people for certain reasons that follow a logical and easily comprehensible order,

Rick when he insists on the supremacy of science above all else in the universe despite any evidence that might be a challenge to his beliefs in the meaninglessness of it all and how it can be boiled down to chemical reactions or physics principles or whatever else is on his mind at any given moment [including non-scientific but still systematic logical shit like going, “Well, [Beth]’s MY daughter, Summer; I outrank you. Or, family means nothing, in which case, don’t play that card”],

the female Gazorpazorpians,

Principle Vagina when he goes, “all the old religions are dead” and creates the Headism cult based on the cum hoc ergo propter hoc and post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacies [which I don’t feel like explaining myself right now because this is already too long, so here’s a link to the Wisecrack video on “Get Schwifty,” where 8-Bit Jared specifically talks about those exact logical fallacies in the episode],

Morty whenever he tries to be a more conventional do-gooder,

Summer when she falls into Headism or tries to fit other people’s ideas of who she should be if she wants to be popular,

the Meeseeks, who only want to kill Jerry so that they can die because they are created for a specific purpose and can’t fulfill it (thanks, Jerry!!) and don’t know how to cope with what we understand as a full existence in the universe (y’know, one that exists outside of one specific purpose),

and oh this list never ends, it goes on and on and on and on)

or try to hide from everything (like Beth and Rick when they drink, even though Rick acts like he isn’t hiding from shit — which we know is a lie, thanks to Birdperson and how he clarified that, “wubbalubbadubdub” means, “I am in great pain, please help me” — and far more visibly, like Jerry, who would rather live in Jerryboree or the scammer aliens’ 5% processing power simulation than in his actual life)

or any other multiple options that come up throughout the series

—and in the different ways that the show either embraces or rejects any attempts at attaching meaning or significance to the adventures we see in the episodes (like, at the end of “Raising Gazorpazorp,” when Rick tries to go, “this was all pointless lol” so Summer tries to go, “don’t you think it made you think a bit about how you’re being a misogynistic turd to me,” and Rick then tries to go, “no, that’s just your feminine insecurities” — which is creating a meaning and attaching significance to shit, even though Rick literally just went, “it’s all pointless lmao”)

We see this in a BIG way with Rick throughout everything — we can’t not; in a lot of ways, he embodies the entire, “Absurdism vs. Existentialism vs. Nihilism” tension in one character — and in how he reacts to things, how he develops or doesn’t as the series goes on, how he tries to tell himself that he isn’t having any character development but he is but not always in any kind of positive way, and so on. I mean……?

My personal read on him, on an in-character and an in-universe level, is that whatever Rick’s backstory actually is and whatever his motivations actually are, he’s been out into the grand-scale universe — and that could fuck with anybody’s head, but he’s even gone beyond that, into the mega-multiverse, and seen his place(s) in everything, seen the thing(s) that the other Ricks have done*, seen all the possibilities that could’ve been for him**, and seen just how insignificant he actually is, in the grand mega-multiversal scale of everything ever

—and while Morty-Prime can look at being confronted with this shit in “Close Rick-counters” and conclude, “When I first saw all those Ricks and Mortys [at the Council of Ricks], I thought, ‘Gee, that kind of devalues our bond.’ But then I realized it just means that our relationship must be pretty special to span over all those different timelines,” Rick has seen too much to deny the randomness of existence and/or think that he can believe in something comforting like anything being so cool or so special that it spans multiple universes and timelines without the risk of having it painfully ripped away from him

So, basically, when Rick tries to reject having any semblance of meaning attached to his actions or adventures, he’s trying to do the Absurdist thing of embracing the fundamentally random and meaningless nature of the universe and of life itself, and he has seen enough to make him think that this is just how it all is — but he’s also struggling with that because he doesn’t want it to all be meaningless, and he doesn’t know what to do with the fact that it might actually be meaningless.

I mean, he’s a scientist. He’s dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth and knowledge and meaning. It might seem like cynical or even a reaffirmation of the inherent meaninglessness of life, the universe, and everything, but he wants the meaning to be there in some form — so being confronted with as much evidence as he’s seen that there isn’t any intrinsic meaning to anything that isn’t projected onto it by beings observing those phenomena? That would probably fuck him up even more than how isolated and alienated he is from other sentient beings

And he’s already pretty fucked up from that — I mean, he rarely sees his bff Birdperson, his relationships with his family (except for Jerry) are in a perpetual cycle of needing them but shoving them away since he hates that he needs them and devaluing all their relationships by trying to dismiss them based on what he needs from them or not, and connecting with other people as Tiny Rick requires him to be in intense pain while his real body is slowly dying in a stasis tube, while connecting with other people in the party in “Rixty Business” or with Unity in “Auto Erotic Assimilation” requires him to be fucked up beyond all belief on sex and drugs, and it’s still not enough to let him hide from how much pain he’s in, wubbalubbadubdub

(which gets me so hard, just. I am so weak for this trope. it hurts and I love it and I’m weak for it because I’m actual trash garbage.)

