#but instead i’m at the office

[breakbreadwithme]

haven’t been this depressed in so loooooong & i just increased my meds which in theory should help but this is all related to an Actual Fucking Problem not irrational thinking so i’m probably going to stay do fucked up for weeeeeeks & my meds are giving me Side Effects which they didn’t last time so i’m also physically suffering which just fucking adds to the Everything Else about the hell i am currently living in

[corpusdiem-seizethedead]

Husk: *flirting* On a scale of one to ten, you're a nine, because I'm the one you need.

Angel: …I'm a ten

Husk: It's a pickup line-

Angel: *clapping between syllables* I.👏 Am.👏 A.👏 Ten.👏

[nerdy-hyperfixations]

I just want to remind everyone that Wallace is canonically the worse one to sleep in the same bed with.

Scott can be a bad roommate in every other aspect but GUYS Wallace is the one that canonically snores and kicks in his sleep.

Scott sleeps like a princess with his back against the sheet lying perfectly straight (and also taking all the covers) and Wallace sleeps semi-on-his-side and apparently just fucking punting Scott in the leg every so often (not to mention he talked in his sleep too) and I don’t know why this is important to me but it is.

Because when people draw them cuddling in their sleep it’s always Wallace being normal and Scott turning and snoring and shit but you’re missing out on sleepy-cuddly Wallace turning and snoring on Scott. Let that cringe-fail 25 year old be annoying. Istg.

I’m talking to the Mobillace people too btw. Not that I’ve seen anyone draw them cuddling in bed (which is a CRIME btw. Draw that. For me.) but like imagine how funny it would be: Mobile stays the night for the first time and the hot-weirdo is a bed-menace, snoring and kicking and tossing and turning and suction cupping for warmth and Mobile is like “I want him to be my boyfriend” THATS FUNNY! LIKE-

[simcardiac-arrested]

wait, that elias?

[cinematicnomad]

and i’m feeling insane existential dread in this chili’s tonight

[proshipconfessions]

Responding to your last post about proshippers complaining about other proshippers. You didn't provide this option, but I really think it should depend on the content of the ask... And yes, this is a confession blog for proshippers/profic, etc. aligned people. Telling us to go to antiship confession blogs is horrifically stupid and is only going to put us in dangerous positions.

The proship community is not immune from being shitty. There are proshippers who act just like antis. People who think they can change their race and give themselves disabilities are straight up infecting the community as well. There are proshippers who are horrifically ableist against pwOSDDID, schizospec disorders, etc. There are proshippers who straight up use slurs they can not reclaim. There are proshippers who call people the r slur. I especially think proshippers with these disorders (including myself) should have a safe outlet to talk about the toxicity and abuse within our own community without telling us to basically become an anti. Because what the hell???

Of course, I can't read every single anon that you get, but if they are anything along the lines of what I'm talking about here, consider not deleting them. Especially don't tell people to "just become antis" or "just go to antiship confession blogs." That's harmful as fuck.

If anything, these confessions should serve as a reality check that our community isn't perfect. Or serve to remind people that this behavior shouldn't or won't be tolerated in the proship community. Not every self-proclaimed "proshipper" is actually a proshipper, especially if they act abusive, ableist, or harass people like antis do. I will die on this hill.

If you don't want to house confessions about these topics, that's fine. Just say so, and I'll make my own confessional blog where these topics are allowed.

You’re right that there are plenty of people who are proship and also shitty af. It’s something that I’ve both posted plenty of confessions about and have actually even—in case you haven’t been familiar with my blog for a while—made my own post about! It’s like one of just a few posts that I have made speaking directly from my mouth and not a confession. It’s just a post that I wrote about behavior that I hate seeing pop up far too commonly in this community. I literally can’t count how many people I have blocked, which includes not only antis, but also shitty proshippers and pricks who claim to be them while supporting harm caused to others in real life.

You’re also right that you can’t read every anon that I get. I would have much preferred that you even just ask what kind of thing I’m talking about instead of acting like you’re some secret second mod and I’m just some asshole who refuses to hold anyone or any behavior accountable as long as I agree with them on some level.

I really do wonder what you would think about one of the (many with a similar tone) asks that inspired this post.

