#freddys in space ref

[davidthephoneguy]

Welcome to CD's list of Canceled and Unfinished projects! :D

First we got the canceled ones Part 2

These go from oldest to newest

Gameboy Who Cried Wolf

This was an oc story in which I was attempting to making a non fandom oc comic. The storyline involved two main characters named Daniel who had a GameBoy for a head and Julias who was a werewolf but had to try and hide it from Daniel and everyone else due to werewolves in this world were hunted to extinction. There was a bunch of other monster types existed n stuff like that. Only made a few artworks of it. Canceled due to lack of motivation and I felt like I was forcing myself to do something I didn't really want to. Storyline was also non-existent and yet confusing.

Moon Base Freddy's au

Can't say a lot on this one's reason for existing other then it was heavily inspired by the song The Fine Print by Stupendium. I drew a few artworks for it in some privated live streams. Basically the whole au was a space capitalist dystopia in which all the employees were owned by the company, oh yeah also the restaurant was a moon base that they lived in. Canceled due to not really having anything to do with Freddys, it just sorta had a Freddys mask on. Also lack of motivation which tends to kill a lot of my ideas.

Floral Flurry

Not much to say on this one either, didn't have much to it either. Was another attempt at making a non fandom project that died very quickly. Had help from @/systemfailuretpd for the designs. The storyline was pretty basic being about a parasite plant that learns empathy from its new host and has to go back and fix what it did with its past host. Canceled due to just not really wanting to work on it, was kinda boring and felt too cutesy and simple despite one of the characters previously being basically a genocidal dictator.

Dr Surus' Experiments

Another oc story, this one was about a Dr Frankienstien type who would bring people (several of my oc's) back to life as basically zombies for fame. The story was mainly about David, Jannette, Stevm and another oc that I can't remember rn. Their whole deal was going to be talking about the ethics of bringing someone back to life and how they can't give consent. It was planned to be my next big thing that I was gonna reveal in the animation I'm still working on. Honestly given my track record I would not have been able to convey the messaging very well. Canceled due to lack of interest and generally loosing motivation to work on it.

Pet Shoppe Cats

Another oc story comic that was meant to be a non fandom project. It stared two main characters named Felix and Chip, Chip was an immortal parental figure to Felix. Both were half self inserts and sorta didn't do much. They worked at a pet shop together as they were both animal hybrids which was mostly a trans allegory but despite that I didn't really focus on that with the story being a slice of life thing about them just working at the pet store with not much else happening. I made a few panels and character sheets but not much. Canceled for pretty obvious reasons, was boring and lacked focus. Art style was also just not fitting to my style and i was just sorta forcing myself to not draw something cutesy which my style cannot break from without lookin really odd. Basically I was trying to make myself do something I can't do.

Aaaaaand that is the end of Part 2 my fellows!

A lil shorter then the first one due to me removing a few as upon looking at them again they would be rift content.

The final part will be the unfinished ones on the verge of being canceled so their fate is very up in the air.

[toxifoxx]

I don't remember if you've ever shown your Cassidy design! If you haven't, I'd love to see!

cassidy? who's cassidy? AH!!! THE VENGEFUL SPIRIT!!!!!

[dasketcherz]

thought i'd share my thought process for this fun lil piece / outfit in full display that i whipped out for beckory on valentines cuz i really had a lotta fun making it <3

OKAY first off, big thanks to @leaky-heart for helpin me gather some really cool outfit refs and for lending me resources where I can find a ref for bonnie's guitar in a 3d space. Thank you bestie, yar a life saver <3

Second, @/littleleaflings' jacket—goated af, will never stop gushin bout it aaaaAAA <3

Okay so looking at freddy & bonnie's designs—i am in love with how their dominant and accent colors are opposite of each other like a yin and yang situation. So i absolutely tried to incorporate that when rearranging the palette unto beckory's outfit

Fronnie's colors arent the only contrasting elements about them. Aside from their earrings, even their symbols are a pair—i love how freddy's is a lighting bolt but he is also associated with stars on the side cuz of his branding. While bonnie's is a star but he also has lightning bolts on the side (the purple accent in his fit) to match freddy

And to sprinkle a bit of beckory flair, i put stripe lines across their pants (if you look back on my ref sheet for the squad, the three amigos all have stripes somewhere in their fits, i purposely designed that to be their thing) just to also unify the patterns from their top

i gave tony a scarf to match greg's bow tie accessory. Its a combo homage to bonnie's headband and bunny ears in a way (cuz the ribbons on its ends look like droopy rabbit ears) i gave them gloves to compensate being unable to add punk bracelets on em cuz it would be too much for the overall look (same logic applies to the star shades, its to match with the top hat)

Also this was such a pure coincidence but i also realized beckory wears their fazwatches in the same placement as fronnie wears their earrings on. That actually makes me very happy, i think its a really cool coincidence

And as yall can see, Greg's jacket initially had stars on his sleeves (like it does in the ref), but i decided against putting it in the final cuz im startin to think it might look cluttered and hard to read from afar and tbh, I really liked how the translucent sleeves turned out... I didnt want the star pattern to cover it up lol

And thats pretty much it, thank you coming to my ted talk!! <3

if youre interested to see more of my art process compilation like this you can check over on my ko-fi page, you can support me by buying me a latte cuz I am planning to post more exclusive stuff like this over there in the future so I hope yall look forward to that! I deeply appreciate yall and thank you so much in advance!!

[puhpandas]

heres something interesting i noticed about the ruined designs! each ruined animatronic designs of the original evil 3 of SB all have parts of their design that kinda recreate something recognizeable from their original looks.

chica has a trash bag in her middle to make up for the broken space so it appears she still has her light pink dark pink leotard look. she also has orange/yellow melted cheese on her mouth to represent her beak. the cheese also fills in the gaps with chicas torso to help aid the complete leotard look i mentioned earlier

roxy has a lot of attention brought to her green strand because it stands out and is recognizeable as roxy. she also has red wiring on her arm to make up for her lack of shoulder pad, and red wiring on the left side of her torso to create the illusion of her shirt, and on top of that the broken plastic on her torso piece resembles the star pattern on her shirt. her pelvis is also singed from the fire in SB and is red to resemble her clothes

monty is the most far gone from his original personality in his design. the fact that hes only half of an animatronic is enough but also they brought attenton to his mowhawk because its blaringly monty. they also made some parts of hid endoskeleton a lighter rusty color to resemble his underbelly color

my point after all of this is comparing all of these design decisions to ruined Freddy

with this design, they removed the two most recognizeable things about freddy: his lightning bolt and his face. his head is completely gone, which is a big deal, and the blue lightling bolt is almost completely ripped off.

they chose to stick with fun FNAF 4 refs with ruined freddy with the lack of a head and stomach mouth, and i think that its genius. the callbacks are cool and all, but i think the fact that they removed what makes Freddy look like himself from this design really hammers in how its NOT freddy. our freddy is canonically somewhere else outside with Gregory and Vanessa. this Freddy is only a shell of ours and it shows with how unrecognizeable it is.

with the others, they designed them so you can still see that even after all this damage theyre STILL themselves. but sith Freddy, they remove everything recognizeable he had before, because it ISNT him.

youre not supposed to see him as same old freddy and they removed what makes him himself from this design and on top of that, they gave us cool early fnaf references and also made the one safe place for Gregory in SB super dangerous looking. i just think SW are geniuses thats all

[nutria--oscura]

lets talk about heaven!

~spoilers for s2 ep41~ (its 11pm help)

ninjas and drag queens

lincoln m kicks <3

normal kick oaks oakicks o'kicks <3

"when scary grows up she wants to open a french bread shop, because its all about the pain" multilingual jokes my beloved<33

stanley parable ref from will <3 YESSSSSS i am so normal about ythat game

"a triad of pain" "3 french bakeries?" MULTILINGUAL JOKES MY BELOVED <3

"i look for the thrill of the hunt: thats the new personality link has" how far link has come

DUDE YES

santa?

DEMON HELL SANTA HELL YEA

"we'll be meeting again, if not this season then in fan-canon"

"heh" link imitating taylors vocal stims(im calling them stims cause they are to me!) <3

hermie being a vital team member as usual <3

love when freddie gets to just go off and anthony allows his plan

"heh" (link's version) pt2

"as a woman, im used to dexterously avoiding animated hands" i-

"oh american dad must be so conflicted" "yea,american dad works for the government. anthony, american dad works for the government." "give me a second" "anthony" "anthony" "anthony" "anthony" "anthony anthony" "anthony" "american dad he works for the cia" "yea" "yea yea" "so what is american dad gonna do, anthony?" "yea well the first thing you-" "anthony" my fav bit (/hj)

"bad girl time" proceeds to (try and) do some horrifying shit-

"i thought we had a moment" "i- did we?"

RON RON RON RON RON RON RON R O N

DOG? is it rogue- ITS ROGUE!

RON AND ROGUE <3

YES BETH

ANTHONY DONT YOU DARE THREATEN ROGUE

"yes, he hasnt killed... that many... people"

above space?

wait so heaven does exist? wait what-

BIBLICALLY ACURATE ANGLE? FUCK YEAAAAAAA

"sorry we had to beef up security ever since a catholic priest got into heaven" WOAHOHOHOH- HOLY SHIT

"i got here by faking my own death, but i faked it so good that i actually died" have i ever told yall how much i absolutely LOVE ron stampler?