—so, like? Rick might feel like he’s certain of everything, as he tells Morty and Summer in, “A Rickle In Time,” but the reality of his situation is probably more that he overcompensates and he tries to reassure himself that he’s certain, and he might be in an immediate small-context moment…… but overall, he’s actually perpetually uncertain, because everything he dedicated his life to wound up completely undermining the sacrifices he made in pursuit of truth and knowledge (……and the Mulan-themed, plum-flavored, promotional McNugget dipping sauce)

…but acknowledging the inherent meaninglessness of it all is itself a way of ascribing meaning to the situation (*points above to our dear friend Albert and The Myth of Sisyphus*), which would probably mean, to Rick, that there is no such thing as truth or even necessarily reality (not least since he has firsthand evidence that every single thing we take for granted in our own dimension isn’t actually as stable as we think, so all of it could be completely different in another universe, so who’s to say that anything we care about is real when, as real as it is to us, it is equally not-real to a different version of ourselves from another dimension)

……which would mean that his entire pursuit of anything, ever (from knowledge to love to Mulan McNugget dipping sauce) is a pointless lie, because it could still be objectively proven that he doesn’t have these things in another dimension (I mean, the existence of Doofus Rick proves that Rick doesn’t always have knowledge or ridiculous super-intelligence, and the fact that Evil Rick was actually being controlled by Evil Morty shows us — if not Rick himself — that his belief in the stability and typical patterns of his and Morty’s relationship isn’t right, either), which would mean that he doesn’t conclusively have these things and that he doesn’t conclusively “win”

………not that any of this is a competition (it isn’t even always a matter of competition for Rick), but it all seems to go back to an idea or a feeling like something being untrue in a different universe or timeline means that its truth isn’t a fixed construct in Rick’s own universe (or whichever universe he’s calling home at any given moment, since he’s no longer in Dimension C-137) — and if something isn’t always true, then it arguably can’t be said to be objectively true

…………and if nothing is objectively true — so much so that even saying, “this thing is not objectively true” cannot possibly be an objectively true statement — then this means that Rick’s entire life has been a pointless lie and all his work means jack squat, but then that invalidates the statement that nothing is objectively true, so it’s either the case that some of Rick’s work might have meaning and his life might not be pointless, or there is no objective truth

……………but if it’s the latter that’s true and there is no actual objective truth, then Rick invalidates his own work because he’s supposed to be a scientist and on the search for a truth that doesn’t exist (and we have to start this whole cycle over again because, “nothing is objectively true” is a fundamentally self-invalidating statement)……

………………but if it’s the former statement that’s true and Rick’s work might mean something and his life isn’t actually pointless, then that raises questions like what the point of it even is (where “it” can be literally anything), how Rick can even begin to know what the point of his life and work or of literally anything is, whether or not other Ricks lives also have meaning or purpose, do any of their lives mean more than the lives of any of the other Ricks, is he truly Rickest of them all, and so on

(there are some obvious issues with this line of thinking, in addition to the same paradox that Albert got into back in The Myth of Sisyphus, and I’ll get back to one of them in just a minute)

which yes, Camus could deal with because he was capable of handling that uncertainty and perpetual state of questioning all the things, but Rick can’t deal with that ambiguity, because he isn’t a philosopher — where he’d have to get comfortable with ambiguity and not having concrete answers, because frankly, most philosophers don’t, and the ones who try to say they do are the ones who are most likely to get humiliated when faced with someone who goes, “but hey, what about this obvious and glaring flaw in your theory” — but a scientist who is supposed to be working in the realm of the concrete, even if it is really out there and science-fiction-y to us, the viewers

So, TL;DR: Rick has no capacity for dealing with ambiguity or his own fundamental, underlying uncertainty, and part of why he is in so much pain is that he wants for things to mean shit but they don’t appear to, but even saying that they definitely for sure don’t mean shit anything is, in a way, ascribing meaning to them, and so, everything in his life seems like pointless, horrific suffering for no reason, and he acts like he can wrap his head around that lack of an underlying reason and his own inability to control all the factors at play in any given scenario, but on a deep, abiding level, he actually CAN’T and he HASN’T

—and, at some point, he probably wanted to do something good or remotely moral or ethical (even if he insists that the real reason is Mulan McNugget dipping sauce), because we know that he has scruples and lines that he won’t cross (maybe not very many of them, but they do exist), but in his view, he can’t do that thing, whatever it was or possibly still is. He never can, because literally everything in the universe is forever uncertain

And in his pursuit of shit, Rick has probably been forced to deal with the possibility that wanting to control all the factors in any given situation and shape them in his image (c.f., “Something Ricked,” where he forces Mr. Needful to play by his rules just for the sake of going, “neener neener neener, I’m better than you, suck it”; and the fact that he loses his shit over the beings in his microverse car battery creating their own miniverse, and doing the exact same thing as him)…… makes him not terribly unlike the Galactic Federation and the Council of Ricks, aside from issues of scale (but even that’s questionable when he can and has created literal universes full of sentient beings, whom he uses to power his fucking car/spaceship), oops

And without any internal sense of stability or anything else, Rick is stuck in this Limbo between the Absurdist mindset and the Existential mindset, and even if he weren’t, he’d have a whole fuck-ton of other problems — but this philosophical, “he stared at the abyss so long that they’re on a first-name basis and hit the clubs together on Friday nights” cosmic horror shit definitely isn’t helping

*: and despite claiming that he’s amoral and that he has no fucks to give, we see that this isn’t true when he does shit like reach back through a portal to shoot Jellybean King because of what Jellybean King did to Morty, or like when he and Summer specifically go after Neo-Nazis and bullies and animal abusers after they beat up Mr. Needful when he Zuckerbergs them, or like when he’s horrified by the fact that Evil Rick actually created a giant fortress of solitude using multiple Mortys as armor to protect himself from being found by other Ricks, or like when he’s deeply unnerved by the idea that Unity would blow up an entire city on its planet for the lulz until Unity goes, “Oh look, the people are all evacuated, and Morty and Summer weren’t there”

