#cw: suffocation

[behindthescreamz]

leigh whannell as adam stanheight alongside shawnee smith as amanda young and director darren lynn bousman filming adam’s death scene in “saw iii” (2006)

[the-delightful-temptation]

“Sir..” One of the moth ladies gets near Valentino, shily kneeling near him. “Alkas finished the deliveries but…”

She hesitates as the overlord sits up on his couch, eyes glowing behind the screen of smoke.

“She didn’t kill the imps. Reports are that some bar chatter on the district said something about a new delivery from you..  ” 

“What?” His eyes seemed to be burning with rage, it was impossible to see his face behind all the red smoke, just a dark silhouette. He crawls on the couch, getting near the moth sinner. “She can’t even kill two unimportant imps??”

The moth lady flinches, her entire body wanting to take a step back but she held her ground. 

“A-and.. she didn’t come baa- argh!”

Before she could finish the sentence Valentino lounged at the moth sinner, grabbing her throat and lifting her from the ground.

“She didn’t?” His golden claws tightened around her throat, she gasped for air and scratched his hands while she was held.

“P- leas-e sir… cough– I can-t.” 

Valentino clenched his jaw along with his grip, enough for some blood to pour out of the moth’s neck. He throws her away, hitting the wall and laying on the floor, coughing as she tries to get some air.

“Get out!” He yells getting up from the couch and searching his phone for some numbers. “I’ll have to deal with this myself…”

[b-dubs-valdubs]

new fic up! angsty season 5 fic letsgooo

i wrote this in english class under timed conditions as practice for gcse lang paper 1.... so thats why it's shorter than usual

reblogs appreciated! <3

fic under the cut, or you can read it on ao3

CW: ANGST, BLOOD MENTION, SUFFOCATION

--------------

The Jungle was alive. The Jungle was breathing.

The canopy shielded all that lay within its cage from the pale sunglight above; the humidity, however, still remained, persisting through the greenery and dampening everything in its wake.

Awake, at last, the creature opened his bleary eyes.

He was greeted by sunlight slipping through the canopy's inpenitrable guard like a thief, settling on the ground like an infant in its cot. The creature curled in on himself, shielding himself from the light, burrowing into the greenery where everything was blissfully dark. Ragged breaths were pulled out of his lungs, his airways were roadblocks, restricting his ability to just breathe, breathe, breathe.

He was bleeding.

He had almost forgotten: in a fit of panic he had caused this, and yet his reality did not cease to stab him in the wound in his gut.

The Vines were coming for him. The Vines were making their way back into his body, despite his best efforts to yank and cut and pull them out. The Vines were wrapped around his nose and mouth, stifling shaky sobs.

When the Vines meandered towards his tears, he felt as if he was going to throw up.

He couldn't help but stare outwards, glassy eyed, at the brush-stroked sunlight through the brambles. It reminds him of what once was; days spent laying in the Sun's embrace, friends milling about his house amongst the trees, growing his plants, caring and nuturing them until they flowered and bore fruit.

The Jungle was his home. The Jungle was his family.

Yet one day, the Jungle became a parasite.

He remembered that day as vividly as the surrounding green, foolishly leaving his house at night and investigating the new species. He took notes, images, felt its scaly leaves on the pads of his fingertips.

He didn't notice the green sprouts in his hair the next morning.

The sprouts grew, and soon began to demand the impossible from him. Every droplet of water dried into a drought-stricken resevoir, every ounce of food was destroyed.

Even now, the Vines writhed into the sunlight, his memories, his joy.

He growled, shrinking into the shadows impossibly further.

"No," he admonished, reeling at how hoarse his voice had become, "No, no sunlight for you. Feel what it's like to be deprived, for once."

His head felt tingly, spots dancing on his vision for a few fleeting moments, feeling the Vines constrict around him like a snake squeezing its prey. A stray leaf almost stroked his cheek, before joining the others, muffling his whimpers.

Maybe, in another life, he would have his world back. He would have his house, his friends, his garden.

Not this.

It had all become too much. The forced sleep submerged him. The sunlight could never penetrate the darkness, not anymore.

He let himself go.

And everything faded to green...

[runekeepershymnal]

Boy howdy are the two people above me correct! But let me provide some details / citations / specific, recent examples.

Just a couple things OSHA regulates that you would probably miss if they were gone:

Workplace temperature and humidity. See, I would prefer that, if I'm working in an office, that it isn't unreasonably hot or cold, as this helps me refrain from biting people, among other things.