"where do we go when we die?" "roll perception" if only-

ron and scary <3

In conclusion:

"im sorry for your loss, scary" "well, its not really my loss, so, im sorry for your loss. its- its not my loss" "well, in that case, im sorry you dont realise that it is your loss" OUCH-

terry jrs not in heaven :( (he said bitch in s1)

DUDE? oh bby-

their coping mechanisms- i (a teen) feel called out

give erin a break

"i remember a box in tennessee" "only ten i see"

GOD? oh, jerry!

"you have to find powerful memories between fathers and their children, and you can take some of the daddy magic from those memories and then store it in like a jug, and when you have enough of that I can make the potion" does it have to be their memories? if so they might be kinda screwed

SIDE EYE

"although hmm" <- erin about sparrow being normals father

FIND THE GRANDDADS‽ HELL YEA

SEE TERRY JR AGAIN

darrys dead :(

SPARROW AND HENRY HAVEN'T SPOKEN IN A WHILE

HENRYS ALIVE <3

HEAVEN HEIST-

Rogue

[thecreaturecodex]

Brainchild

Image © Paizo Publishing, accessed at Archives of Nethys here

[I mentioned earlier that Bestiary 3 is my favorite of the PF2e main monster books. The brainchild is part of the reason why. I was going through the As and Bs with a fair bit of enjoyment, but this is the first monster in the book that made me sit up and take notice. I’ve streamlined and regulated the urban legend ability a bit more than the PF2e version, which states that the same brainchild might have different abilities in the same combat against different characters! That’s a lot of bookkeeping, so I wanted to make it a bit easier to play. I also expanded the types of spell-like abilities it could have access to. So if you want to make Candyman and have him summon swarms of bees, or give a brainchild Freddy Krueger’s nightmare ability, you can.]

Brainchild CR 11 CE Aberration This humanoid creature appears as a twisted, shadowy hag, her grin filled with sharp teeth and her claws perpetually blood-stained.

A brainchild is an urban legend come to life. In places where fears run high, especially where the boundaries between the Material and Shadow Planes are thin, any mysterious death or unexplained sighting might inspire the creation of a brainchild. No two brainchildren are alike, and they may take humanoid, bestial or stranger forms. Most people in a community haunted by a brainchild believe the creature to be a fiend, an undead, a monstrous beast or some other more tangible entity. As stories expand and rumors spread, the same brainchild may even take on new appearances or abilities.

Because of their disparate legends, no two brainchildren fight with exactly the same strategy, but there are some common themes. A brainchild’s most powerful attack is an illusory weapon of some kind, a signature move that inflicts mental, not physical damage (although it may certainly resemble a gout of flame, a hyperextensible claw, or some other more mundane weapon). They prefer ambush and slaughter to a straight up fight, attempting to kill the weakest seeming enemy at once with a phantasmal killer spell. Enemies that recognize that a brainchild is a mental creature can use that to weaken the monster, disbelieving its abilities until it is a shell of its typical power.

Areas haunted by a brainchild tend to attract other monsters. Fear-obsessed fey such as bogeymen and meenlocks are drawn to a brainchild the way a moth is drawn to a flame. Popobawas love brainchildren as if they were literal children, and try to bring them into existence in a community by hiding their own presence. All of these added horrors tend to reinforce a brainchild’s existence, as the stories get blurred together and the reputation of the region as monster-haunted increases. The only way to permanently destroy a brainchild is to convince everyone living in the area that it truly is dead. Most brainchildren accumulate rumors of their weaknesses—a particular sword can slay one, they can only die if a specific song is sung over their fresh body, etc. Some of the most dangerous and powerful brainchildren are those that return after a long absence. When an old diary is read or regional folklore is collected, a brainchild may be called back into existence, and the means to put it down again may not be as well remembered.

Brainchild              CR 11 XP 12,800 CE Large aberration Init +9; Senses darkvision 60 ft., Perception +18 Aura frightful presence (100 ft., Will DC 25) Defense AC 27, touch 15, flat-footed 21 (-1 size, +5 Dex, +1 dodge, +12 natural) hp 136 (16d8+64) Fort +11, Ref +10, Will +13 DR 10/cold iron; Immune cold, death effects, disease, fear; SR 22 Defensive Abilities persistence of memory, undetectable Offense Speed 40 ft., fly 40 ft. (good) Melee 2 claws +15 (1d8+4 plus bleed), bite +15 (2d6+4 plus bleed) Ranged illusory weapon +16 (8d6+7) Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft. Special Attacks bleed (1d6) Spell-like Abilities CL 11th, concentration +18 (+22 casting defensively) At will—ghost sound (DC 17) 3/day—dimension door, phantasmal killer (DC 21), sending 1/day—cone of cold (DC 22) Statistics Str 18, Dex 21, Con 18, Int 15, Wis 16, Cha 25 Base Atk +12; CMB +19; CMD 35 Feats Blind Fight, Combat Casting, Dodge, Great Fortitude, Improved Initiative, Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Skill Focus (Bluff) Skills Bluff +25, Fly +22, Intimidate +22, Knowledge (local) +17, Perception +18, Perform (oratory) +19, Sense Motive +15, Stealth +16 Languages telepathy 100 ft., truespeech SQ urban legend (bleed, blindsense, cone of cold, DR/cold iron, frightful presence, immune to cold, SR) Ecology Environment urban or any land Organization solitary Treasure standard Special Abilities Illusory Weapon (Su) As a standard action, a brainchild can make an attack with an illusory weapon. Treat this as a ranged attack with a range of 100 feet and no range increment. A creature struck takes d6s of damage equal to ½ the brainchild’s HD, plus the brainchild’s Charisma modifier (8d6+7 for the average specimen). This damage is typeless, but creatures immune to mind-influencing damage are immune to this effect, and the illusory weapon is treated as a mind thrust III spell for the purposes of interacting with mental barrier and similar effects. Persistence of Memory (Ex) A brainchild is restored to life 2d4 days after it is slain, unless everyone in the community it haunts believes it to be truly dead. Undetectable (Ex) A brainchild is immune to divination spells and effects that would detect it or determine its alignment or other auras. It is not immune to divination spells and effects that deal damage, such as mind thrust spells. Urban Legend (Su) All brainchildren have a suite of abilities, based on what people believe about them. A brainchild may choose from any of the following abilities, and may take multiple abilities of the same type as long as they do not cancel each other out (for example, two immunities).

An additional natural weapon that deals damage as normal for a creature of its size

All natural weapons deal an additional 1d6 points of damage. This damage may be acid, bleed, cold, electricity, fire, force, negative energy or sonic damage.

Damage reduction 10/cold iron or DR 10/silver

Spell resistance equal to 10  + CR

Immune to an energy type or school of magic

A 5th or 6th level spell usable as a spell-like ability 1/day, or a 3rd or 4th     level spell usable as a spell-like ability 3/day

Blindsense or tremorsense 60 ft.

Frightful presence (100 foot radius)

A brainchild may have a number of abilities equal to its Charisma modifier (+7 for the average specimen). A brainchild may take an 8th ability if it also takes a vulnerability to an energy type. As a standard action, a character within 100 feet of a brainchild may attempt to make a Perception or Sense Motive check, opposed by the brainchild’s Bluff check. If it succeeds, it treats the brainchild as if it doesn’t have one of its abilities (of the character’s choice) for 24 hours. If it fails, it cannot attempt to disbelieve that same ability for the next 24 hours. During that time, that character can spend a standard action to aid another character’s Perception or Sense Motive check against the same ability and grant them a +4 bonus on their skill check to disbelieve.

[darktapufifi]

Blog Directory

~{ ☆ About Me ☆ }~

Hiya there everyone, my name's Fifi! I use They/Them pronouns and I enjoy storytelling, creating characters, and making art.

I enjoy multiple fandoms and post whatever I feel like on my blog, some of these fandoms include;

Undertale

Five nights at Freddy's

Poppy playtime

OneShot

Cuphead

Many others (that ive most likely rambled about but forgor)

~{ ✧ For any more info about me or commissions, check out my Carrd ✧ }~

Commission status》 Open — Commission post - <3/4 Slots Open>

Ask box status》 Open

When making asks though please clarify who/what your asking about please ^^

Side Blog(s)》

@phobophobia-au (Undertale AU)

@fazbear-adventure-park (FNAF AU/Re-write)

@silly-critters-01 (Smiling Critters OC group ask blog)

@forests-fabled-stage (Smiling Critters AU blog)

~{ ✧ Navigation Below ✧ }~

~{ ☆ Personal Tags ☆ }~

Art / Work in progress》 #DarkTapuFifiArt

Writing / Stories》 #DarkTapuFifiWriting

Fanart》 #DtfFanart

Asks / Annon Asks》 #DtfAsk

~{ ☆ Masterlist ☆ }~

Worlds》

A Tale of Sirens & Pirates》 #AToS&P — Worldbuilding

(SRAU/SCAU/CSAU - By: @onyxonline) — Ourea Planet Information - Ourea UnVale Info - Squad K.J.-05 - Shitpost Pt.1 - Shitpost Pt.2 - Shitpost Pt.3

Smiling Critters: Forest Fables》 #SC: Forest Fables —

Characters》

Marshmallow — Ref Sheet

Persona — Lore - Undertalesona

Friend Art》

My Hero Roleplay — Faye, Robbie, Hestia

Fanart — ItzShark - (SRAU) Shitpost Pt.1 - (SRAU + SCAU) Shitpost Pt.2

Fan Content/AU OC's》

Space Riders & Spellcasters ( By: @onyxonline ) — SRAU SillyBilly Bio - SRAU Gala sneak peak - SRAU Gala finished - SRAU Uniforms & info - SRAU Common occurrence pt.1 - Ourea Planet Information - Ourea UnVale Info - Squad K.J.-05

~{ ☆ Credits ☆ }~

Sunset Gradient Divider》 Cafekitsune

[ladyshadowsblog]

♡ .° Pinned post time! .° ♡

Edited/updated as of November/26/24

Taken by @imboredcrystalixx

🖤 9/24/24 💜

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Pfp by @truelazymaker (I absolutely love it! Go follow em or I will eat your cookies while your not looking)

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Fandoms:

• Cookie Run Kingdom (Current hyper fixation)

• Poppy Playtime (Smiling critters mostly)

• Five Nights At Freddy's

• Heaven Official's Blessing

• Bendy And The Ink Machine

• Mcfnafverse (kinda???)

