#ghostofasecretary

[tanoraqui]

tell us about Míriel in the superhero AU?

Miriel was Finwë’s neighbor, best friend and first crush. Her father worked for the government on the sort of morally dubious scientific projects that would soon become Los Alamos and nuclear bombs…and one day when they were, idk, ten? They snuck into his laboratory out of curiosity and something went Terribly Wrong, and Miriel was struck by irradiated, maybe even Musical lighting that made her…sick, mostly. But also now she could manipulate thread with her mind, any sort of thread, anything that could reasonably be imagined as thread. (Think Sandry from the Circle of Magic books by Tamora Pierce.)

Part of what drove Finwë from that day, as he sought chances for heroism, befriended aliens and gods, was to fix or at least make up for what he saw as his fault for giving Miriel this chronic weakness. Miriel, who accompanied him on most of these adventures because she had freakin’ superpowers and also wanted to help people and see strange new things, never blamed him, though she did get annoyed at him blaming himself.

Miriel’s death not long after Fëanáro’s birth was still something like sheer exhaustion and something like a choice. She returned at some point (comic books!) and, as of the “present day” of her few great-grandchildren being teenage heroes, lives together with Indis in the Tirion family manor house (none of their descendants live there anymore, though some stay frequently enough to still have their own room.)

[a-small-batch-of-dragons]

Hypermobility

Okay wait I have a prompt!!! If you wanna So I've been reading a lot of fics recently that are in space aus, with the whole humans are deathworlders concept (idk how this is common across my fandoms but it is so I'm binging them lol). And I had an idea based on recent irl events. – anon (long ask, cut for brevity)

inspired by my lovely @ghostofasecretary who has trained all of our friend group to look for hypermobility on account of our schlorpy joints :)

Read on Ao3

Warnings: none

Pairings: loosely implied analogical i guess, but as with most of my shit can be platonic or romantic you decide

Word Count; 1809

Remus glances up to see Virgil staring at Logan like his abdomen has spontaneously ruptured. He sees Roman out of the corner of his eye do the same. Virgil swallows heavily. "L," he says slowly, "what the fuck is wrong with your arms?" "Nothing is wrong with my arms, what are you talking about?" "Elbows don't bend like that!" Ah. So there was something wrong. Remus was right. Take that, human etiquette manual. Wait, shit, something's wrong with Logan.

Roman clicks at Remus as he comes onto the lab floor. Remus clicks back as he logs onto his station, sighing as he looks at the absolute mess someone's fucking made of the logs—seriously, it's only been one quarter cycle, how are they this fucked up already?—and Roman immediately leans over to see what he's sighing at.

"Wait, what's that?"

"Some xetron made an absolute fucking disaster out of the hadron logs."

Roman winces in sympathy and his carapace shifts. "Are you gonna do yours before you clean that up, or—?"

The last part of his question gest interrupted when Logan comes onto the floor, waving a brief hello with his fingers instead of his antenna—because humans don't have antennae, which was a pretty sharp learning curve for both of them when they'd been so confused as to why this human was refusing to talk to them or even show his feelings, they'd had a few apologetic shifts before Logan realized what was going on and explained everything—and raising an eyebrow when he noticed them clustered around Remus's station.

"Is there something wrong?"

"The shift before us messed up their hadron logs."

Logan rolls his eyes. "You'd think that for life forms insistent that their gravitational curves made them more naturally prepared for graviton scans, they'd have a better sense of how to record them properly."

"You're spellcasting on the acolytes, Logan."

Logan frowns, glancing at his tablet, before the equivalent phrase pings on the screen and he hums. "Ah, I see. Yes, well, if you'd like my help at any point, I only have the routine gamma sweeps to do this shift, so I should be amenable."

"Oh, I can do it, it's just a pain in my thorax."

Roman chuckles and heads back to his own station, probably to sneakily-not-so-sneakily ask some of the others on the shift who are fucking competent what the fuck happened. Remus gets himself ready to dive into the long and tedious work of redoing the spin increments and calculating the proper uncertainties for the right variables—honestly, do they even look at the readouts? It has the layout right there! And it's not like the other logs are invisible! Just look at the rows two microns above the empty one you're supposed to be filling out!—and manages to sink into a rhythm for the first half of the shift. Granted, he's absolutely muttering about how stupid it is that they aren't even calculating the basic momentum, let alone the angular velocity to account for the other celestial bodies in the middle of the waveforms, but it's fine, and Roman keeps up his running commentary of the molecular analysis machine that takes its sweet-ass time to do even the most basic of scans, and every so often he'll hear a small huff from Logan as he corrects their probe's trajectory, but for the most part, the lab is a quiet and serene place to be.