Storage. As someone who's worked in a storeroom environment with only one exit (thanks, guy whose office led to the only other exit, for locking your door so we could die in a fire if ours was blocked), with a fuckton of materials and not enough place to store them, having boxes fall on top of you / shelves collapse on you is not fucking fun. You know how Ikea shelves/dressers now come with brackets to bolt it to the wall because they kept getting pulled over onto people? That, but industrial shelving. OSHA's got ya.

Corporations have pushed a narrative of regulations/bureaucracy always bad for centuries, just like law enforcement has pushed the all lawyers are scum narrative (and corporations/insurance companies have pushed the "ambulance chaser" lawyer narrative).

Go through OSHA's press releases and look at the shit they've had to enforce for. Horrible deaths that they try to keep your employer from inflicting on you to make more money include:

Electrocution

Being scalded to death in a steam explosion

Being buried alive

Drowning

Dismemberment by industrial saw

Biohazards

Amputations

Having your head crushed

Suffocating in grain

Poisoning (mercury, arsenic, pick your flavor!)

Suffocating in a literal sewer.

Cop behavior. For the love of fuck. Without regulations we'd be living in an even more Charles Dickens workhouse-ass situation than we are.

I’m still thinking about that “is OSHA regulations Cop Behavior” post. Like. You know who thinks regulations are for losers? People who build submersibles out of logitech gamepads and rejected carbon fibre. People who trust starlink as their only surface lifeline.

Do you wanna be like the fine film on the floor of the Atlantic that was once a billionaire? Is that the hill you’re really gonna die on?

We have an expression in my field- “Regulations Are Written In Blood”

People don’t have fucking safety standards as a power trip, we have them because somewhere in the past, NOT having those regulations killed or maimed someone.

A lot of laws out there are bullshit- safety regulations sure as fuck aren’t. I have the literal scars to prove it.

[conspicuous-clown-car]

pushing boundaries

[paintingpuff]

When there's not enough official Outer Wilds merch so you make your own poster

[stale-trash]

Hi, of that's, can I please have yandere Jade x reader who tries to break up with her? (Headcanon). How would Jade react and what would she do in this situation?

I am assuming you mean Jade from Honkai Star Rail. If not, I'm sorry!!

cw: yandere/possessive behavior, very questionable behavior, implied violence, possible ooc

A/N: I have yet to play any of the quests she's in (╥﹏╥). I hope I did her justice!!

Bold of you to even assume you have the option to break-up with her. No matter how you end up in a relationship with her - willing or unwilling - your fate is sealed. 

Jade knows every aspect of her desires, from their depth to their origins. When she sets her mind to something, precious little can get in her way.

How she acquired you determines how she reacts to your ill-advised statement. If you are in a contract with her, she would take some time to remind you of your position - how truly nice you have it.  

It'd start small, like having you organize paperwork in the pawnshop where you'd get a first hand look at Lady Bonajade's dealings. Many desires are laid bare in front of you; some are honorable, others deplorable, and both are equally pondered upon by the lavishly clad woman. It’s hard to understand the logic behind most of the dealings, yet you remembered the time you occupied their positions - the way your desires slipped past your lips to be scrutinized by Lady Bonajade. 

You also get to see what happens to those who step out of line - more specifically, the bureaucratic aftermath. The written records of their punishment, outstanding debt, and next steps are so clinical regardless of the situation. It doesn't matter if they were fighting for their life or attempting to pull a fast one - there was no leeway. 

There was no reason for Jade to drape you in expensive fabric and opulent jewels. There was no reason for Jade to have you by her side doing menial tasks. There was no reason for Jade to suffocate you in her cold embrace and colder favor.

There was no reason for Jade to treat you like a lover. All the contract specified in its convoluted wording was that you're hers to use as she sees fit. 

If you somehow aren't apologizing for your behavior and willingly accepting whatever humiliating punishment she has in mind within a week, Lady Bonajade has no problem pushing you further. 

You'd lose all of her "favor" slowly until you're nothing but another IPC grunt. You won't be in any threat of dying, but there are many things worse than death prowling the cosmos. Don't worry, it won't be anything Jade can't fix given the appropriate price. 

All you need to do is apologize, and beg for her favor once again. Of course, a benevolent woman such as her would be more than willing to reevaluate your contract - though, it is in your interest to note that this is a one-time offer. If you were to repeat this mistake again, the punishment wouldn’t be so light. 

If you aren't in a contract with her, that would change. This relationship wouldn’t just end because you will it. But she'll let you slip from her embrace for now.

Jade is not above dismantling every aspect of your life piece by piece until you come crawling back. You can choose how much is destroyed - your social life, finances, career prospects, or even the lives of your close ones - by walking back into that pawnshop of hers.