**: which fucked up Jerry and Beth and Summer badly enough in “Rixty Minutes,” when they got just a little taste of it, but Rick’s done this so much that he isn’t even fazed by burying a dead Rick in the backyard and taking his place, and sees the Council of Ricks as unimpressive and boring when they aren’t being a pain in his ass

—and Rick’s general attitude and demeanor are established as coming out of how he’s in great pain, so it’s plausible that his disaffection with the Council of Ricks is, in some ways or on some level, related to him being in so much pain over constantly seeing all the other possibilities, and wishing that he could just be numb to it, and lashing out because he isn’t

(…though it stands to reason that, somewhere, there are different Ricks who are genuinely numb to it)

and for all we have an entire Council of Ricks (who all kind of seem some degree of miserable, just like Rick-Prime), it stands to reason that, in the infinite universes, there are realities wherein Rick is actually happy

—and I don’t mean “happy” like Doofus Rick, who’s such a doofus that he probably would be pretty happy, if he could just hang out and chill with Jerry all the time, but Doofus Rick isn’t allowed to just have that.

Instead, he gets dragged into the Council of Ricks, where everybody treats him like crap [even Rick-Prime treats him like crap, and he completely rejects the Council of Ricks and their authority, and only sees a use for them because the fact that they’re a thing makes it possible for him to exist in opposition to them, which is crucial for his ability to deem himself the most Rickest of all possible Ricks]

—but yeah, no. I don’t mean Doofus Rick; I mean that, in the infinite multiverse, there must be some universes in which Rick is legitimately happy.

And true, one of the biggest points of the plot with Beth, Summer, and Jerry in, “Rixty Minutes”… is that it doesn’t matter what reality you look at, because the people in any reality will almost definitely spend at least some time just looking up at the sky and wondering what might’ve been if they’d done something differently

(……which, if we accept the logic of the infinite multiverse, can’t actually be constant in all universes ever, but it’s also unfathomable to most people that other people don’t necessarily wonder what might’ve been within our own single universe, much less if we are forced to confront the reality of other universes in which things are different for us)

—but, either way? Yeah, “Rixty Minutes” gives us a Rick and Morty spin on the good old, “lmao the grass is always greener on the other side” moral, but someone being truly happy isn’t mutually exclusive with wondering what could have been if you’d done something differently or if you’d only made different choices at certain points in life

I’m not really sure where the series falls on the question of whether someone’s life is:

an aggregate of all the smaller choices that they make (let’s call this the, “Spec Ops: The Line” approach to choice-making, because of how Spec Ops: The Line held the player accountable for every little choice that they make, even the ones where they don’t feel like they have a choice)

or more contingent on what bigger choices people make at crucial moments in life that are somehow more important than other choices for some reason (i.e., the idea that most contemporary fiction relies on but let’s call it the, “Colossus” approach to the question, because of that scene in Deadpool where Colossus tries to tell Mr. Pool Boy that being a hero comes down to your choices in four or five Big Deal moments, and you don’t have to brush your teeth as a hero)

or some kind of balance between the two extreme options here (and hey, let’s call it the, “Mass Effect” approach, because of how the original Mass Effect trilogy has a mix of both bigger deal “key moments” where your choices affect huge pieces of the story — like, for example, whether you have to fight Saren before fighting Sovereign, or manage to make Saren realize that he’s been Indoctrinated and then shoot himself so he can die as himself — and smaller shit that may seem like, “oh, it’s an insignificant choice on this one loyalty mission or fetch quest,” and then it comes back to bite you in the ass later)

—but wherever Rick and Morty ultimately falls, I maintain that there must be universes where Rick is genuinely happy, for better and for worse, and regardless of what shape that happiness takes? If Rick-Prime has seen it for his alternate selves at all, and possibly even seen how he can’t fit into those universes somehow, then that would do a LOT to fuck him up

Anyway, remember I said I’d get back to one of the biggest flaws in how Rick seems to approach the universe?

Yeah, well, it’s pretty simple. His flaw here is that he doesn’t understand issues of scale and seems to see some things as being mutually exclusive when they aren’t

These two flaws really are one and the same, for Rick

Because on one hand, you have scale — which, for Rick, means that he looks at day-to-day human problems and sees them as pointless because he knows what’s out there in the big deal mega-multiverse, and so he has a more accurate idea than most beings do of how insignificant one being’s individual life looks in the grand scheme of things…… but he also can’t escape these problems and is, in several ways, bound to them

He would say that he’s bound to his family because he relies on the protective shielding from being around Morty’s brain and junk, but I’m actually thinking more like how Rick is dependent on the attention and reactions he gets from other beings to feel like there is SOME kind of point to anything he does (even if the point is just, “annoying Jerry” or whatever, there is some kind of point, because he can do a thing and get a reaction), and he is at least emotionally dependent on alcohol and likely other mind-altering substances because he’s apparently in great pain more or less all the time, and he wants to get away from that

And, I mean.