God, he can't wait until he gets rotated back to the engineering department full-time.

Like, yeah, he likes spending time with his brother, and the human's cool—he's really funny when he lets himself be, like his wit is drying than the mountain deserts on Cre-Ativa, and his facial expressions are fucking plat when their superiors are being xetrons, but there's only so much he can take of this quiet where not much happens. And he has to deal with the idiots who don't know how to format hadron logs correctly. This is the third time he's had to correct a typo that's rendered the rest of the calculations useless.

"I'm honestly about to recommend them for a review of the training course, that's how fucking serious this is."

"Maybe there's something wrong with how the keyboard is adapted for their limbs?"

"That would explain some of the typos, not all of them. And it definitely wouldn't explain why there's a massive formatting change about halfway through."

"Perhaps there's a shorthand they're using for some of the notes that we don't know about, and they're forgetting to correct them at the end of their shift."

"Yeah, but then they should tell us that, instead of—" Roman trails off and Remus looks up.

Logan is…stretching, yes, that's the right word. His limbs are extended over his head and his back is arched, but his upper limbs are…bending. Not like the way they normally bend, they're bending…too much? Not enough? The wrong way? Yeah, that's it. The wrong way.

Logan notices they've gone quiet and looks over. "Is there something wrong?"

"You're, uh," Remus stammers, "are you—okay?"

"Yes, I'm perfectly fine, what is it?"

"Nothing, nothing."

He and Roman exchange a look—the first rule in the human etiquette training manual was if they get weird, just roll with it for a reason—and get back to minding their own business. Admittedly, some of the errors do make more sense now that he's looking at it like it's some kind of shorthand he doesn't know yet, but that wouldn't explain why some of these variables are straight-up wrong and why they wouldn't bother to tell him what the shorthand is so that he's not trying to do the work of two shifts in the time of one.

Something he does appreciate is that the way the shifts in the lab are set up, opposed to engineering, is that sometimes there will be people whose shifts halfway overlap with theirs. So there's always at least one set of people that are staying in the lab while a changeover is happening and then there's not that risk that the equipment will be left unattended. Apparently they learned that lesson the hard way when the molecular exhibitor decided to go into overload in the five minutes where there wasn't anyone logged in, and nearly destroyed the matter wave projector on the station next to it. The justification was in the name of safety, but really everyone knows it's just so the higher-ups know exactly who to blame when shit goes awry.

Whatever the case may be, the door slides open to reveal the other human down here, Virgil, yawning as he makes his way over to his station.

"Hello, hello, everyone."

"Hi, Virgil!"

Virgil winces. "You are way too chipper this early in the morning."

"It's past the circadian half cycle, Virgil."

"Yeah, and?"

"I'm afraid you're going to have to acclimate to your schedule on your own time," Logan says, stretching again, "even though I'm sure your caffeine tolerance has—what? Why are you looking at me like that?"

Remus glances up to see Virgil staring at Logan like his abdomen has spontaneously ruptured. He sees Roman out of the corner of his eye do the same. Virgil swallows heavily.

"L," he says slowly, "what the fuck is wrong with your arms?"

"Nothing is wrong with my arms, what are you talking about?"

"Elbows don't bend like that!"

Ah. So there was something wrong. Remus was right. Take that, human etiquette manual.

Wait, shit, something's wrong with Logan.

"Logan? Do we need to take you to medbay?" Roman's already rushing out from behind his station. "There's a pack in the corner, I can—"

"Oh, for—relax, all of you, I'm fine."

"Uh-huh, yeah, fine, that's what I'd describe elbows that bend all schlorpy as, yeah," Virgil says, "what the—does that not hurt?"

"What? No, it doesn't hurt, look, your joints—"

"My joints suck ass but at least they're fucking bending the amount they're supposed to!"

Remus isn't quite sure how human joints are capable of such a surprising and invasive act, but never let it be said he's not curious. "Your joints are capable of performing anal suction?"

"What the fuck? No! It's a turn of phrase!"

"Oh. Disappointing."

"Ignore him," Roman says, "Logan, are you sure you're—"

"Yes, yes, I'm fine, I'm just—oh," he mumbles, prodding at his tablet, "what's the word for this in Common?"

"There's no word for schlorpy elbows, Logan—"

"Yes, there is!" He pokes around for a few more seconds before he lets out a noise of triumph and says something that the translators don't translate.

"It's what?" Virgil just shakes his head when Logan tries again. "I don't know what that means, bud."

Logan sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Okay, let me try it this way. What's it called when you are in a state of heightened energy and it leads to outbursts of things like running around, or talking too loudly, or being high-strung?"