• Hermitcraft (Minecraft)

• Life series

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Name: Shadow, Shadlin, either or is fine

Tho most of you know me on here as the parent of Midnight Dreamer and or my blog name

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Pronouns: They/Them

My blog was created much before I came out as non-binary so the Lady part in my name isn't very reliable anymore

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Facts:

I'm an artist, tho that may be already very clear from any of my posts.

I am a content creator, those who follow me from twitter Hi, that goes to you as well Bother.

Like many may assume even from looking at Dreamers lore and such, I myself am gay. Pansexual to be exact!

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•~ShadLin~• stuff (aka online persona):

My online persona Ref sheet (aka •~ShadLin~• ref sheet)

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Cookie Run Kingdom Au:

Here is the link to my CRK Au Ask Blog

Go wild keep things Sfw, don't be an ass. Yes you guys can ask Blueberry Cream stuff as well

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Extra!

For anyone who may be interested, here are other ways to find me. Yes I have a discord server

Link to my Twitter (Will not be posting my art there anymore)

Link to my Blue Sky

Link to my Discord Server

Link to my YouTube

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Dreamer Designs!

Main design

Savior Au Design | Au belongs to OnyxOnline

Space Riders Au design | Au belongs to OnyxOnline

Pre hour of joy Space Riders design | Au belongs to OnyxOnline

Spellcasters Au design | Au by OnyxOnline

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Commissions: Closed

I'm still quite young, so I do not have a lot of ways of currently making money from online payment. Tho my commissions are closed for many reasons, me being young is only one of them

I am willing to do art Collabs tho

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I look forward to seeing you all and chatting, and posting my interests as well!

[thecourtjester12]

Hey there!! Your SS here 🎅❄️ I just wish to double check a few things on your JDCAU designs if that's alright!

1. Their hands: they have a total of four fingers in their refs, and I just wanted to make sure that's the right amount 🫡

2. Does Sun's upgraded design still have the ruffle collar?

3. Moon has a silver sun pin on their cravat which reminded me of the gold one he receives from Roxy in their bday fic! Is it okay to color that as gold as a reference to it? 🩵💛

4. The pin on Moon's hat! I noticed you mentioned it's a trans fem flag in another au, but what is it for your JDCAU? (Sorry if this is answered in one of the fics!! I haven't read through all of them yet 😅)

And if you think of anything important about them that you want to make clear I would love to know!! Been having lots of fun reading and working on your gift so far!! Hope your day has been well, and thank you for your time!!

Hello!!!

Was a bit surprised to see this, seen a few others getting and sending anon asks for Secret Santa wasn't sure if I would get one (And it seems I have! How exciting :3)

Onto your questions!

I do tend to draw them with 3 fingers (plus the thumb) it's just stylistically easier to draw usually >~< But I do draw them with 4 fingers and a thumb sometimes especially for ASL, so it's completely interchangeable! :3

2. Yup! He kept the ruffle its just…generally covered by his rays whenever I draw him XD Moony also still has his ruffle, they sometimes wear it instead of the cravat (Sentimentality and familiarity, he also has their old hat for this reason!)

3…..eheh…ya…umm…that's just me misremembering what color it was, the one in the refs is supposed to be the one from Roxy I just mixed up the color >~< So…It technically is supposed to be gold! Oopsies…I shall fix that on the refs XD

4. The pin on JDCAU Moon's hat is a 'Monty in space' pin from Monty! Since he's a fan of 'Freddy in space' Monty gave them one of himself XD I just…never really draw it properly for a ref so…here you go! And one of my other Moon's (Moo) is from J-TOL which is set in the same universe as JDCAU but is just the other plex location in the AU (I enjoy referring to the 2 AU's as my JAu's XD) So Moo is the one with a trans fem flag on their hat!

Anything else….hmmmm…Only thing I can really thing of is if you want to dress them up at all in stuff, Asides the Earrings from Roxy you can go with whatever! (but stuff like suns, moons, stars, clouds, rainbows are very his style) same goes for stickers since I don't have very many specifically stated!

And I know i have a good handful of items listed they have (clothes, accessories, lil gifts and hobby items in their room) and most don't have any references, so…if you need refs for anything like that just send in another ask and I'll get you the refs you need should you need any!

And if you end up dressing em up for Sunny masc or fem styles work! But for Moony masc or androgynous no fem for them please! :3

And just AHHHHHHHH omgoodnesssssss I can't believe you've been reading my stories >-< Makes me really happy to hear you've been enjoying reading them and what you're working on!!! I'm super excited to see what you make! And I hope your day has been good as well!!!! <3

[caltropspress]

FIELD NOTES STRAIGHT FROM THE GLUMS OF NEW JERUZALEM: Fatboi Sharif + noface's Preaching In Havana

[I played the Preaching In Havana cassette on a Panasonic Portable AM/FM Stereo Boombox Model #RX-F9 (manufacturing date circa 1988) at nine predetermined locations around the state of New Jersey—1-2 songs per site location—over several weeks in February and March 2023. Each song was played a minimum of three times (“Notice parables of three in every other inference”). The boombox was battery-powered and preferably set atop a natural surface. No GPS was used to navigate to the sites; a superannuated Rand McNally folding map was utilized. Disorientation was embraced.]

Here is a clad doom.

—Clark Coolidge, “After Morandi” (c. 1984)

Oblivion: walking the edge of insanity sideways…

—Orko the Psykotik Alien, NMS, “Invisible Oblivion” (2003)

All the world had gone unreal, mere foolish play—a shoddy carnival, a magic show; and remembering those who had died…those real severed heads, mouths working in the dirt, those real bodies stretched and torn apart on the rack…

—John Gardner, Freddy’s Book (1980)

[SITE REF. → Holy, Holy, Holy Altar; Mt. Holly, NJ. The Jersey Devil was supposedly chained to the altar within the stone vault. Holy, Holy, Holy is inscribed across the lintel. Track played: “Static Vision.”]

I ask at the altar [paraphrasing Gardner]: WHO IS THIS SAURIAN BEING WITH THE GOATISH SMELL, THIS IDIOT GOD? On “Static Vision,” Fatboi Sharif bemoans the “info drain”—a residual from the age of the Info Kill. Company Flow told us we MUST GET IN SYNC, and Bigg Justoleum led the way as the horns blowed. Behold, in a dark universe Sharif is chasing shadows.

Sharif speaks lowly of the “blood-sucking corporations,” clued into Marx’s diagnoses. “Kapital,” Killah Karl spews, “is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Succulent, right, you sucker MCs? We’re frightened into the factories as the “news footage funnel[s] fear.” It’s “death [we] watch”—our own. Our work is “converted into necessaries,” Marxy Marx and the Funky Bunch writes, “by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced.” Yum yum, you Dray and Skoob dum-dums. This is your feast of grotesqueries.

[NB:  I will be formatting Fatboi Sharif’s lyrics in a manner suitable to Clark Coolidge’s poetic lines in his 1967 chapbook entitled, confusingly, Clark Coolidge.]

KVU at the engineering deck, the control panel, the console—King Vision Ultra[-magnetizing], if you will—with ineffable efx. Super-scientifikal behind the boards, knob-turning and ear-worming like the Scientist that is/was Hopeton Overton Brown, almighty creator who Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981). Geng PTP with transformer coils cloying at your cortex, fair listener. His dub-infused engineering fits noface’s krunk-skronk productions and Sharif’s vertiginous vocals into deep-space and crypt-encasement, equally [EQ]. Cryptic, ’cause Sharif’s Sick Wid’ It meanings are entombed:

He’s hanging loose; forget the Smith & Wesson at the Smithsonian—they found a noose! What U See (Is What U Get) now in the xzibit. So raid the tombs of your own mind. Clark Coolidge, too: “Scratch of lines, on a vast hill or prone tomb. / Nothing buckles from them, no sneezed move” (from “After Morandi”).