On a more nonspecific, basic logic 101 level, Rick might be the closest that any of the single-minded beings Unity’s ever met has gotten to truly understanding the hive-minded perspective, but he’s still a human. He is fundamentally bound to human problems due to simply being a human.

—and, on the other hand, you have Rick’s problem of seeing shit that isn’t mutually exclusive as being mutually exclusive. Like, yes, there are obviously situations where something that is working on a bigger scale is objectively more important, due to what the stakes are — e.g., while Rick is a lying douche about blowing off Morty’s concern for the rest of the family in, “Get Schwifty,” he has a point about needing to focus on their song, because they had six hours, and they needed to damn well be ready or the entire earth was going to be disintegrated by a giant space laser

—but at the same time, there are plenty of situations where the stakes are not actually like that just because one thing works on a bigger scale than something else. In other words, Rick has the same damn problem that a lot of characters who’ve Seen Some Things Out There In The Great Wide Infinite have fallen into, where they have trouble seeing how the day-to-day shit in life on the ground even matters when compared to the rest of what’s out there in the universe

You see a more humanistic and sympathetic take on this trope with Rose Tyler and how she grows increasingly distanced from her Mum and from Mickey Smith because of everything that she sees while traveling with the Doctor, and how she doesn’t mean to say that there is no worth or meaning in working in a shop in, “Parting of the Ways” when she wants to open up the TARDIS and Jackie and Mickey want her to chill out, but when Rose compares eating chips and working in a shop to all of the life that she’s seen in the rest of the universe, she can’t just sit idle by and do nothing, knowing that life needs the Doctor and the Doctor needs her

……Clearly, Rick is not Rose Tyler and his approach to this is a lot less concerned with the value of anything (because unless it has some kind of objective value like X amount of Y money, he would probably say that it has no value whatsoever, even if he doesn’t necessarily feel that way for real)

But the same underlying principle applies, where Rick has seen a lot of shit and knows that certain problems are on a smaller scale than others. The problem is that, unlike Rose Tyler, Rick… doesn’t seem to get (at least not consistently or on any kind of reliable basis) that the smaller-scale problems can be important and meaningful without invalidating the importance of the much bigger-scale issues

Like, Rick has seen so much and he acts like he’s unfazed by a lot of what he goes through, but: 1. he DOES remember, every so often, the importance of the smaller-scale shit, because he’ll run into SOMETHING that trips over one of the few lines that he won’t cross (at least not in practice, since he thinks about all the lines he won’t cross pretty often, apparently), or kicks him in one of his genuine emotions, or something — so he clearly is not as unfazed as he wants everyone to think (see also: the true meaning of, “wubbalubbadubdub”);

and 2. HOWEVER, most of the time, he behaves dismissively toward the smaller-scale problems, and the underlying logic of WHY seems to be, “Yeah, I know this is bad, but frankly, all of it could be a lot worse, and this is pointless anyway, sooo really? Who cares?” — which is probably aimed at himself as much as everyone he ever gives this sort of attitude to

And there IS a balance here — Morty usually strikes up a pretty good balance between concern for bigger picture shit and for smaller scale shit (or at least he strikes the best balance that he can, given what he is capable of doing in most situations), and he and Summer both want to encourage Rick to find some kind of similar balance for himself

Buuuuuuut there’s a pretty fundamental failure to communicate going on in the Smith-Sanchez family here, because even after the few glimpses they’ve had into their Grandpa’s adventures, Summer and Morty don’t really know what kind of level Rick is working on here (and in fairness to them, I don’t think that Rick really gets this, either)

Philosophy, fuck yeah

Seriously, though, if you read even 35% of that, please go have a cookie or something, I didn’t even mean to go on that long

Uh

I feel like I should wrap this up now

ngl, I kinda ship Rick/Birdperson but that’s probably the closest that I have to an actual ship for this show, because Dan Harmon is mean to me and won’t give me enough options for Summer femslash

Wubbalubbadubdub

Nothing to see here

Okay, you can go, now. You’re free

[moffbadgerplays-blog]

My Game of the Year 2016: DOOM

So it’s a little late I know but I only recently got a PC capable of running this game on the last day of 2016. I haven’t even finished it yet and already I can see that is in my opinion the best game of 2016.

But why not Overwatch like Gamespot says? Sure it’s a good game (I really enjoy it) but, it really feels like a reaction to the success of other companies (Valve). The competitive scene appears to be overtaking companies like Blizzard who are gone full pelt into providing professional players with a new e-sport to stream on Twitch for cash. 

But heres the problem, a regular player will see these games, play them and then get frustrated that they never get a similar experience because they cannot put as much time (or in some cases money) into the game. It leaves players becoming frustrated and their enjoyment of the game starts to diminish for multiple reasons like their allies griefing or letting them down or the other team just being better than them. The industry as a whole appears to be moving away from singleplayer or “half arsing” it so that people get through it to play the main part of the game, the multiplayer.

But then came along DOOM. A throwback from the 90s, the grandfather of modern day shooters. Usually when a game with so much history comes back, i.e. Duke Nuke’m, it’s really bad but Id Software managed to also make the return of Wolfenstein worthwhile and you know what? DOOM IS FUCKING AWESOME. It’s clear that they really care about their intellectual properties and the amount of love that went into the game is clear.