"Remus," Roman offers helpfully.

"No, Roman."

"Are you talking about being excitable?"

"No, there's a specific word for it. It also serves as a prefix for being too much of something, or an overabundance of something."

"Too much—do you mean the word hyper?"

"Yes! Yes, that's it. And then what's the name of the thing that some people hang over cribs that have little stars or animals?"

Virgil stares at Logan for another moment. "You mean a baby mobile?"

"Yes, but only the second word."

"Mobile?"

"Yes, that's it. Then put the two words together—"

"There were probably so many other ways you could've said you were hypermobile, L, I'm just gonna put that out there—"

"Well, it got you to guess it, didn't it?"

"It's too fucking early for this shit."

"Again, it is afternoon—"

"Shut up."

Roman looks back and forth between the two humans, still twitching as though he's going to be asked to sprint for the medbay at a moment's notice. "So…is Logan…are you alright?"

"Yes, for the fourth time, I'm fine. Virgil's just a little excitable, that's all."

"You try being normal when joints are doing unexpected things," Virgil mumbles, more to his caf than anything else, but he reaches behind himself to pat Roman's carapace. "He's fine, his body just does that."

"But you said it bends the wrong way, how is that fine?"

"There is a thing known as hypermobility," Logan says, "it…oh, dear, it basically means that certain joints will bend…more."

"He's not hurt, that's pretty much all I know."

Roman looks like he's about to protest but Remus just clicks at him. They exchange another look as the humans settle back to work.

Humans are weird, just gotta roll with it.

These hadron logs, on the other hand—

"I'm gonna punt these flimflobbers into the next star we see."

"Can I help? They fucked up the carbon dating program as well."

"How do you fuck that up?"

"Ask them, not me!"

General Taglist: @frxgprince@potereregina@gattonero17@iamhereforthegayshit@thefingergunsgirl@awkwardandanxiousfander@creative-lampd-liberties@djpurple3@winterswrandomness@sanders-sides-uncorrect-quotes@iminyourfandom@bullet-tothefeels@full-of-roman-angst-trash  @ask-elsalvador @ramdomthingsfrommymind@demoniccheese83@pattonsandershugs @el-does-photography @princeanxious@firefinch-ember@fandomssaremysoul@im-an-anxious-wreck@crazy-multifandomfangirl @punk-academian-witch@enby-ralsei@unicornssunflowersandstuff@wildhorsewolf @thetruthaboutthesun @stubbornness-and-spite @princedarkandstormv  @your-local-fookin-deadmeme @angels-and-dreams@averykedavra @a-ghostlight-for-roman @treasurechestininterweb @cricketanne @queerly-fluid-fan @compactdiscdraws@cecil-but-gayer@i-am-overly-complicated@annytheseal@alias290@tranquil-space-ninja @arxticandy @mychemically-imbalanced-romance@whyiask@crows-ace @emilythezeldafan@frida0043 @ieatspinalcords @snowyfires@cyanide-violence@oonagh2@xxpanic-at-the-everywherexx@rabbitsartcorner @percy-07734@triflingassailantofmyemotions @virgil-sanders-the-gay-emo@cerulean-watermelon@puffed-up-bees@meltheromanstan@joyrose-fandomer@insanitori@mavenmush@justablah65@10paradox10@uhhh-hi-there-i-am-nervous@cutebisexualmess@bella-bugatti-frogetti-baguetti@ultrageekygirl

[everoutoftouch]

How does your Pinterest see you?

I was tagged by @onyxheartbeat thank you! ^^

Search up

-Fashion

-Pantone

-Mood

-Food

I like it. Especially the Pantone color!

Tagging anyone who wants to do this and @fictionalred @gothdrpepper @graveyardlilies @ghostofasecretary

[aeide-thea]

tagged by @aldieb! thx for thinking of me, these little questionnaires are like. a cute little blast from tumblr's more interactive past :)

last song: i was going to have to give a sad little answer here about how i don't listen to music nearly enough anymore (never mind sing) and it's very definitely a reflection of my depression, but then i entirely out of nowhere and very urgently was like 'wait actually i have to listen to gordon lightfoot's "song for a winter's night" right now' so then i dashed off and did that and now that's the answer:

if i could know within my heart that you were lonely too i would be happy just to hold the hands i love on this winter night with you…

favorite color: oof so so many!! colors are so important. the signature one has gotta be a really highlighter-vivid chartreuse (🎾), but i do also really love me a good marigold orange? not to mention vermilion, or ochre, or moss green, or really saturated cobalt, or shades of rust or russet…

last movie/show: shetland bbc, which is a quiet well-acted murder mystery series set in a very beautiful very remote landscape. soothing if you like the british isles and can bear to entertain the fantasy of a decent policeman, at least for an hour or so at a time. also i admit to enjoying douglas henshall's face.

