#but figured the competitors

[aquarines]

modern day famous lestat needs to be a judge on rupaul's drag race

[williams-excel-sheet]

shoma uno and yuki tsunoda exist in similar spaces in my brain. why?

very talented Japanese athletes

have a surprisingly good relationship with food considering their respective sports

(most vitally) are very close to my height so when I see them in pictures I am forced to reckon with how small I actually am compared to the average person

[ambitionslost]

"I don't want him walking off the ice tonight. I want him limping. Or leaving on a stretcher."

[imreallyloveleee]

there's just too much happening right now. stop

[henrysglock]

Listen to me. Listen. If you give me the chance to talk about a Henry figure skater au I will NEVER shut up about it. He's so incredibly elite skater coded you don't even know. Brenner is so incredibly "coach who's after glory and doesn't care that he's pushing kids to their breaking points" coded.

I'm going to talk about it under the cut because I have SO much to say

Henry's signature jumping pass is a delayed double axel. What he misses in points on it, he makes up with artistry points and upgrading other jumps to quads. He's one of the few mens skaters who can do a proper Bielmann. His technique is strong, but his artistry is stronger. His nimbleness on the ice and the way he seems suspended in midair on his delayed 2A are what gets him nicknamed "the spider". He's generally quiet and unhappy, which everyone mistakes for him being heartless and aloof. He's not, it's just that Brenner doesn't know when to stop pushing, which is why Henry is never smiling in his press releases. He got two consecutive grand prix finals gold medals before The Scandal where he supposedly attacked a fellow skater before having The most disastrous injury the skating world has ever seen. He's rumored to have killed himself after the whole debacle. (He's not dead. He bums around Hawkins Community Ice Arena at the early freestyle sessions that No One ever attends...except Eleanor Hopper, when Jim can get his ass out of bed to take her) Virginia originally wanted him to "be a man" and do hockey while Alice did FS, but he's not um. built for that, exactly. So she stuck him with Brenner hoping Brenner could make something useful out of him.

When they were younger: Scott (who's part of AV club in addition to working on the school paper) was Not a team sports guy and would rather find more interesting things than football, and who better to talk about than the kid who's going to junior nationals?? They fall out of touch when they've graduated and Henry's time is completely monopolized by Brenner, who wants to craft him into the perfect super-weapon of a skater (spoiler: all he actually does is give him a mental breakdown, a physical breakdown, and get him banned from competition by framing him once he's showing signs of becoming obsolete)

Henry's disaster injury that I mentioned earlier comes about from years of simply being pushed consistently past his limit mentally and physically. He's exhausted. Everyone's body has a breaking point, and he happens to hit that point in the middle of an uncharacteristically sloppy routine on a botched 4Lz. He cracks his skull on the ice, and he's "lucky" he didn't die. It may not have killed him, but it did make his memory of the events leading up to the injury spotty at best, which makes it that much easier for Brenner to pin everything on him being a bad seed with whom he did his best.

After being all but excommunicated from the FS community, Henry drops off the face of the Earth. No one but Scott, Victor, and Alice know what he's up to (which is: dating Scott and having a much needed mental health break).

Henry flies under the radar that way until he meets El, who happens to have been training under Brenner for several years. Henry totally poaches her from Brenner, even though he himself has zero coaching experience. It's alright, because he and El are on the same wavelength when it comes to their approaches to complex skills. The only pictures of him smiling at press releases are after he takes El on as a student.

El absolutely smacks Angela in the face with her skate. Jonathan, high, tells her it could have been so much worse, at least she had her rubber blade guard on. Henry poaching El from Brenner is what reintroduces him to the skating community, but his defense of El in her mini-scandal reopens the overdue investigation into his own scandal. Deeper digging reveals the depth of Brenner's involvement, as well as evidence of decades of concealed abuse within the relationship.

Henry and Alice did pairs as children, and they were actually a pretty good team. Alice fell out of the sport after a bad fall, which Virginia blames Henry for (and Henry silently blames himself for). The blame and guilt in that regard only makes it easier for Brenner to be a piece of shit and get away with it.

Lonnie wanted Will to do hockey. Will isn't the hockey type, but he does enjoy bumming around with El and the Party at public skate. Mike is literally Bambi on ice, but it's endearing.

Jim 100% thought Henry was creeping on El at the early freestyle sessions until he figured out that oh. Henry's with Scott, and Brenner's the sicko. He and Henry started out on the wrong foot and never really recovered from it. They're like two feral cats forced to share territory.