You don’t regenerate health and you have to pick up armour but, compared to everything else available on the market, even though it is a very old concept it actually feels like a breath of fresh air and it’s really nice to not have to deform my hand into some weird kind of claw to make my character sprint at full speed. DOOM is all about the flow of combat. You don’t want to stay in one place when you fight, if you do that you are a dead man. Every room is built into a multi storey jungle gym when you can just concentrate of having fun.

The fact the game encourages you to get even more aggressive when your health bar is low is just adds to the endorphin rush. The one complaint I would have about the Glory Kills is that sometimes the animation used repeats with each demon. I’d like to see more variation, I believe they are triggered contextually (point at the head and you kick it off) but a little randomness would be nice as well.

Watching the game you would be forgiven to think it is a blur simulator but when you actually sit there and play it you are in complete control and you feel like a god slaying the legions of Hell. The game delivers what it promises at all times.

Rip and Tear. But why is the game so enjoyable? Well it turns out that no matter how complicated and sophisticated our brains are. The lizard part is always present. DOOM really manages to tap into your base urges to just cut loose. It’s a completely guilt and consequence free environment where you are given a collection of weapons, a suit of armour and a hatred for demons, and the game says “Go Nuts”. It’s an incredibly fun game with a very simple premise and that is apparently all you need to have fun. It’s strange that in an era of gaming where you need to innovate and over complicate to get anywhere that the oldest FPS game ever made with a graphical update and a small number of gameplay mechanics (some old, some new) manages to blow it’s competition out of the water.

Quit Projecting on Me. The story is incredibly basic “we opened a portal to Hell and demons are coming out of it go kill them”. Id Software knows its a bullshit story, you know it’s a bullshit story but you accept it because it doesn’t take itself that seriously. It’s self aware but doesn’t become horrifically grating like some attempts.

Lets talk about Doomguy as well. He doesn’t say anything at all during the game yet, as you can see from the gif above, his characterisation is fantastic. He’s an angry guy who hates demons when he needs to be but that isn’t his entire character. He isn’t just an angry slab of muscle like Marcus Fenix or Dom from Gears of War. He’s a dork, how many protagonists in FPS games do you see taking the time to rearrange the hand of a bobblehead to fist bump it. Most characters would break it open or jam it somewhere into their body as quickly as they could.  Doomguy is also a really effective blank slate. 

This is something that Cracked talked about concerning why Keanu Reeves is so effective in the Matrix. Because he shows little emotion it’s really easy to project yourself onto him. Doomguy on the other hand is literally faceless, you can project easily onto him. I see his characterisation as being that of the player’s. What would you do in that situation. Let’s talk about a couple of examples.

Exhibit A - DEMONIC INVASION IN PROGRESS, you’re getting ready to jump through the door into an army of demons and this guy starts spouting exposition at you. You don’t care, you were probably barely even listening to him and what does Doomguy do? He throws the screen away. “Go away, I just want to kill demons, I don’t care what you have to say”

Exhibit B -  “It was worth it...”, you climb into an elevator and the evil Reinhardt is telling you how even though all his staff are dead it was all worth it for the ardent energy. To which Doomguy looks down at his feet to see a mutilated dead body. In your head you’re thinking “sure it is...”

Doomguy is a great blank slate because he already behaves like you would if you were in a videogame and you can then start projecting the other parts of your personality onto him. It’s the same reason that Gorden Freeman was such a good protagonist in the Half Life series.

Conclusions. Usually this would be where I’d be talking about where the game needs improvement. However, I seem to be finding that difficult with DOOM (yes that is the only way I can say it) because the only thing I have issue with is superficial. Id Software has really revived their greatest franchise with a true and worthy replacement. It is a great addition to the series which took everyone by surprise after the negative reaction that DOOM 3 received at the time of it’s release. If you haven’t played this game please do. It is the most fun murder play set I have ever experienced.

[blaperile]

Homestuck Epilogues - Meat - Page 25 (Epilogue 4 Page 8)

[tipsydipsydo]

BTS Make out-Songs🎶 [Maknae Line]

Hey my Dears!💜

I have a new Scenario for you! It's about my Ideas what BTS favourite Make Out/Sex Songs could be~🙈

Originally I wanted to post the scenarios of all member in one post but then I realized I wrote waaay to much for each member so I split the post in two parts (The Hyung Line and the Maknae Line are sepereated now)

This here is the Maknae Line (yeah I know you read it already in the title xD)

The link to the Hyung Line can be found here.

A little thing: Some scenarios of the members are written more in the "Scenario Style" and some are more in the "Fanfic Style" but I hope you'll like all of them! 💜

I tried to include some verses of the specific song into the fic when I thought it'll fit the specific situation very well.

I'll write the song titles (links seems to not working out actually) for their songs into the scenario right after the moodboard of the member. And I think it could be helpful for you when you listen to the song while reading to get better "into the mood" you know😉

Information: The link to my masterlist can be found at the end of the scenario! 📝

Gender of the reader: female

Then... there is nothing more left to say and I hope you'll enjoy it!

「© tipsydipsydo」

These following scenarios are my intellectual property and belongs only to my blog tipsydipsydo.tumblr.com!

I’ll not accept any kind of reposting, stealing or using/editing my work!

That includes reposting my content on other social media platforms too, even when you link me as the original author.

Thank you.

Jimin

Champagne and Sunshine by PLVTINUM & Tarro

I don't know when it started, but whenever I hear this song now, it reminds me of Jimin.