She doesn't ask for what you seek nor what you desire - those are irrelevant in the face of her own. No, she asks if you've come back to your senses, a pet name rolling off her lips oh-so-naturally as if she hadn't constructed your downfall.

A contract is placed in front of you, the written words melting together into an indecipherable mess. Her signature was the only legible word in the entire document, with a blank spot ready for your own. 

You may gain everything you've naively wished for many years ago with a few strokes of ink - insurmountable wealth, a lavish lifestyle, and a lack of mundane worries - but gilded chains are still chains.

[heelkenny]

Kota Ibushi casually attempts murder on his opponent and the ref - 8/25/2024

[aarontveit]

GRACELAND | S02E01 The Line

for @gingerpeachtea

[patheticpretending]

This song really reminded me of James for sum reason..... So I made this,,,

[bittwitchy]

Chica and her cupcake

[endlessthoughtsofafangirl]

-Preface to Call to Arms 呐喊 by Lu Xun, written in 1922

[togglesbloggle]

I get nightmares, sometimes.

I know specifically where they come from. Second grade. My elementary school would gather kids up in the cafeteria and read some short-ish book to a large-ish crowd. I don't know why they did it that way instead of the classroom; it might have been some kind of after-school activity instead of during normal hours. The circumstances are pretty vague to me, this long after the fact.

I don't remember the title of this particular story either, or any of the names of the characters, most of it's long since lost in the fog. I was probably a bit bored for most of the reading. The book was a pretty generic little thing, until it wasn't. There was this caterpillar, it wanted to be a butterfly, a convenient and kid-friendly shorthand for overcoming obstacles to self-actualization through friendship and wisdom. One of the more common allegories out there.

But anyway, what made it weird was, the author decided that the catharsis of becoming a butterfly was a bit too straightforward to carry the climax of the story all on its own. So instead, most of the other bugs- the ones, I have to assume, that represented the forces of conformity and social pressure, or whatever- all became envious of the butterfly's ability to reach the sky (or sun?). When they saw the beautiful butterfly soaring through the air, in a rage they all started climbing on top of one another, and forming a big teeming pile of bugs, each one trying to get just a little bit higher, demanding to touch the sky just like the butterfly did. It became a giant, squirming mass, larger and larger until the inevitable occurred, the bugs at the bottom of this horrific mass were crushed, and the entire thing collapsed to its inevitable doom. The butterfly, armed with wings of its own, flew onward to the sky.

It's a little hard to pinpoint exactly what these nightmares are about, in a symbolic sense. They're about the anxieties of social conformity and peer pressure, certainly; my recurring fears of being molded by the community around me in to compliant and useful forms without consideration for my own happiness. But they're also about hierarchies and the meaning of social power, and even about conformist pressures in epistemic and ontological frames. It sort of slips from one analogy to another, untethered. It's a basal, animal fear that gets carried forward to many walks of life, both practical and philosophical, one that takes the particular form it does just because that story happened to be the first thing to hit this fault-line of mine at the right angle and crystalize my fears in to something I could understand.

On those nights when I find myself trapped in that pile, buried under the weight of hundreds of bodies, forced to crush the victims below me and claw my way through the airless, squirming heat and death of it all, the analogies don't really matter so much. Sometimes the beings around me are humans, sometimes they're all bugs, sometimes I am too, but always it's just about the simple, awful terror of living in that world of flesh. Things that might once have been fellow-travelers, trapped underneath and above and on every side with no room to move. When the agonizing pressure bearing down on you drives through your body without interruption, and you become an instrument that empowers and transmits that same violence to the animals that you're crawling over, with no relief from the pain except to drag somebody down from above you and get just a bit higher. Suffocating, always suffocating, gasping hot breaths where nothing's left to breathe.

But it is very potent grist for any number of metaphors, that's why I keep dreaming the damned thing. And it's not at all uncommon to be moving through my normal, waking life and find myself in circumstances that trigger this fear. I can always feel it coming on with that vague sense of suffocation, usually even before I understand consciously that I've found myself in one of those situations.

Being in the crowd at a sports stadium will usually get me pretty bad, of course. Driving in traffic does it sometimes, a little. But the merely physical crowds are pretty tolerable in the short term. Being at a protest or political rally is much worse; chanting with a crowd is more likely to trigger these nightmares than just cheering with one, because chants are semantic. More buy-in, you see? You have to conform with your ideas as well as your body.

It's there in more abstract ways as well. If I'm in a chat group or social community that brings in an applause light (or shared enemy) that is meant to unify everybody and create a sense of shared identity using public consensus, it can get a little hard to breathe; I sometimes have to go hide in a private room during dinner parties, when they go in the wrong direction. I've avoided employment in big, mission-statement-y corporations my whole life, for much the same reason.