I ain’t scared no more, Sharif shouts, dry-throated. He gargles holy water and spits. I can’t believe you, he hollers, as dubious as Du Bois staring down the Talented Tenth. Preaching In Havana is Fatboi Sharif penning editorials for The Crisis. Like Eric B. in ’88, he’s never scared. He seeks your AttenCHUN! Larger-than-life, like Bone Crusher on “Never Scared” in 2003: Now the plasma is oozing out of your cerebellum. Snort the bone dust or arrange the remains ritualistically. 

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In Charles Chestnutt’s 1899 story “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” narrator John and his wife are warned by old man Julius about clearing a tract of swampland for agricultural use. “Uncle Julius” regales them with a murder account from slave days about a “conjuh man” who could make “monst’us powe’ful goopher” and used a “mixtry” to exact revenge for his son’s death. Through craft and cunning, the conjure man transforms the murderer into a gray wolf and cons him into killing his wife (similarly duped and transformed into a black cat). By crafty design, Julius’s tale keeps folks off that desirable tract of land with fears of what haunts it. But John is undeterred. He finds no evidence of a wolf’s dwelling there, and if a wolf “had once made his den there, his bones had long since crumbled into dust and gone to fertilize the rank vegetation.” Instead, John discovers a “bee-tree” with an “ample cavity in its trunk” and “stores of honey within.” Julius’s haint warning, it turns out, is nothing more than a ruse to maintain “his monopoly” over the honey stash. “Poison honeycomb, / Sticky situation,” Sharif says on “John Hinckley.” 

[SITE REF. → Sybil’s Cave; Hoboken, NJ. An early 19th century natural spring excavated from the rock wall along the Hudson River; the cave was frequented by tavern-goers. Mary Rogers’ body was discovered in the shallow waters near the site, strangled and sexually abused, and the cave was eventually filled in. Track played: “The Hybrid.”]

I replied my brains in a hybrid of pain, Sharif raps on “The Hybrid,” his syntax clunking and skulking in ways that shouldn’t make sense but do. Let me explaaaaaiiiiin, he begs. Threats loom as “grenades surround ledge” and “PTSD particles” spread. (Cough into your elbow, won’t you?!) Don’t push; we’re close to the edge. Living on shaky grounds; let’s see if Sharif—like Rakim—knows the ledge. I’ve no doubt he does, but he still squeals like a teenybopper on the airport concourse:

“The eight-year-old with a pipe bomb by its privates” sounds like textbook projection. [Rapidly consults the DSM-5.] But let’s bring it back to A HYBRID OF PAIN. It’s Sharif’s term-in-ol-og-y, like Pharoahe Monch on “Bring It On”; he flows awkwardly and incisions are made into the [maggot] brain. Bring it on, motherfucker, bring it on—but also bring the pain like Meth. Sharif came to bring the pain hardcore from the [maggot] brain. We go inside his astral plane.

Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng! Fatboi Sharif awakens like Bigger Thomas with fantasies of furnaces dancing in his head. [...alarm clock clanged…spring creaked…voice sang…surly grunt sounded…tinny ring of metal…] TURN IT UP! BRING THE NOISE! A certifiable consonantal ruckus—the brawling br-, the stinging /n/, the queasy -ng. KVU’s Pain of Mind (2018) comes to mind, undeniably.

[SITE REF. → Gates of Hell; Clifton, NJ. The “Gates of Hell” are a network of sewage tunnels and underground passageways behind the old Erie-Lackawanna railroad tracks. Devil worshipers frequent the location. Track played: “Sunday School Explosions.”]

Sharif combines elements: “Science with cosmic plague and Hooked On Phonics” (it worked for me!). He steals a complete set from the flea market and magnetizes the cassettes and places slips of Scotch tape over the top slots—write-protection begone and be-damned. He can feel his “pulse risen” at the “silent treatment” he receives from the ferric formulation spirits he summons—a kiss of haunting hiss. He translates “postcards in Arabic” at the “NA meeting” prior to filming a reproduction of the Jets and the Sharks dance-fight as “Cronenberg’s last scene.” What results is a “war world ouija [that] got West Side Story.” Thus, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein get flayed and slayed on “Sunday School Explosives.”

I’m still haunted by Fatboi Sharif’s echoey Oh, I’m buggin’? from Gandhi Loves Children’s “I’m Buggin.” It comes to me in my sleep, like the Sandman (“Enter Sandman near banquet,” Sharif raps on “John Hinckley,” and we’re off to Never Neverland Ranch with all the Culkins in Jacko’s bed). Not a hypnagogic vapor wave—but the dissonant hatred of Nicholas Sandmann silently smirking at the ceremonial drum of an Omaha elder as Black Hebrew Israelites shout gay-bashy slogans in the background. “Cronenberg’s last scene” will be as body-horrific as all his previous ones. Sharif feasts on a naked lunch of flesh sandwiches while typing Burroughs-like cut-ups onto a scarab beetle typewriter. He snorts lines of minced and mortared-and-pestled Black Meat—the guts and entrails of Scolopendra gigantea. “Oh, I’m buggin’?” has become an earworm, and Fatboi Sharif is every poor child pulling up to the ER with a cockroach lodged in its ear canal. Ruptured tympanic membranes at every entrance, each exit. To borrow a neologism from k-the-i?, Fatboi Sharif breeds electrobugs.

[SITE REF. → Shell Pile ghost town; Port Norris, NJ. Named for its mountains of oyster shells, a WPA guidebook from 1939 described Shell Pile as “a community of about 1,000 Negroes living in wooden barracks erected on stilts over the salt marshes.” A pathogen known as MSX devastated the local oyster industry in the mid-50s, and the community never recovered. The shell piles remain. Track(s) played: “John Hinckley” and “Sugarcane Plantation.”]

In 1990, Tragedy Khadafi (née Intelligent Hoodlum) proposed we arrest the president (NB: Your mother’s buggin’—her mind slanted, he rapped). In 1992, Paris became a Bush Killa, delivering a bullet from the barrel of a Black guerrilla. In 1998, Non Phixion dropped “I Shot Reagan” and Sabac dragged First Lady Nancy into the crosshairs: “His wife’s the hostage, / Her body parts up in a grab-bag.” On “John Hinckley,” Sharif’s ode to POTUS-pistol whippings, he speaks of the “covenant grab-bag.” It’s a covenant signed by Tragedy, Paris, Non Phixion, and now Sharif himself (among many other signees—Chuck D comes to mind as he invokes the Honey Drippers’ nix-Nixon anthem and its foundational drum break on 1987’s “Rebel Without A Pause”: Impeach the president—pulling out my raygun). 

“John Hinckley popped that president,” Sharif raps, and he did it with a naked raygun (...throb throb…throb throb…)—a Röhm RG-14. Sharif rap-renders the scene into a 60-second assassination, and he can sympathize with Hinckley—both film buffs, fans of Taxi Driver (1976). Jodie Foster—the child-actor playing child-prostitute—turned into a child-bride in Hinckley’s obsessive mind. Hinckley’s single “We Got That Chemistry” is streaming on all DSPs—I’m searching the liner notes for the Sharif feature; a collab for the ages. 

For his assassination plot, Fatboi Sharif readies “gun fire sun visor” with “spinning Budweiser breath.” He’s funky cold medina, cold lampin’, and “coldstone hypnotic.” He opens the “seventh seal,” chopping and playing chess with Myka 9 and Max von Sydow in a seaside “fog of chronic.” This is Sharif’s “daily operation”—peep him on the cover of Gang Starr’s Daily Operation (1992). He’s there—amongst the messy mahogany table covered with money stacks, Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Black Man in America paperback, typewriter, and skull. He’s there—top-right, hiding behind the mounted boar’s head. He wears it like a mask. The illest brother when he gets his mic check.

He’s ready and willing to go underground—deep cavities and cavernous tunnelways:

After he goes for the headshot (like John Wilkes Booth with his derringer, like those old Rhymesayers cassette tapes…), Sharif’s weapon is a “soul glowing hidden in the briefcase.” The execution is the pulpiest fiction emanating an aura of Diaspora Problems.

In David Gordon Green’s 2000 film George Washington, the character George—young, strange, and Black—“had to be very careful never to get his head wet…”:

See, his fontanel was very, very, very, very soft. Like a baby’s head. And when he soaks it or itches it, it irritates his brain. He don’t like it, ’cause if somebody hit him in his head, he’d probably die.

As George and his group of mangy misfits fool around in a bathroom, another character, Buddy, pushes George and bangs his head against the wall. In retaliation, George pushes Buddy who slips and loses consciousness. When he comes to, blood begins to dribble from a crack in his skull and he ends up slumped in a urine-splashed stall—dead. “Everything’s blue in this world—all fuzzy,” Trent Reznor groans on Nine Inch Nails’ “The Downward Spiral,” “Spilling out of my head,” and from such a tiny little hole.

The character Nasia speaks with a Malick-inspired voiceover. Considering the unsettling tone and disquieting details of the film’s narration, Nasia’s name may as well be “Nausea.” Nas: I’m out for dead presidents to represent me. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Ronald Reagan, et al. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Nausicaä collects spore samples (like Ced-Gee collected Melvin Bliss records and transformed “Synthetic Substitution” into “Ego Trippin’”) and is eventually revived by Ohmu tentacles. Miyazaki’s ravaged world—his crushed-killed-destroyed eco-stressed landscape—is like Bliss sings: “Synthetic substitution has taken over this land, / There’s no one to blame but man.” Those monstrous Ohmu are roly-polies [Armadillidium vulgare] navigating digable planets. Oh, I’m buggin’?

In Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Kathy Acker’s “mysterious Mr Linker” rhetorically asks: “Where does culture come from? I will tell you. It comes from disease. All the great artists, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean-Paul Sartre—you must read Nausea in the French, in English it is nothing—have said this. They are aware how evil they are. They are aware this life is truly evil; due to this awareness, they are able to go beyond.” [Acker also depicts her protagonist Janey getting assaulted by a man whose “hands ran huge insects down (her) back.” Oh…I’m…buggin’?]

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Earlier in George Washington, Buddy paces a stage in some dilapidated auditorium (all the film's settings are ruinous—real Sharif video shoot environs) with a T-Rex mask on as he recites passages from the Book of Job:

All kinds of pests, like, all over its legs. Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me: When His lamp shone over my head...and by His light I walked through darkness: When I was in my prime: When the friendship of God was upon my tent: When the Almighty was with me: When my children were around me: When my steps were washed with milk...and the rock poured out for me streams of oil.

[SITE REF. → Venusian alien contact location; West Main Street; High Bridge, NJ. Howard Menger purported to bear witness to cosmic lifeforms on his property. Track(s) played: “1999 Hacker Worldwide” and “Parasite.”]

Let transmission commence. Fatboi Sharif bends and adjusts the rabbit ears antenna on “1999 Hacker Worldwide.” Through the snow and noise (talkin’ about static vision, folx) emerges a “televised child slave, / Live at 11” (later, on “Sugarcane Plantation,” it’s the “news at 12” when he’ll “crucify white Jesus” on a live-feed). The commercial break previews what’s coming up next: “Tonight we loot the church.” Yes, loot the church and the monastery, because you know now that the Dalai Lama leaves your boo-boo achin’ like Bambaataa and requests you suck his tongue. Gimme the loot, gimme the loot! Sharif’s a bad, bad boy, in the pitchdown death-voice of Kid Hood on ATCQ’s “Scenario (Remix)”—his opening salvo is a son’s cry as he was murdered just days after recording his verse shirtless in the booth [cut to footage of Sharif performing shirtless]. “He didn’t say hello or nothin’,” Q-Tip told The Source for Hood’s obituary, “he just started rhymin’.” Gimme the loot, gimme the loot! Anthony Iles sees “the suspension of the normal ordering” and “new and unforeseen relations” between objects and behaviors when we loot. “[W]hen looters use a mannequin leg to break a shop window to impose some asset relocation from below we are talking about media as impure means.” Sharif’s got the impurest means and the impurest thoughts.

The carnivalesque catastrophe of Fatboi Sharif’s mind unravels. You know the “economy collapsing” and “fi…nan…cial by…pass…ing”—all that hocus-pocus. [I’m shaping your brain like pot…ter…y, Monch says, his motor temporarily running low on power but only to deconstruct the temporality.] Sharif has access; he’s got the “skeleton key” as he danses macabre, as he speaks “open sesame,” pulling from Antoine Galland’s orientalist Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves (or his Sporty Thievz, but the tomb raiders and grave robbers ain’t getting nada from us). Open Sesame Street to hip-hop. See MC Lyte rock the stoop in her purple sweatsuit. Sharif riding side-saddle on Snuffleupagus with the subwoofer pumping KMD’s “Humrush,” Bert philosophizing Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā). (Oh, an empty place…a perfect place to practice the exciting art of humming.) Meanwhile, Sharif is on an expedition to “Woodstock 2030.” The brown acid warning still reverberates across space and time and he’s finger-crossed that there’s a few tabs left (the “final acid trip” he growls about on “5G Celsius Cell Tower”).

“1999 Hacker Worldwide” plays like Y2K paranoia—a glitch-hop ode to the millennium bug (Oh, I’m buggin’?). Kool Keith emerged as Black Elvis in 1999 and proceeded to get Lost in Space. The soundbombing of Common and Sadat X on “One-Nine-Nine-Nine” [...inch nails through each one of my eyelids, c. ’99] penetrated RealAudio players, and the Hi-Teknological production set the doom mood. On “Parasite,” Sharif “ride[s] a push on a Greyhound / Searching for a way out” with Dirt McGirt inflections. Behold a Pale Snuffleupagus.

[SITE REF. → VHS Walkway; Fort Lee, NJ. The original motion picture industry in America was located in Fort Lee, and in that spirit, a patio and walkway made up of VHS tapes surrounds a private residence. Track played: “Paging Dr. noface.”]

Fatboi Sharif has an ongoing appointment with his octagonecologyst, but Dr. Octagon isn’t answering his calls. Instead, he pages Dr. noface. And noface’s sonix are aptly described in Gardner’s Freddy’s Book: “Outside someone was again banging metal against metal. The sound was too irregular to be the work of a hammer, and the sound was sometimes loud, sometimes lighter, a mere clink.” noface takes the folk of “If I Had A Hammer” and filters it through his failed state fuzz. Peep him on the PTP cassette cover, his void-face hidden behind a Baphomet mask. He flexes his equilibrium—a sabbatic goat prematurely goated. He’s Black Phillip from Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), pacing his pen and passing you a ballpoint pen to sign your deal with the Devil. He doesn’t blink—redaction bars for pupils. “It was true that the Devil could sometimes read one’s mind,” Gardner writes, “that once he’d gotten into you there seemed to be no shaking him; but at least one could in some measure limit the monster’s conversation.” Sharif’s conversation with the listener knows no limits, though. For noface’s Baphomet cosplaying, Gardner’s Devil masquerades as a mule:

“What kind of fool are you, trying to block out the voice of the Devil with your fingers?” the mule scoffed. “Plug your ears with pebbles if it pleases you, and sing at the top of your voice to drown me out. I’ll still be heard!”

noface will still be heard as he activates the widening gyre (peace, Yeats) that is Preaching In Havana.

Furthermore, the album is a set of interlocking spirals—a helix, a hex. Spin yourself silly on a spiral staircase to Hell—ride a helicoid to the void. Listen as you’re yeah-boyee’d by the endless [eternal and infernal] echo of Flavor Flav—voices whirlpooling the River Styx. Eyes pierced by an unwound spiral notebook containing handwritten transcriptions of Malleus Maleficarum. noface’s productions aren’t beats; they’re dungeon bludgeonings. His loops are spirals, deranged and ceaselessly spinning out of control. A loop begins linear but soon goes labyrinthine. In Dante’s Inferno, his circles of suffering—circles and circles, oodles and oodles and oodles of o’s—from embryo to man and back again, form a downward spiral. Reznor razor-wire torture. “Slow it behoveth our descent to be,” the Italian in the Black medallion (no gold) writes. According to him, we have to acclimate “to the sad blast”—but I prefer to get dizzy from the disorientation. 

In an interview with Fatboi Sharif for The Next Movement podcast, co-host E. Fortson precisely sketches Preaching In Havana’s lineage to Divine Styler’s Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light (1992). On Preaching In Havana, she tells Sharif, it feels as if we’re granted access to his mind: “We’re hearing your internal thoughts, and we can witness how you’re processing them.” On Styler’s “Heaven Don’t Want Me and Hell’s Afraid I’ll Take Over,” the message blares like a Network nervous breakdown: “NEWS, NEWS, AND NEWS! MORE BLUESY NEWS!!!” Sharif adopts the mantle of the mad prophet of the airwaves.

Fatboi Sharif holds not a conch to his ear but a nautilus—a mollusk with musical musculature. What Bob James calls the “atmospheric orchestration” of “Nautilus” (1974) unravels as an infinite scroll for sample use—hordes of hip-hop producers synthesizing and submerging the oceanic depths Bob James chose to navigate. They abide by the spells Sharif proposes on “Sugarcane Plantation”: a “PCP posted, / Psychedelic relic, / Road atlas.” Their stems create helices of recorded sound—much like noface. Preaching In Havana devolves into a Wichita Vortex Sutra in an Allen Ginsberg mode, only to reveal the Beat poet’s affiliation with NAMBLA and how he squeezed my uncle’s thigh once at a book signing hoping for lemon juice to run down his leg.

Oh, the places you’ll go! Suessian spirals lead us to the Final Whorl Front. We link galaxy arms across the universe—needle our way through the Realm of the Nebulae. We crack the human genome with DNAlysis and hogtie James Watson in the process. Evocations of the inventor’s spring, of horrific histories like the lynch mob’s corkscrew used on Luther Holbert in 1904 in Doddsville, Mississippi to bore holes into his body and extract, in the words of the Vicksburg Evening Post, “quivering flesh.” On “Sugarcane Plantation,” Sharif is howling—he “yell[s] terrorist threats, / The coldest spirit, / In pig Latin” (emphasis on pig). His anti-rhymes coordinate with Lune TNS’s “Plantation Rhymes.” Pliny the Elder described comets as “knot[s] of fire” with an appearance that was “twisted like a spiral.” We’re fired up. Sharif’s got incendiary comments for daze, and each hits like a Molotov.