Do you know how many anons I get with the same fucking attitude and the same fucking insistence that they’re right and I’m wrong and evil, and yet I’m somehow the perfect mouthpiece for their beliefs? What reality check is this supposed to be giving me? Please either stop assuming that everything I say is in bad faith or genuinely try to explain to me what the good content for my followers is in this ask. This is the behavior that I mocked in my post. I also have an old one that I think is somewhere in my drafts(?) where the evil behavior that they’ve seen among a bunch of proshippers that has made them hate all proshippers is venting about harassment from antis. The fake post I made mocking them is an amalgamation of those two, but you only get this one since I’m way too tired to go find the other one rn lol. If someone reminds me, I can reblog it with it later.

Also, I really can’t tell where I said in my post that I would tell these people to go to antiship blogs (other than my reference to a comment where I said that if all that people send to my inbox is how much they hate proshippers and basic proship ideology, then they should probably take that to an anti blog) instead of just deleting the ask, like I actually said in the post. The post that was really more of a way to let off some steam while getting some use out of the Tumblr polls that I practically never get to do anything with. Do you think that the person in those screenshots that I put above is more at home here than they’d be sending this to some anti’s blog?

But like to try to put myself in your shoes, you could’ve been having a shitty day when you sent this, you could be young, or hell, you could’ve seen someone say something similar to my statement recently while meaning this shitty completely different thing. Or maybe you’ve never seen my blog in your life and have no clue what kind of stuff I do/don’t post. My response might sound super defensive, and I hope that it doesn’t, and that I’m not jumping to conclusions, too. I’d hate to blow this out of proportion over what could easily be just a misunderstanding. If I’m being too harsh, sorry. I aim any coldness towards all of these bigoted ideas and the idea that I hold them, and not at you as a person, as I’m willing to believe that you’re an entirely rational person who just misunderstood me and lashed out at me bc of it. But if there is a next time, please try to give me the benefit of the doubt. I don’t ever intend to do anything harmful, and what I said wasn’t intended to imply anything like what you’re saying here at all. I’m not talking about proshippers venting. I’m talking about actual antis coming into my inbox with the “I’m like TECHNICALLY a proshipper, I guess, but I just despise proshippers and think that people who engage with certain types of fiction are inherently bad!!!” So unless you’re one of these people coming into my inbox, then I am NOT telling YOU to go to antiship confession blogs. And if you are… well, then you’re probably not gonna see this, since I’m going through and blocking all of these dickheads soon.

[diegusting]

Inktober: day 29 - Navigator

My sense of humour is absolute crap

[18shadesofmay]

you speak up, suspect

ooooo the cops are at my doorstep

this throws me back to crabvestigation @definitelynotnia @abyssmita @chimera-tail

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

No matter what job I’m working they can never stop me from thinking about dragon age on company time

[ashxketchum]

11/11 💝 Happy Pocky Day to these two dorks!

Pose reference found on Pinterest but belongs to this user.

[bleue-flora]

i’m absolutely devouring ur playdate au i LOVE IT ‼️‼️‼️

lol I love how my random afternoon thought took over like a virus XD... Not sure there is a cure I’m afraid. ;)

[clownjacket]

If Kipperlilly DOES end up betraying Porter/Jace as part of a secret other scheme she has (whether good or evil) and it has to do with saving Lucy, I just know she’s going to be a bitch about it and pull a ‘sorry, I only save High Five Heroes’ before leaving her other friends to die or some shit. And then she will take her final form: Magic Betty from Adventure Time, betraying her allies and saving her frost gf at the expense of the world. It would also parallel what Ankarna is going through (‘your girlfriend’s out of town, it sucks’, becoming a little imperialist rage machine under the influence of Porter/Sunstone but not being able to fully turn on Lucy despite going against her values and turning into a violent weirdo). This is my wish. My dream. I am manifesting it. Magic Betty Kipperlilly I believe in you.