This is 100% me self-indulging with Henry and El's mentor-student potential. He's her rink Dad, okay?

HCIA is nicknamed the "Rainbow Rink" a) because of the rainbow tiling on the lobby floor, and later b) because it's associated with Henry, who's rumored (later confirmed) to be gay.

Scott is also Bambi on ice. It's okay, it's just another reason for him to hold Henry's hand <3

[thewomaninlilywhite]

serve tall king

[bodyhorrorbeatdown]

Body Horror Beatdown, Match 32, Round 1

Vote for your favorite:

Propaganda under the cut.

Tusk

All that separates man from animal are the stories he tells.

"dude gets his legs mutilated, his femurs (p sure it was femurs, part of his legs) fashioned into tusks and stuck in his face, and gets a suit made out of a patchwork of human flesh all to make him look like a walrus just so the dude who did it to him can feel less bad about eating his walrus buddy. Iirc a bunch of other stuff was done to this poor guy to make him more walrus-like (I believe his mouth got fucked up somehow so he can't speak anymore, and I think his arms were made shorter?? I forgor 💀) and then he just has to Live Like That"

Possessor

No Body Is Safe

"Not the goriest, but deals with the horror of your body turning against you and not feeling at home within your own body. *spoiler* There’s a great bit where the person who the main character is possessing rips off the face of the main character and wears it over his own face. It’s a surreal, psychological bit all taking place within their minds, but the imagery is great."

[cantsayidont]

Maybe the children in cages and the U.S.-funded genocide and the ongoing plague and the censorship campaign and propping Sen. Dianne Feinstein up like a reanimated corpse à la Spinrad's "World War Last" have made me more than usually cynical about the Democrats, but I can't help feeling that Kamala Harris inheriting Biden's place on the ticket is a clear indicator that they are expecting to lose (as their staffers have apparently been saying for weeks), and they've ordered her to take one for the team because they would never run her under any other circumstances.

As a Californian, I am as contemptuous as anyone of Harris and her awful record, but I suspect that's beside the point. I don't think the DNC regards her as a viable candidate — if they did, they would have put her forward much more prominently long before this — and I have a hard time picturing them running any Black woman in a presidential race they thought they could win.

[rondocapri]

I love using my degree for useful things. such as writing my own script for my spreadsheet that will automatically sort GP rankings by points so that I can play around with possibilities of who will be in the grand prix final this year

[minnesota-flag-tournament]

Wait why aren't you just doing a normal tournament of flags? I guess I get why the first round would have polls with more than 2 choices to narrow it down faster but beyond that it's kinda weird. Is it just for fun?

(also smh at the schedule using Eastern time instead of the superior Minnesotan Central time)

Lol I was gonna put all the times in Central but I didn't want to

The main reason it looks weird is because the numbers are impossible to divide in the normal bracket style. The first round has 3 options to narrow it down to the top 100. The next 2 rounds have two options, but there will be 25 flags that will compete in round 4, which can't be divided by 2 and I think polls of 5 isn't appropriate for that round. The only point of round 5 is to eliminate one flag to narrow it down to 12 flags total for the coming rounds, but one design can also get kicked out after round 3 which might make more sense. Round 6 has 3 options to narrow it down to the final four designs, and the last 2 rounds have 2 options.

The times were set up to make minimize the amount of time between rounds, and to keep me on track with posting.

[l00k4tm4m45c415]

Karen Patten

[pawsitivevibe]

I dunno why everyone says they hate grooming and hand stripping dogs. I find it so soothing. I would probably go for hours if Arthur didn't let me know he was done with it.

[blackidyll]

world silver medalists skating to james bond medleys: an odd but great intersection of my fandoms

[treecakes]

uploading photos to a database and it’s fun bc sometimes i’m writing image descriptions essentially. and other times i’m giving so much background info i’m referencing from wikipedia 😭

[stepffan]

as much as i would like to see more banquet photos and shoma hanging out with the other skaters, if that's what he needs to do to stay focused on the skating and it helps keep away the competition stress of the "i need to win and fight and compete against others" mindset and then by all means i hope he continues what he's doing now, just focusing on himself and hanging out with his team of emotional support middle-aged men

[np5enkidu]

myethos is making 1/10th scale figures, starting with miss angelina arknights and miss shining arknights. really hoping they'll mayhaps place interest on the men of arknights🙏🙏🙏