Sharif paints with a Tesla coil—streamer arcs and brush discharges. Voltage flashing from his cranium. As Kool Keith says, he’s “Eveready, like a battery—charged, / [He’s] worth the alkaline.” Ultramagnetic, indeed. Play Preaching In Havana backwards. Watch Fatboi Sharif perform: a human Fraser spiral illusion—hypnotic, fuck up your optics like ELUCID fucks up electronics. Misalignments and distortions. Ha, Sharif is sicker than your average. Can’t you see? Sometimes his words just hypnotize you. Or, as Archimedes wrote in On Spirals circa 225 BC:

I say that the area added by the spiral in the third revolution will be double of that added in the second, that in the fourth three times, that in the fifth four times, and generally the areas added in the later revolutions will be multiples of that added in the second revolution according to the successive numbers, while the area bounded by the spiral in the first revolution is a sixth part of that added in the second revolution.

Right? Right. (Oh, you buggin’?)

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Like the dark and droney ambience of Bobby Krlic’s Haxan Cloak moniker, noface fashions his own Excavation Musick, digging deep only to resurface, bedraggled and cloak tattered. Krlic (also noted for his role as an Ari Aster collaborator) described his first album as “a person’s decline towards death.” His follow-up was described as a “journey [to] a different plane.”

The 1922 silent film Hӓxan, directed by Benjamin Christensen [“hӓxan”:  Swedish for witch], plays like watching Fatboi Sharif perform live on mute. Christensen’s goal was to “throw light on the psychological causes of…witch trials by demonstrating their connections with certain abnormalities of the human psyche, abnormalities which have existed throughout history and still exist in our midst.” Such abnormalities exist—gloriously—on Preaching In Havana.

One of Hӓxan’s intertitles details “the terrible confessions” that can be “forced from [a victim] in less than a minute” by using the thumbscrew [tumskruv]. (The thumbscrew, naturally, being yet another spiral.) The brevity of the songs on Preaching In Havana have the same excruciating effect.

[SITE REF. → Bergwald Nazi Bund Camp; Federal Hill; Bloomingdale, NJ. The ruins of a Nazi Youth camp that was shut down by the FBI in 1941. The remnants of a stone cistern, storage silo, cabinets, and iron grates are still visible. Track played: “Nazi Needle Marks.”]

Outspoken about his adoration for Gonjasufi, Sharif channels his die-verse-ified voice often. We could compare his timbral offerings to Gonjasufi’s delivery on “Venom” from 2012’s MU.ZZ.LE. It’s not “singing” we hear, per se—it’s [sin]ging, it’s [singe]ing—transgressive, burning; a vicious and venomous flow. Sharif’s baritone [bury-tone] is throat-scourged. Liken it to the outro on Busta Rhymes’ When Disaster Strikes… (1997) where Busta screams and talks, stalks and fiends—“rap” as emceeing; “rap” as talking. Give me that ol’ “Preparation for the Final World[/Whorl] Front” religion. 

On “Nazi Needle Marks,” Sharif raps in “nauseous nasal chalk-line intervals,” to use his own phrase. The French Revolution comes for the Queen in b-boy style: “Exorcism Antoinette headspin.” The guillotine uprocks and downrocks until Marie’s dome rolls off the platform and into the crowd. Regan projectile vomits the greenest sticky-icky as she goes full Rock Steady on the 180-degree rotation. “Death of a salesman,” Sharif mutters with anti-consumerist ire. In Sharif’s looney-tune universe, Arthur Miller dicks down Marilyn Monroe before penning the final pages of his play—post-coital when he sends Willy Loman’s Studebaker speeding into a suicide machine. As for Marilyn, maybe it’s the “poison dart slumped her.”

Sharif says a prayer at the altar of the Beastie Boys’ prank-calling “Cooky Puss” (1983):

These pussy crumbs are making me itch! Sharif and the ill-communicating saboteurs are capable of making our skin crawl, not unlike El-P pontificating about how he “could suck a cookie out a pussy, no question” on Co Flow’s “Definitive.” Sick fux.  Before long, Sharif is back inhaling John Brown’s vaporizer and riding a white steed. He’s gonna “burn [the] village in search of [his] masterrrrr.” Torches, pitchforks, and hedge-shears in his holster. Fighting fire with fire to the point of self-immolation is a necessity for survival. Kathy Acker shows us what we’re up against:

One of the landlords burned down his building so he could collect the insurance money. Two families and one pimp were sleeping in this building when it burned down. The landlord sold the charred lot for lots of money to McDonald’s, a multinational fast food concern. This is how poor people become transformed into hamburger meat.

Or, as Sharif would versify it:

Ridin’ filthy-mangy-grimy-raunchy-dirty out of Rahway, bumping the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” in the lemon. Screaming, lung-top, with Jello Biafra: We ain’t trying to be police. “The Nazi showed his needle marks” like the NJ state trooper showed his “Blood Honor” neck tats on his driver’s license photo ID.

[SITE REF. → Ong’s Hat village; Pemberton Township, NJ. Deep in the Pine Barrens, a group known as the Moorish Science Ashram established an Institute of Chaos Studies in Ong’s Hat and opened a portal to another dimension. Track played: “5G Celsius Cell Tower.”]

On “5G Celsius Cell Tower,” the cell tower sprouts polystyrene branches and the drones surveil the 5G conspiracists—they wouldn’t dare. Sharif says things have become “ice storm hazardous,” with the soul-lift of Godfather Don—we’re talking about a hellofasong. Fever-inducing frequencies are emitted, so Sharif raps like he’s caught an ague—he’s “breaking atoms.” The cover of Main Source’s Breaking Atoms (1991), which includes a spiral-in-the-making comprised of protons, neutrons, electrons [read it in the tone of Prince Po’s insight, foresight, more sight from OK’s “Releasing Hypnotical Gases”—yes, hypnotical], flashes across our mind’s eye.

“Jacob’s ladder staggered on” as a symbol of numbskull persistence. Sharif trudges through the stagger grass [a man from the meadows], swaggering like Stagolee, and he’s stopping for an intermission to stream one of his fave films: Jacob’s Ladder (1990). His physical form atomizes as he hallucinates the rungs of Jacob’s ladder twist and deform and become a helix. (William Blake’s 1805 watercolor shows a spiraling ascent.) Sharif cannonballs instead into the Boogiemonsters’ “Old Man Jacob’s Well” (1994)—a well where souls dwell. “I got the cravings again of the wicked,” and child abductions are the only answer. Demented, sick, and vile. Climb Jacob’s jaundiced ladder from well-to-cell tower.

The temperature’s rising on the “5G Celsius Cell Tower,” and we’ve got our culprit for coronaviruses, microchip implants, and mind control. But what you’ve really got to be concerned with—many people are saying—is that havoc-causing Havana syndrome. Fatboi Sharif is here to get idiopathic for you idiots. He’s hunkered down at the U.S. embassy in Cuba while the C.I.A. (Criminals In Action) claims Fidel Castro’s corpse is responsible. Someone somewhere under some top-secret security clearance is whispering about Sharif, and his ears ring out with tinnitus intensity. Ours, too.

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By now you know Fatboi Sharif is an atrocity exhibitionist who’d have the PMRC’s panties in a bunch, an MC whose processional route is the Stations of the Crass. Just as Chuck D’s voice from “Bring the Noise” (Once again, back, it’s the incredible…) reverberates through time, Fatboi Sharif’s tone pongs within the popcorn walls of our mind [substitute diabolical for incredible, though]. His white noise machine is a gnash teeth-grinder, perfection for fist-fucking fascists ’til they see shuriken stars between their eyes. I’m reminded of the caustic words of upfromsumdirt—his poem “Orisha Obsidious”:

this embryo of dark / black space spiral / virile midnight swirling / this onyx wet and non-unctuous vaginal and oleaginous this / this magnetic venom rancid with non-white wonder / rancid with non-white vocabulary self-servile, reverse-transcendent - pagan and perversely reported with discarded veins throbbing in black omniscience / chews its own adventure

In the “Static Vision” video, Sharif wears a fencing mask like a soiled diaper, a MU.ZZ.LE on loan from Gonjasufi. Olaudah Equiano was familiar:

I had seen a black woman slave…and the poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink….I afterwards learned [it] was called the iron muzzle.

The muzzle Equiano describes is depicted on Gonjasufi’s album cover, albeit shaded and spectrummed. He and Sharif both rupture the iron muzzle with punctuated flashes of resistance, hence the cleaving periods [MU.ZZ.LE]—they’ve got the makings of an ellipsis.

[SITE REF. → Mary’s Tower; Flemington, NJ. A dilapidated edifice in a wooded area off a county road. “Mary” committed suicide in a third story bedroom and her red-eyed specter haunts the tower. Track(s) played: “Smells Like Autopsy” and “Fentanyl Firing Squad.”]

I’m gonna allow Kathy Acker to set the scene for “Fentanyl Firing Squad”:

We had heard that this rock band called THE CONTORTIONS was gonna play in a redneck town in New Jersey and the white head singer thought he was James Brown. The rest of the band would be too drunk to stop the rednecks from beating up Brown.

James Brown was crawling baby-style across the floor. The rednecks were jerking their cocks off in a corner. James Brown crawled up to the redneck's boot. The redneck, confused, jumped James. Everyone in the club started hitting each other. I heard cops' sirens. I ran.