I don't know for sure, but I think it's this playfulness in this song. It reminds you at first of a typical summer song, which simply spread cheerfulness and a good atmosphere and you want to sing along with it, until you notice the dirty lyrics for the first time.

And I think that's exactly the point why this song fits Jimin so well! At the beginning he always seems to be cute and maybe a little bit naïve, so you just want to take him into your arms and cuddle him. There is a reason why they call him little mochi...

And then he goes on stage and seems to be a complete different person. He knows exactly what a magical attraction he has, how to use his personal advantages to tease the shit out of Army.

For example I mean this cocky smile, his bodyrolls, the way he shows himself so freaking sensual and sexy.

He has so many different facets, all of them are so contrary. He's really like an exotic animal, like a chameleon. And that's what fascinated you so much about him and stole your heart.

How can he be so damn cute and then bang!, the next moment he gave you one of these dangerous dark looks, licking his sweet plush lips and if you're not careful enough, he'll have you pressed against the wall within seconds and you'll drown in his deep, passionate kiss.

Love, take it off

She love that dirty talk

Pushing her up, against the wall

White wine and bubblegum

I also combine this lightness and carefreeness of the song with wild, passionate sex of a young, freshly in love couple and they just can't keep their hands off each other and take every opportunity to somehow release anything of this thick sexual tension between them.

No matter how young or old you both are, no matter how long you've already been with Jimin, he will always make you fall in love with him all over again like you did on day one.

It's this mix, these countless facets Jimin have, that makes it possible that you'll never know where it'll lead you after a sensual, needy kiss, what kind of Sex you two will have this time.

I have this headcanon in my head that you're on vacation together, in LA, especially when a stressful time is behind you and your relationship has suffered a little because of all these appointements you both had.

Now you finally have time for each other again and you make use of it, on the flight back home to Seoul you have to accept that you didn't really see much of the city, but you definitely knew your hotel room inside out.

Every now and then you actually tried to crawl out of bed and get ready for an exploratory tour through the neighborhood, but then came Jimin sneaking up from behind like a tiger and took his prey right back into the king-size bed. Your little cuddle tiger has other plans for you...

Sometimes you even make it into the shower together, but that's a bad idea. Jimin's initially innocent bodylotion rubbing onto your skin becomes needy very quickly and either he fingers or fucks you against the tiled shower wall.

And when you finally managed to leave the hotel room to do some sightseeing, it won't be the only time that you will be kicked out of some museums for "inappropriate behaviours".

And all this only because Jimin can't keep his hands to himself and has to touch your ass all the time!

...and well, because you can't leave this action unpunished too, you gave him a slap on his ass back with a giggle. You can guess the rest of the story...

Most of the time, Jimin can't wait to finally open the hotel door again, without all these annoyed looks from the other peoples.

After a delicious dinner and an almost empty bottle of red wine, you two return to the hotel tipsy and giggling like a young teenage couple. When the hotel door hasn't closed completely yet, Jimin's lips are back in their rightful place, your lips.

It's not the bedroom floor that has to withstand your concentrated lust, but it's the couch that has to hold out, because the bed is simply too far away.

Rough sex on the bedroom floor

Hop in the shower, she begging for more

'Do not disturb' on the hotel door

Waking the neighbours

"God Baby, I just can't get enough of you...", Jimin sighs against your lips.

He fiddles impatiently with the zipper of your summer dress and curses quietly when he can't take your dress off by the first try.

You run your hand through his hair and laugh as he has no more nerves for further opening attempts and simply pushes the skirt of your dress up to your waist. Quickly he clears your panties out of the way before he lets his own pants and boxer briefs slides down to the floor and sink deep into you.

A moan full of pleasure leave your lips, but still an amused smile plays around the corners of your mouth.

"So impatient, my Sweetheart? Even though you've been taking me non-stop the last few days and you still can't get enough? What will just our poor room-neighbors think?"

"I'll never get enough of you, Darling. And when you ask me what the neighbors could think of us? I just want them to think that we're a very happy couple and we're just taking care of each other's needs."

Your laugher is mixed with soft moans as Jimin fucks you slowly with deep thrusts into the cushions of the couch.

From the outside, the countless colorful lights of LA's lively nightlife shine through the panorama window into your hotel room.

"Yeah, that's true. We take care of each other and I'm very, very happy with you, Jimin.", you wisper before you let your lips melt back together with Jimin's.

All I want is champagne and sunshine

Looking for a good time

Sipping on the stars while we laying under sunlight

Tanned skin, light eyes

Oh my, she's so damn fine

Kissing on her neck

We be running from the nighttime

Taehyung

National Anthem by Lana del Rey (full version)

Taehyung loves aesthetic. Taehyung loves perfection. Taehyung loves passion and sensuality. Taehyung loves the perfect moment.

This is also the reason why he has specific music playlists on his phone that are precise tuned to the mood. Especially sex-playlists. For every imaginable situation and mood between you he has also a perfectly adapded playlist of songs for it. Whether you have wild, impetuous sex and can't get enough of each other, wether you have an another play-session and one of you takes the lead for the night or you just have sensual, loving sex and enjoy the closeness to each other.

But Tae is right, the right music only makes the sex more intense, exciting a whole new athmosphere.

You don't know exactly how many playlists Taehyung has on his phone, nur you estimate to be ten to fifteen different ones.

Yeah, your Sweetheart got a bit of a passionate thing for this.

But it's worth it every time.