[j-esbian]

i lost the post but i saw someone talking about how some of y’all act like being weird is a choice and like. YEAHHHHHHH.

that’s fine, it might be for you. but i just live like this and don’t know any other way. like yeah i’ve worked customer service, i can do innocuous small talk, but anything beyond that, i don’t understand what i’m missing. and it’s frustrating to see the tonal disconnect especially from people who are like “uwu embrace weirdness!!” where they’re like. dressing quirky and talking about bugs and listening to obscure music and eschewing small talk to ask Deep Questions on the first date and unlearning their tendency to not infodump. and generally have an idea of what Weirdness is supposed to look like. idk man some of us wake up and get out of bed and can’t figure out why the rest of their coworkers chitchat with each other but when they join the conversation it dies.

weirdness is value neutral. let’s stop trying to turn it into a badge because quite frankly, it’s not a choice for everyone. it’s fucking exhausting to never be on the same wavelength as other people and they’re going to react the way they do and label you the way they will without any conscious actions on your end. it’s difficult to talk about this without feeling like you’ll be dismissed as immature, a teenager whining “no one understands me” but the thing is. sometimes you don’t grow out of feeling alone and different, and there’s no good way to talk about it without feeling like people will think you’re just fishing for pity.

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

dual-part fic prompt: first a moment where nikolai ran across the darkling as a little boy, potentially even a scene where he'd broken into his private rooms and was hiding or something, and then a moment where he's mocking nikolai sometime circa R&R or KOS just before the monster takes over again (can be real or a hallucination)

Not the exact same concept but I was already working on a one shot with vaguely similar elements! Pre KoS I had a lot of thoughts about the Darkling resurfacing as basically a voice in Nikolai’s head. So I’m leaning into that with this.

***

At first, Nikolai thinks he is going mad. Ever since that fateful night, where he plummeted from the sky, still more monster than man, the Darkling’s power rapidly fading from him, but not quickly enough, he’s felt it. There’s an ice in his chest, always with him, an invasive presence chilling him to the bone. There are thoughts, urges, he doesn’t quite understand, that don’t quite feel like his own. When he dreams, even his nightmares aren’t fully his.

He might dream of meat, of sprouting talons and wings again, of losing sanity and taking flight. Or see his family dying at that last wretched dinner in his honor, gruesome memories from the army, from his time at sea. Those things are horrible, but they’re familiar. They’re not foreign things lodged into his mind.

Other nights though, he dreams of traveling endlessly, changing names with every village and city, always looking over his shoulder for fear of being discovered. Of hands holding him underwater, in an iced over lake. But in the most frequent dreams, he is only terrified of being alone in the all-consuming dark.

Then there are the dreams of Alina. Her hands, her neck, the feel of her. The way her face betrays her every single emotion. And the collar. Always the collar. Mine, a quiet, resentful voice whispers to him. She should have been mine. Mine to shape, mine to guide. My balance. My right.

It would be simpler to call it madness. But of course, Nikolai would never have such good fortune.

He’d hoped it— whatever it was— would go away with time, that it was just a matter of readjusting to life as a mere mortal again. That it was only the simple business of becoming reacquainted with trivial civilities such as speech, and literacy, and complex thought. But no, even as his monstrous foray feels more and more like a dream, Nikolai continues to feel distinctly altered.

Sobachka, he’ll hear the ghost of the Darkling say in his head. In the dark of night, half-ensared by sleep, when he will not fully remember. Usurper, he calls him. Thief. You foolish, boy-king. Your life is like a flicker of a candle, snuffed out before it’s begun.

The voice persists, grows stronger with each passing day, seeping into his waking moments. A nagging, bitter thing, a wound he cannot help but worry at, and feel it grow even more painful, inflamed.

Sometimes when the nightmares are at their worst, they’ll leave him thrashing in his bed, stumbling out of it with a will he doesn’t fully understand. Sometimes he’ll come to in the halls of the Little Palace, having slipped past multiple sets of guards, and through the wooded tunnel in his sleep. Usually he wakes before he gets too far— after all it’s always the same route, to Alina’s door.

This time, he wakes with his fingers— always stained with black, he still shudders at the sight of them— curled around the cool metal door handle. He recoils, almost stumbles, and he is about to turn away, but then the door opens a crack and he can see her peering out at him.

“Nikolai?” Alina says, voice raspy like she’s been asleep or perhaps crying. He can see the warm glow of lamplight behind her. She’s told him she cannot stand the dark anymore. That makes two of them.