Acker writes Blood and Guts in High School in blood and guts—smeared and splattered. (L7 tossed tampon tricks and theatrics. Find yourself hungry for stink.) Picture “pig” painted in blood on Sharon Tate’s white front door by the Manson Family—the recording location of NIN’s The Downward Spiral [“spiral,” motherfucker, spiral!]. Reznor seethes on “Piggy”: “Black and blue and broken bones, / You left me here, I’m all alone.” Tally two hog heads for the haram tableau:

Sharif surely strikes a vital nerve, proving he’s been the nastiest one since birth [auto/matic…]. He can “purple haze testify” to that—and with the Fuzz Face pedal helping him power through what nixed Hendrix: a puke puddle; axed down by Vesperax. “Smells Like Autopsy,” hmm? Not like Teen Spirit scrrrawled by Kathleen Hanna on Kurdt’s wall. noface detours through The Caretaker’s haunted ballroom. That must be the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of his [no]face.

↴

Poet Phillip B. Williams introduces a Black hauntology, one of creaky floorboards and box fans that whisper in their manufacturing of wind. Williams calls each haunting “a loop of existence.” In “Haunting, Blackness, and Algorithmic Thought,” an essay that appears in a 2021 issue of e-flux journal, Ezekiel Dixon-Román reminds us of Derrida’s insight that “in every being there is a haunting.” Dixon-Román sees possibility in this. He conceives an “operation of Black techno-conjuring [as] a technological force that has the potential to reroute and alter the logic of the system.” With Fatboi Sharif’s steady output of discursive, deviant deviations, you can’t tell me he isn’t the prime mover of such potentialities. It’s not all so gravitationally heavy, though, seeing as how Sharif floats and flits about with the wreckless abandon of Slimer.

ANEC[/ANTI]DOTE 1:

I wanted to completely unhinge the language and then see if I could put it, if that would make an energy that would then hook up in some other way, like a magnet, like resistance—poles pushing and coming together…. There wasn’t any system of structures. The space between words became very important. How close together they were…. [Y]ou know what loop-players are? You make a loop of tape and there are these tape machines that have one play-back head and a single drive-wheel and you can put a loop on it and it has a rheostat knob so you can change the speed. I was doing these experiments…. I put a couple of words, or even one word at first, one each on two loops and put them both on, and I’d vary the times. And I swear that I could see…in fact, I wish that someone would scientifically follow this up, it was interesting. Let’s say that you had “of       this”,—you had “of” on one tape and “this” on another, and you would change the times until they came closer together in time and farther away, and I swear that you could join and become a phrase, and one millisecond on either side of that they don’t, they’re disembodied, and I got fascinated with that. I had this thing, I made a tape out of it, where they went in and out of phrase with each other for a half hour period so you could follow this, and I thought, well, hey, that’s interesting…. You really began to feel there was a magnetic force in language.

—Clark Coolidge interview with FRICTION magazine, Number 7 (1984)

[sample pack from Clark Coolidge, 1967]

ANEC[/ANTI]DOTE 2:

For Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” (1979), drummer Stephen Morris sprayed an aerosol can of tape head cleaner into a microphone to produce a drum sound (that’s a KVU move if I’ve ever seen one). Morris nearly passed out from the fumes. Fatboi Sharif has timewarped and is in that recording booth as a willing huffer of chlorofluorocarbons. What he produces as a result is a babbling brook of jabberwocky jargons:

Sharif clearly audited classes at Clark Coolidge’s School of Disembodied Poetics—body-the-track training, if you will. His method isn’t just sheer madness. He takes rumors of “bad blood’ and infusions of syphilis to the face. He spins plastic bendy straws into gold but not before sucking a spiral of backwashed spit from his cauldron. Wu-Tang is for the children, but Sharif is here to scare the children with his fury and fairy tales. Just accept it. After all, “our brains been programmed for so loooong!”

Images:

Le Sabbat des sorcières, Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1508-10 (detail) | Holy, Holy, Holy Altar (screenshot, via YouTube) | The Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, 1981 (album cover) | Gates of Hell (screenshot, via YouTube) | Hooked on Phonics cassette set | Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 1984 (screenshot) | George Washington, dir. David Gordon Green, 2000 (screenshot) | Venusian alien contact location (screenshot, via YouTube) | Apple Lisa Workshop not accepting Y2K date | "The Sabbatic Goat" from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Éliphas Lévi (1856) | Drawing by Nikola Tesla showing stages in his evolution of the high frequency resonant transformer used in his Tesla coil (1899) | Haxän, dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922 (screenshot) | Carvel "Cookie Puss" TV commercial (1985) | Jacob's Dream, William Blake (c. 1805) | "Slave with Iron Muzzle," illustration from Souvenirs d'un aveugle, Jacques Etienne Victor Arago (1839) | Mary's Tower (screenshot, via YouTube) | Haxän, dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922 (screenshot) | Le Sabbat des sorcières, Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1508-10 (detail)

[laveenderdraws]

I redrew an old drawing of mine unintentionally one year from the original almost

[nachosforfree]

Why is Henry so bad at spotting red flags?

Any Charlotte headcanons?

How did Henry and William meet? How did they gain eachother's trust?

How did William get kids? Seriously this man looks like he gets absolutely NO bitches. Now Henry on the other hand...

Any Elizabeth headcanons?

1. He thinks he can make William a more um. socially acceptable person. He cant

2. I hc her to be the youngest in the emily family, and that she has her hair in space buns to match fredbear/freddy because "he's daddy's favorite so he's my favorite too"

3. I'm debating on if I want them to have met in college or if I want them to have been childhood friends. I kinda like the latter because I think it would make it more likely for Henry to have trouble realizing all of Will's ref dlags

4. I have NO CLUE tbh....... They popped out of his side like mitosis one day ig

5. She was always more outwardly frustrated towards William out of all 3 Afton kids. She wasn't as scared to talk back to him and she was openly upset when he neglected her and her brothers. Her favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry.

[vnights]

Sun/Moon character sheet

Name: Sunny Chantara

Age: 25

Employer: Freddy Fazbears Mega Pizza Plex

Role: Daycare Attendee

Sunny absolutely loves watching the children during the day. His true passion is helping to create wonderful memories for dozens upon dozens of tiny people, and help them discover their creativity and new ways to have fun. But, a simple energy drink or coffee just can’t supply the amount of enthusiasm he has to hold for hours at a time all day every day, so the Pizza Plex has taken it upon themselves to ever so graciously offer Sunny a specialized formula to keep him jolly and bouncy all day! (But ssshhh, it’s a secret~.)

When his work is over for the day, he is left with not only the hangover, but the struggles of getting home as a man who suffers from Nyctophobia.

Those who have seen him in the dark or in dark spaces described him as ‘a completely different person,’ and it’s all due to his inability to control his emotions. Though he’s gotten used to it, and he isn’t terrified anymore, his mood is still tarnished. It is in everyones best interest to keep the Daycare lit at all times, especially when he’s ‘Jolly.’

In other words: If Sunny, while intoxicated, enters darkness, the mixture combined with his phobia sends him into an almost violent fit, all to get out of said darkness, while also upholding his responsibilities. If Sunny, while normal, enters darkness, he is simply what’s known as a “Debby Downer,” and tries to find a source of light ASAP.

Basic ref sheet below

[winedad16]

Living Spaces and Character References (Our Time Together)

Character Refs

K and Freddy's Place (From Part 2: Away From Home)

Freddy's Childhood Home (pre-1937)

Freddy's Childhood Home (1937-Onward)

K and Freddy’s Apartment (From Part 3: Can We Control What Lies Ahead?)

[thecreaturecodex]

Mole Cricket, Giant

“Kricket Freddy Krueger” © Melvyn Yeo, accessed at his deviantArt page here

[Commissioned by @justicegundam82​. As always, I like monstrous vermin in D&D, and think there should be more interesting varieties. Not a mole cricket, but a similar insect (the Jerusalem cricket) appears as a giant adversary in the terrible (even by his standards) Bert I. Gordon film King Dinosaur]

Mole Cricket, Giant CR 5 N Vermin This giant, stout-bodied insect is the size of a horse, although built lower towards the ground. Its body is cylindrical, and its two forelegs are oversized and tipped with powerful claws.

Giant mole crickets are monstrous vermin related to locusts, crickets and katydids. They spend most of their lives underground, tunneling through the soil with their oversized digging claws. Although they can fly, they rarely do so, leaving the comfortable darkness only after sundown and only to disperse to find better food or to lay their eggs. Males attract females by chirping, much as other crickets do, but they do so from subterranean galleries. The chirps of a giant mole cricket are powerful enough to shake the earth, and may be mistaken for small earthquakes.

Giant mole crickets are omnivorous. Most of their diet comes from roots and whole plants, pulled from below ground. As such, they are notorious crop pests. Carrion and fresh meat is added to their diet, especially by females preparing to lay eggs, and often consists of those farmers who try to drive them away or kill them.

A giant mole cricket is about seven feet long on average and weighs four hundred pounds.

Giant Mole Crickets as Vermin Companions Starting Statistics: Size Medium; Speed 30 ft, burrow 30 ft.. AC +4 natural armor; Attack 2 claws (1d6), bite (1d3); Ability Scores Str 14, Dex 15, Con 14, Int —, Wis 12, Cha 3; Special Qualities burrowing claws, darkvision 60 ft., tremorsense 30 ft.