I know that there are people who find a great deal of joy and meaning in this stuff, in being a part of social movements and organizations larger than themselves. I don't mean to say anything objective about such preferences, this isn't even really about my considered opinions so much as the animal parts of me. But man, the animal in me is so frightened sometimes. So much of our world seems to be made of these ziggurats of flesh, teeming piles of human life all trying to reach for something divine by crushing the souls below.

I have, I think, mostly avoided the worst failure states of contrarianism; better not to let the crows dictate my opinions at all, even by inversion. And actually I do better living in large cities than you might expect. Modern city life is 'dense' in the sense that you're often near a few people at a time, but not often to the point of actually restricting movement. Merely having a loud upstairs neighbor doesn't trigger my phobias at all, and it's usually pretty trivial to have basic personal space; I suppose I might struggle in places like Manhattan or Tokyo, though. It's a marked part of my life, but not a disabling one.

And like I said, this isn't a philosophical or a moral stance per se, though it's clearly part of the 'state of nature' that's upstream of my ideological commitments. Mostly, I'm writing this out because I think a lot of people tend to be annoyed by the kind of separatism I reach for reflexively, and treat it like a threat or a form of dissent. Which I guess it sort of is; I and people like me are pretty bad at forming coalitions and doing that kind of important work in the polis. But still, I'm hoping that my nightmares can do a little bit of good on that front, by providing vivid and terrible imagery to help others understand subjectively what it's like instead of just rounding it off to an easy-to-dismiss "Reddit bro" or whatever Type Of Guy is common parlance on the internet at the time.

And I guess, also, I'd like to help communicate something of the beauty of the alternative- of being the butterfly, I mean. And to the extent that it's possible, to communicate the urgency that I feel in chasing tools and institutional patterns that can help people to build their own wings and fly through the open air. There are things that help us rise under our own power as individuals, without victims. Curiosity, creativity, patience, mutual appreciation; so many kinds of strength that don't demand sacrifices. And the greatest of these, I think, is the pursuit of truth, and the sincere desire to understand the structure and consistency of the world around us.

Failing all else, during this election season please have a little patience for those of us who fall silent or slip away instead of lending our voices to the chanting of the crowds, or who seem to care more about picking apart ideas instead of organizing around them, or who otherwise never seem to miss an opportunity to make ourselves the odd one out. There's power in numbers, and this is a moment when power is desperately needed; but I don't think you can touch the sky that way. The higher goals, the things that will allow us to transcend our present difficulties outright and to achieve something really great, are too far away and too alien to reach merely by stacking bodies or echoing the doctrines of the present. Hope comes as a stranger, and we need hope right now for the same reasons that we need power.

[m-kuprum]

I love the ocean. it makes me Think Of Things.

it made me think how it works in tma because, honestly, there's so much you can do with it.

it's deep, it's almost endless in a way, sometimes it's so very empty, you feel lost, not even know where is up. it is the vast

it's also choking. the water is everywhere, it embraces you from all sides, burying in tons of water, taking out your breath. it is the buried

it's unexplored. it's unexplained sometimes, there, where the light doesn't reach. it hides so many secrets, so many terrifying things. it is the dark

have you ever been in the open ocean? have you seen the unending waters? it's as lonely as it can get.

I wonder if I could fit all other fears here? the desolation with it's destructive nature, the corruption with a hundred crawling things on the ocean floor, the slaughter with all the myths about danger in the waters (or are they myths really)

it's all to say - I love the ocean guys :)) I think it's nice!! come on, the water's warm!

- a.m. kuprum

[idyllic-affections]

hello.

pantalone w/ a younger sibling!reader (or older.... but that changes the plot slightly!) who runs the most popular chain of casinos in teyvat. shockingly, pantalone doesn't chide or chastise them or look down upon them for their choices. he encourages it, actually.

the house, his darling younger sibling, always wins. and his rivals always wind up in further debt because of them <3 even if they lose, ultimately, they still win. it's a fucked up game rigged in their favor, but really, is that not how all casinos work?

he can't be mad that they're supporting him the only way they know how... well, it's not the only way they know how, but they're supporting him with what they're best at. and he can't really be mad, not really--every time he looks at his sibling, he is reminded of how they really are cut from the same cloth as him.

[faker-aus]

don't you hate it when your brother tells you everything will be fine and the world won't be taken over (by a disease that sprouts vines from your body when you're stressed and wraps around your entire body until it reaches your face and suffocates you so it can feed off your body's nutrients), but the vines growing from his ankles make it clear he's bluffing