He runs a hand through his hair, not quite fully awake yet. That dreaming urge to be near her still eating at him. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

“Is something wrong?”

Tell her you’re pathetic, a drowning child, foolish enough to wade out into the sea. Instead he blinks, tries to smile. “I couldn’t sleep.”

She finally opens the door all the way, gesturing for him to come in. His gaze flickers to the antlers at her neck, the scales at her wrist, and the second fetter, bone white but delicately carved into the shape of talons clasped around her other wrist.

He always wonders if she’d requested that bit of obfuscation, or perhaps David had been feeling artistic. It’s weakness. Even now she refuses to face difficult truths.

She ushers him through the impersonal audience chamber and to the hexagonal bedroom all in shades of black. He wonders idly if she’ll ever change it.

She fusses over him to sit by the fire. He hadn’t realized he was shaking.

“I’d ring for tea,” she says. “But you hate it, and it is unreasonably late.”

“It is an abominable hour isn’t it? I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

She smiles faintly, fetching glasses and a bottle of brandy instead. He takes his own glass gratefully, tries not to spill it. He wonders how drunk he’d have to be before he stops hearing that cool voice in his head, trickling through his own thoughts like meltwater.

It hasn’t quite been a year since the Shadow Fold was destroyed. Since she drove a dagger in the Darkling’s heart to do it.

Nikolai doesn’t remember this part, or well, he shouldn’t remember, he wasn’t back to himself by then. But somehow he knows. The roiling, cold thing, whatever remnant of the Darkling still exists inside him, it remembers. How could I forget? When I was so close to my purpose, so close to lifting this country out of its misery.

After all was said and done, Alina had quietly accompanied him back to the capital. The Saint at his side to bolster his claim. She’d weathered the coronation with him and the chaos of drawing Ravka back from civil war.

But mostly she just sequesters herself in this room and its funerary elegance. He wonders if she likes it because it’s so miserable, or simply because it belonged to the Darkling. It’s a strange shrine to a dead man.

He’d proposed to Alina yet again, after everything, and she’d rejected him firmly enough that he’s resolved that it will be the final time. It had stung though, so much that he doesn’t like to think about it.

Even an orphan girl that comes from nothing will not have you. How humiliating.

Nikolai wants to say, if certain dreams are anything to go by, then it appears you’re in the same boat. But he catches himself before he does.

The most frustrating part of this, beyond the confusion and the unnerving distraction of having a foreign voice nattering in his head, is that more often than not he cannot reply. Nikolai has always been uniquely terrible at keeping his mouth shut. Over the years he’s become very adept at knowing the right thing to say, but simply staying silent is not one of his strengths. It’ll be just what he needs, walking around arguing with an invisible adversary.

He can see it now. Mad King Nikolai, remembered for his good looks and the pesky habit of interrupting nearly every conversation with entirely irrelevant, but admittedly clever, insults.

Alina lets him drink in silence, waiting for him to collect himself long enough to speak.

“There’s something wrong with me,” he says finally, more bluntly than he’d like.

“What do you mean?”

There’s too much open concern in her eyes, startlingly dark next to the rest of her face. This close he can tell that she has been crying. For her tracker no doubt. Wasted tears on an otkazat’sya who was only ever born to die.

He must really look wretched, because she touches his face gently. It’s meant in simple comfort but for a helpless moment he wonders if she’s trying to hurt him.

That’s pity on her face. She sees you for the broken, repulsively frail thing you are. A clock with a missing cog, a puppet with cut strings. Pathetic.

The firelight catches in her pale hair, makes it into a halo. It gleams off the amplifiers too, turning the bone white of them to a warm gold. He doesn’t like the way his eyes keep catching on them. And the place on her shoulder, where beneath the nightdress, he shouldn’t know she has a scar.

He pulls away, looking to the fire, the rest of the room, anything but her.

Despite everything, his wounded pride and his wounded heart, he’s glad now that she knew better than to accept his hand. Perhaps she sensed it somehow. How he is still stained by the Darkling’s mark.

“I’m not entirely certain yet,” he tells her, attempting for a light tone and failing miserably. “There’s a few possibilities, I don’t much like any of them.”