7th-Level Advancement: Size Large; Speed 30 ft., burrow 30 ft., fly 40 ft. (poor); AC +3 natural armor; Attack 2 claws (1d8), bite (1d4); Ability Scores Str +8, Dex –2, Con +4; Special Qualities tremorsense 60 ft.

Giant Mole Cricket              CR 5 XP 1,600 N Large vermin Init +1; Senses darkvision 60 ft., Perception +5, tremorsense 60 ft. Defense AC 17, touch 10, flat-footed 16 (-1 size, +1 Dex, +7 natural) hp 68 (8d8+32) Fort +10, Ref +3, Will +3 Defensive Abilities mindless; Weakness light sensitivity Offense Speed 30 ft., burrow 30 ft., fly 40 ft. (poor) Melee 2 claws +11 (1d8+6), bite +11 (1d4+6) Space 10 ft.; Reach 5 ft. Statistics Str 22, Dex 13, Con 18, Int -, Wis 12, Cha 3 Base Atk +6; CMB +13; CMD 24 (30 vs. trip) Skills Fly -5, Perception +5; Racial Modifiers +4 Perception SQ burrowing claws Ecology Environment temperate and warm land and underground Organization solitary, pair, cluster (3-6) or plague (7-24) Treasure none Special Abilities Burrowing Claws (Ex) A giant mole cricket ignores all hardness of earthen and stone objects with its claw attacks, and can use its burrow speed to burrow through solid rock. When it does so, it treats the rock as difficult terrain, and can leave a tunnel if it wishes.

[izzy-b-hands]

Eventuality Eventually

My first bit of Smile fic! Roger has bought a new van for himself/for the band! And it is...something. But of course, this is less about the van and more about the three goof balls that plan to ride around in it. Set in a loose-ish AU? If only because I’m doing real general research rn, so I might fumble things about the timeline as I go, if I write more after this one (which I would like to do!) Some Brian/Roger here as well, which I didn’t actually intend, but then I got going and suddenly here it is lol. 

A quick note too that Freddie is mentioned in this, but only in that this part of the timeline he was friends with them, and at this point was still using his old last name of Bulsara; just noting it so seeing that name isn’t a surprise!

My love to all who read/like/reblog!

“But does it run?” 

Roger looked horribly offended, his arms falling from their stretched out motion of presentation. “Of course it fucking runs! Wouldn’t have bought it, if it didn’t.” 

“I know,” Tim said. “It’s just that you like projects-” 

Roger shot him a dangerous look.

“And that’s a good thing! It shows preservation, and a willingness to put in hard work,” Tim continued. “We don’t want to be stranded again, is the thing.” 

“Was embarrassing, having your mum come pick us up,” Brian added. “She was so upset...” 

“It was awfully late,” Tim noted. “Can’t blame her; we did wake her up.” 

Roger frowned. “So you hate this van, is what you’re saying?” 

“We didn’t say that,” Brian said, but he didn’t unfold his arms or take a step closer towards the simultaneously rusting and rust-colored vehicle. 

“Safety comes to mind,” Tim said, trying to be diplomatic. “But I’m sure it’s better on the inside, isn’t it?” 

Roger smiled at that, and yanked open the side door of the van. It let out a shrill shriek of metal on metal, but Tim motioned for Brian to not say a word about it. 

“See?” Roger crouched inside and dropped into the passenger seat, pointing for them to take the two rows of seats behind the passenger and driver section. “Much better on the inside. You could sleep comfortably in this, if you wanted!” 

“There is a spring that nearly went up my ass,” Brian hissed to Tim, leaning awkwardly forward on his seat. 

“Nice material,” Tim said, running a hand over the worn and cracked leather. “Vintage!” 

Roger’s eyes were starry with happiness. “Exactly! That’s what I thought when I saw it. And good condition, considering the price.” 

“How much did you pay for this?” Brian asked. 

“It was a steal,” Roger replied with a grin as he leaned back in his seat, tossing his feet up on the dashboard, watching them with the cracked rearview mirror. 

“That’s not a number,” Brian said. “How much, in an amount with numbers, did you pay for this?” 

Roger looked wounded again, and internally, Tim sighed. They could go from being the best of friends to stabbing at each other in a heartbeat, these two. It made him think of fencers: neither stabbed to kill, but occasionally they landed a hit that bruised and then looked to him as some sort of ref, as if he should have somehow ripped the saber from the other’s hand before the blow could land. 

“I don’t know if it matters much, if Roger isn’t asking for us to give him any towards it,” Tim said. “Are you, Rog?” 

Roger shook his head. “Just toss me money for upkeep and fuel every now and again, or buy me dinner.” 

“Like your girlfriends then,” Brian snorted, and Tim reached an arm back to slap at his leg. 

“Yeah, but you don’t get what they get out of it,” Roger said as he stuck his tongue out at the mirror, his reflection sending it to Brian in the backseat. 

“A warm sweaty number of nights in the back of a rusty van?” Brian mused sarcastically. “Isn’t that basically what we have every time we drive back from a show?” 

“Those are notably less...” Roger paused. “Well. They’re fun, but not the type of fun-” 

“I think we get the picture,” Tim interrupted quickly.

“Oh, but I could paint a better one,” Roger grinned mischievously. “C’mon Tim. Let me use my brush and make that one blush.” 

But Brian was already blushing, and looking more frustrated by the minute. 

If he didn’t do something, the sabers would be tossed away, and they’d be fighting with fists, at least metaphorically. 

“Why don’t we finish the tour of the van, and then go for lunch?” Tim offered. “My treat?” 

It was a blessing that, as low on money as they could be on occasion, they were often food-motivated creatures. Tim included himself in that, and the promise of food, even if he had to buy it for himself, was what kept him going now. 

“Not much more to see,” Roger sighed, clearly still nursing some hurt. “There’s enough space back there for our gear, behind the coat rack they’ve apparently included on the second row of seats-” 

“Hey!” Brian shouted. “You ought to talk, you...” 

He fumbled, blushing somehow redder still, and Tim felt for him. It was obvious to him that both Brian and Roger were stumbling around feelings for each other, but neither of them made it easy. Truthfully, he was hoping they’d just finally confess to each other about it, or fuck, or both. 

He did have a bet riding with Freddie Bulsara on the fucking though, and a fiver to win if he was right and they did it within the next six months. 

Brian was still stuck as Tim tumbled out from his thoughts, and he gave him a gentle poke to the knee. 

“Are you going to say something rude to him, or not?” Tim asked. “Just wondering if we can go get lunch now, or if we ought to wait you out.” 

Brian gave him a look, then sighed. “No. I’ll make up for it later. Let’s go.” 

“That’s so sweet of you,” Roger laughed as he moved to the driver’s seat, keys jingling as he forced them out of his tight trouser pocket. “You’ll really give it to me later, huh? Make me cry?” 

Tim nearly blushed himself. Surely, Roger could hear himself, and knew how he sounded...

But then, he almost definitely did know, and that had to be supplying the shit-eating smile Roger was wearing as he glanced at them in the rearview mirror again. 

“I don’t ever want to make you cry,” Brian said, but Tim could not for the life of him tell if he was being sarcastic or genuine or if this was Brian trying to flirt. 

“Yet you did drop that amp on my foot,” Roger said as he started the van, that made an odd belching sound as it woke up. “And then I did cry and swear for two minutes.” 

“That was an accident,” Brian said. “Your foot was fine.” 

“You never did say sorry.” 

“I did so!” Brian protested, and tapped Tim on the shoulder. “You heard me; I did!” 

“You did, but you did say it while blaming him for your dropping your end of it,” Tim said. 

“He did make me drop it!” 

“I did not!” Roger shouted back, eyes half on the road and half glaring at Brian in the rearview mirror. 

Before Tim could beg Roger to keep his gaze more on the road, Roger hit the brakes hard enough to toss him out of his seat as he pulled them to a barely big enough street parking space. 

“Get out of my van!” 

“This is a band vehicle; I don’t have to go anywhere!” Brian’s usually soft voice was harsh now, and he was yelling more in Tim’s ear than anything else as Tim scrabbled off the floor and back onto his seat. 

“I’ll make you get out!” 

“Good, make me!” 

“I will!” 

“I’d like to see you fucking-” 

“Will the two of you kiss, or fuck, or whatever you need to do to make this stop?!” Tim shouted, and they fell silent.

He had planned to say that in his head, and it dawned on him after another beat of silence that he had said it aloud instead. 

They were both blushing, bright red, eyes wide. 

Roger swallowed hard. “That obvious, is it?” 

“You’re both so bad at hiding it,” Tim said weakly. “I mean that kindly, as much as I can.” 

Brian nodded. “Well?” 

“Well what?” Roger asked softly.

“Are you going to make me get out of the van?” 

Roger gave Tim a nervous glance, then slipped out of the driver’s seat and moved past him to Brian. 

He stayed long enough to see the kiss, then slipped out of the van quietly as Brian pulled Roger down with him onto the seat. It was a blessing that the back of the van didn’t have windows except for one at the far back door. 

He pulled the keys from the ignition and pocketed them before he left, his destination the nearest shop that had food that would qualify as lunch and be fairly cheap. 

With one detour, to the nearest phone box. 

“Bulsara? Yeah, just wanted to give you an update. A kiss, and they might be fucking in the back of our new van. If you’d like to come down and have lunch with us, you could give me that fiver right away...”