Taehyung lets his head sink further and further into his neck, enjoying how wet and warm you feel around him. The way you tense up rhythmically every time you lift and lower yourself on him and how your tight walls massage his long, thick cock makes everything in his head spin.

"We gonna take it slow today...", he said when he woke you up not long ago with countless butterfly kisses on your shoulder.

A smile manifested in your lips, that sounded like a wonderful start for a Sunday. You would welcome the opportunity to only get out of bed for the bare necessities.

How good that you share this thought with Taehyung and just want to explore the aesthetic and beauty of doing nothing with him. Or rather, to enjoy the beauty of doing nothing alongside the aesthetic of sexual pleasure.

Tae had a very specific goal when he gently pulled you out of your dreamland. He wanted to enjoy the time and the togetherness you two have left before he's abroad for the next three weeks to film a new MV.

And now you're above him, straddling his lap, riding him like his personal godess and smiling so seductively. Especially in those moments he asks himself what he did to deserve a person like you in his life.

In the background is playing soft music, Tae had put it on before your sensual adventure. When you heard the first notes, you couldn't deny yourself the joyful smile of anticipation for what might come next.

In this moment Lana del Rey's "National Anthem" fills the room, almost seizing your bodies with this swinging, lively yet sentimental and melancholic melody.

You have the feeling of being closer to your husband now. So, so much closer. On a level that even the best vocabulary couldn't put into words.

Your rhythm adapts to the beat of the music, your movements become sometimes faster, sometimes slower and so you transport Taehyung into spheres he has never been before.

Lana's longing voice encourage you to reveal your innermost desires. In those moments when you are so close to each other, you feel the most fragile and vulnerable.

You need reasurrance.

"Tell me I'm your National Anthem... please."

Taehyung's lips opens speechlessly for a moment before he can forms the words you need the most right now.

"Yes, Baby! Yes, yes, yes, only you. I'll sing for you, I'll sing you as my National Anthem. You are my National Anthem, my love, my wife."

I sing the National Anthem

While I'm standing over your body

Hold you like a python

And you can't keep your hands off me

Or your pants on

See what you've done to me

Just as dancing is for Hoseok his home, so you're his home for Taehyung. Where he feels safe and secure, where he can calm down from all this stress, where he finds comfort when he can no longer help himself.

You are his home and he'll sing your hymn again and again to pay homage to you.

"Yes, my Love. You are my National Anthem. I chose you, only you. That's why you wear that ring.", he wispers in a throaty voice.

I need somebody to hold me

He will do very well

I can tell, I can tell

Keep me safe in his bell tower hotel

Then he kisses your palm before his lips move higher to spread little kisses over your ring finger. Again and again they brush against the golden ring with the crystal clear diamond.

It's true, Taehyung chose you. He married you.

And I remember when I met him.

It was so clear that he was the only one for me.

We both knew right away.

"You know, I don't dare to say 'forever', that's such a big, powerful word. But shall we try to make eternity ours? As long our eternity would be..?", you wisper and exhale with a trembling breath.

Taehyung's tender caresses let you get closer and closer to your high. Your husband seems no different, his thrusts from below gets increasingly uncoordinated.

"Yes Baby. As long our own eternity would be. Come, let's explore the endlessly sky, I wanna see you float, Darling...", breathes Taehyung with a trembling voice as he paints your walls white and sends you with small circles of his thumb over your clit also over the edge.

He was charismatic, magnetic, electric, and everybody knew him

When he walked in every woman's head turned.

Everyone stood up to talk to him.

He was like this hybrid, this mix of a man who couldn't contain himself.

And I loved him. I loved him, I loved him, I loved him.

And I still love him, I love him.

Jungkook

Heaven by Julia Michaels

Giggling, you try to get in the car, which has been parked at the roadside, on the side where the passenger seat is without breaking your neck because of your vertiginously high Heels.

Jungkook stands behind you and takes care that you really don't hurt yourself and that nobody sees more of your ass (even when he likes to call it his ass) than your whole Outfit already exposes with this damn short and skin-thight cocktail dress you choose for Namjoon's Birthday Party.

You bend into the car and try to get into it while you perform awkward contortions and then you feel Jungkook's hand grab the hem of your dress and move it back into an appropriate position.

That's exactly what makes you giggle even more and you wiggle with your ass provocatively so that the hem of your dress, which has just pulled down twenty secondes ago, slides up again.

"Kookie, are you jealous that someone else could see my nice ass?~"

You're slurring right now and can't get out of all of your giggling.

You are a little bit drunk right now. Maybe a little bit more than just a little bit. And in such a state Jungkook has to admit that you're actually a bit tiring.

Jungkook sighs and gives you a gentle but still reprimand slap on your ass cheeks.

"Come on, Baby. We should get home, you should get into bed really quickly and grab a good night's sleep."

"Koookieeee! Don't be mad at me!"

"I'm not mad, Love. But please, just get finally into the car and sit yourself down on your really nice ass. Jackson already looks at me quizzically from the terrace and seems to wonder, why you've been sticking your butt up in the air like that for five minutes already!"

After another five minutes of Jungkook coaxing you, you finally crawled onto the passenger seat and Jungkook was able to get behind the steering wheel and drive you both home.

The digital clock on the dashboard jumps from 02:29 a.m. to 02:30 a.m. It's hard to believe but at this time in a Sunday morning, even in the normally for 24/7 pulsating city, there is some silent peace laid over Seoul and only a few cars are on the road right now.