“Well, what are they?”

He remembers, as a child, in his rowdier days before anyone had come close to mastering the art of making him sit through an entire lesson at a time, he’d actually snuck in here. It’s virtually unchanged since then, the same carved forest on the walls, the same chips of pearls on the ceiling. He’d known no tutor would dare to look for him in the storied Darkling’s quarters. And he’d been right.

Unfortunately the room’s occupant himself had the audacity to be there, sitting by the same fireside with a book. Nikolai still remembers how towering the Darkling had seemed to his child’s eyes, gazing down at him with a bemused expression. The smoothness of his gestures nearly uncanny, almost serpentine as he approached him and crouched to nearly eye level.

“Moi tsarevich, it’s an honor,” he’d said, too seriously.

Nikolai had only backed towards the door, unnerved.

“I assume you have very important business.”

He’d nodded. “I snuck a live lizard in tutor Mitkin’s lunch and now he’s very cross with me.”

“Hm, a noble endeavor. Stay out of my way and tutor Mitkin needn’t know where you’ve taken refuge for the moment.”

And then the Darkling had offered him cake.

It’s an odd memory he can’t quite reconcile with everything that came after. Far too ordinary.

Should I have poisoned you? I believe that’s your brother’s wheelhouse though.

“Insanity,” he tells Alina, moving to stand. He feels restless in this confined space. His skin itches, feels too tight, ill fitting and wrong. “Which would certainly be a very interesting way to start a reign.”

Alina lets him pace, watching him quietly. “The other options?”

“A very creative imagination. Rather unlikely, I would say.”

“And?”

“The Darkling has taken up residence in my mind. Somehow.”

“What’s it like?”

“It’s like he’s whispering in my ear. Like I can feel him, taking root inside me.” He still vividly remembers the shadows pouring down his throat. The strange wrenching feeling in those moments before he’d turned into the Darkling’s creature. “Unfortunately he fancies himself a conversationalist.”

“Oh. That sounds unpleasant.”

“It is.” He sits down beside her again. Feeling rather defeated and sorry for himself.

“Aleksander,” she whispers.

And the voice that answers is not his own. “My Alina.”

“I killed you,” she breathes. But she’s also drifting closer, like she wants to touch him— the Darkling, not Nikolai, he knows that— but is afraid to.

“And I’ll haunt you for it.”

Alina takes a shuddering breath. It looks like she might cry again.

He doesn’t expect her to kiss him. He barely feels it, though his body responds regardless, hungry, possessive. At least for now, the Darkling’s voice is blessedly silent.

[crypticarchivist]

To anyone who follows me and is thinking of not voting in protest of the genocide in Gaza.

I understand. I do. It’s fucking monstrous. But as fucked up as it is to say it, all those problems you were hearing about before Gaza are still around.

The anti-trans legislation, the book banning, the attacks on abortion rights and other forms of uterine healthcare, the repeated attacks on democracy, the orange guy with a slavishly loyal christo-fascist voter base who literally keeps saying he’s going to turn dictator *day one* and lock up his political opponents and lgbtq+ people in camps if he ever gets re-elected. The same orange guy who has tried to overthrow legal elections in the past. The same orange guy who is absolutely going to turn the genocide from bad to worse and has explicitly said he will.

All that shit.

Still exists.

The far right didn’t take a vacation or time out while people were justifiably worried about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They’re not taking a time out while people are *still* justifiably worried about Gaza.

You can *still* worry about the people of Gaza. You don’t need my permission but I’m still saying you can just to clarify that I’m not telling you to ignore the deaths.

But please. PLEASE.

Do not get tunnel vision.

Not voting. Does not. Hurt Joe Biden.

Not voting. Does not. Help Palestine.

Not voting. Is exactly. What the leader of Israel, Trump, and literally every fascist in this country wants leftists doing.

Some people will need to ask themselves if maintaining a personal sense of moral purity is more important than preventing the country with the biggest military budget on the planet from making a full backslide into theocratic fascism.

[totally-not-an-awkward-okapi]

I’ve doodled ideas for redesigns before, but I’ve never just sat down and done it. By god these designs are so cluttered that there’s so many strings to pull for a redesign!