You had decided last night, just before you two left for Namjoon's Party, that this time Jungkook would play the chauffeur for both of you. So unfortunately he has to stay sober. And that's exactly what you took as a reason to drink a little more than is actually good for you.

After all, you have to drink "for two" and you just drank every shot that are offered to Jungkook in his place.

When you're drunk you laugh and giggle a lot more than usual (well... in your drunken state you laugh about literally everything) and you always get red cheeks which are incredibly adorable. But you also become very talkative and Jungkook just hopes that not all party guests knows your sex life inside out now.

At this moment you try to connect your phone to the car radio via Bluetooth and apparently you can operate the somewhat complicated technology correctly despite the increased alcohol level, because shortly afterwards the first beats of Julia Michaels "Heaven" comes out of the car's speakers.

You start singing one of your favourite songs with a smile on your face, showing no shame, although you usually don't like singing in Kookie's presence, because next to Jungkook's angelic voice you feel like a cat that has been stepped on her tail too often.

Hearing you singing so freely and lightheartedly now, on Jungkook's lips manifests a smile too, even when you certainly don't hit every note correctly.

He tries to look at you as often as possible, but he should keep his eyes on the road to advoid causing an accident.

But he finds it hard when he notice in the corner of his eye how you keep giving him seductive looks during the refrain. Especially when you bring "But bad boys bring heaven to you..." over your lips with a provocative smirk.

A week ago you told him why you like this song so much. In your opinion it describes him pretty well and with these words you gave Kookie a meaningful smile.

No need to imagine

'Cause I know it's true

They say "all good boys go to heaven"

But bad boys bring heaven to you

It's automatic

It's just what they do

They say "all good boys go to heaven"

But bad boys bring heaven to you

At first he seems like a good, decent guy but in reality he's such a naughty and kinky boy! You know it as well as Julia, bad boys bring heaven to you!

Oh yes, that's so true. You've seen Jungkook behind closed bedroom doors. You don't have to be a good girl to get to heaven, Jungkook brings the heaven to you. Either with his fingers, his tongue or best of all, with his thick cock!

At that thought your cheeks blush a little bit more and because of the alcohol and the now absolutely unbearable sexual desire between your thighs you can't get a clear... or even better a decent thought anymore.

Before you can think about any consequences, you spread your legs and let the dress ride up to your hips. You lay your head back against the headrest of your seat and a little moan comes over your lips when you finally let your index and middle finger circle around your clit.

Finally, some satisfaction.

What Jungkook didn't know... well, until now, that you were a naughty little girl and only wore a string ouvert under your dress.

You wanted to feel this kick of being a dirty girlfriend, just the thought that you could have been caught by one of Jungkook's friends made you so horny and wet. ...and what would he have done to you, his filthy Babygirl?

Well, now he knows it anyway.

He looks at you in completely disbelief as you shamelessly start fingering yourself next to him in the passenger seat and he realizes that you worn this damn thong (that covers literally nothing!) overly all night long.

An angry huff leaves your boyfriend who bends without warning with the car sharply onto an abandoned parking space of a supermarket and brings the car to halt.

A surprised squeak comes from your lips and you look to Jungkook in confusion, who is just about to pull the handbrake with a grimly expression on his face and switch off the engine.

"You don't seem to want it any other way, you little brat!"

"What do you mean, Kookie?", you ask him completely unsuspectingly and seemingly unaware of any guilt.

"I promised you that I wouldn't have sex with you when you were drunk. Especially when you've had so much to drink that you surely can't remember some of the things you did that night before. I am a gentleman, really. And I actually keep my promises. Always. But you can't do this next to me! You can't just sit here next to me, playing with your pretty little fingers on your wet pussy like that and presenting to me, that you have been wearing a thong ouvert all night! Apparently you did all of this on purpose. You're such a dirty girl! I think I should stuff your greedy hole with my cock and fuck you so hard until you definitely remember not to do that again!"

With these words Jungkook gets out of the drivers seat, goes around the car and opens the passenger seat door. Then he unbuckles your seat belt and lets your backrest sink back as far as possible.

Utimately he unbuckles the belt of his dress pants. A happy smile spread over your face.

"You got me."

Now a devilish smirk forms on Jungkooks lips.

"Even a gentleman could bring heaven to you..."

Love's my religion but he was my faith

Something so sacred so hard to replace

Fallin' for him was like fallin' from grace

All wrapped in one, he was so many sins

Would have done anything, everything for him

And if you ask me I would do it again

▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪▪

"Oh fuck...", you groan with a twisted face, as you drag yourself into the living room with your blanket over your shoulders. It's around 01:00 p.m. on Sunday's noon.

There's Jungkook, sitting on the couch and and try to memorize the lyrics for the next song.

"Hey Baby, how's the hangover?", he asks amusedly and shake his head at the sight of you.

"No, the headaches and stuff aren't the worst, but you've pretty much wrecked my pussy. I can barely walk straight... but the sex was worth it!"

"So you remember the most important thing of the last night?"

"Yes. I remember everything. I told all of Got7 yesterday which sex toys are the best and which of them they should buy for their girlfriends..."

"Oh God, please no... If Jackson heard all of this, he must have told Namjoon and so Jin will know it now too. And then he'll tease me if I'm not able to satisfy my girlfriend properly... they are such gossip girls!"

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