sweet/spicy/savory: all the best things are savory and also spicy! like. the jamaican curried chicken i grew up with. indian curries. malaysian laksa my beloved. can you tell i like curry. :D

relationship status: sidebar but this is such an amatonormative question lol. like why are we societally expected to look at 'relationship' and infer 'romantic.' also it seems like a weird outlier given that all the other qs are low-stakes little softballs abt yr tastes. however. extremely single! sometimes i'm sad about it because i miss sexual intimacy and i'm too shy to pursue that with strangers? but honestly most of the time i'm just as glad, because i don't actually know how to love people romantically without making a whole self-abnegating religion of it, so i'm not really convinced that dating was ever really all that good for me, on the whole…

last thing i googled: i use duckduckgo now, and you should too! :) having said that: 'yoal boat.' which is a very beautiful traditional style of shetland boat—apparently descended from a norwegian model?—that the islanders used to use for fishing, and then for storage draw up onto the land into these little prepared hollows called noosts (they have marinas now), which like. obviously i think is the most charming word imaginable. a cozy little noost for a lovely little boat! 🪺

current obsession(s): yoals aside, i guess the thing that best fits this category is that sometime in the last year or so i turned into Merino Guy??? like. even my boxer briefs are merino now (well, a merino-tencel blend) and like. it's so good, guys. comfy in a startlingly wide range of temps, helps me lessen my contribution to the microplastics problem, somehow even makes for reasonable athletic wear in the right weights and cuts: what's not to like. anyway brb, gotta go print out my 'NOT 🐑ISH ABOUT MERINO' bumper sticker. :D

tag 9 people: oof idk, do this if you'd enjoy it and ignore it if you wouldn't? gonna make like west and pull some names from my activity feed: @e-b-reads, @ghostofasecretary, @leatherbookmark, @nathanielthecurious, @obstinatecondolement, @papavera, @quailfang, @tisiphoness, @youcanthandelthetruth

[23rdhunter]

Tag Game!

tagged by: @eikotheblue & @avulleonastick

Favorite color: today it's a cool, blueish gray.

Currently reading: Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, and The Vorkosigan Saga (yes, all of it. again.).

Last song listened to: depends on if singing counts. If yes, "De Colores," the folk song. If no, either "Sullen Girl" by Fiona Apple or "Viola" by Najoua Belyzel and Marc Lavoine.

Last movie watched: Glass Onion! I really enjoyed it, and was able to drag several other people to watch it with me, which tbh is probably most of why I enjoyed it. Gotta track down Knives Out soon.

Last series watched: Saw the latest episode of The Owl House when it came out (not the leak, managed to avoid spoilers entirely, somehow). It continues to be really good!

Currently craving: still feel like a few hours in the ocean would fix me, but gotta fix a few things myself first. Also maybe a hug.

Currently working on: trying to figure out if I can mod Dragon Age: Inquisition acquired via xbox gamepass for pc. If so I might wanna stream a liveplay. maybe. Also deciding if I want to tackle [large cleaning project that will take at least 2 days] today or two weeks from today. Also [redacted].

Tea or coffee: I have had several mugs of both these last 24 hours and expect to *checks time* have at least a few more of tea, though we just passed the end of the coffee times.

Tagging: @xactodreams, @rusalkii, @otterknowbynow, @just-evo-now, @incrediblefiction, @change-the-rules, @ghostofasecretary, @salt-and-bramble, @spiralingintocontrol

(note that being tagged places you under zero obligation to do the thing, feel free to ignore)

[thisisnotharmless]

playlist meme!

rules: you can usually tell a lot about a person by the type of music they listen to. put your playlist on shuffle and list the first 10 songs, and then tag 10 people.

tagged by: @drcloyd

Down - Something Corporate

10 Days Gone - Jack’s Mannequin

Sami - Darren Criss

Emily - The Mowgli’s

Nailed - Hedwig & the Angry Inch sountrack

I See You - Mika

Free - Mother Mother

Synthetica - Metric

Starry Configurations - Jets to Brazil

Don’t Fence Me In - Ella Fitzgerald

tagging:@punching-unicorns @throgmortem @rootbeerwolf @ghostofasecretary @thecharmingchimaera @smallsoapdish @eragon17 @11-23-63 @formerlytfs @furi-road @izziwitch

[everoutoftouch]

Username Song Game

Rules: pick a song for each letter of your URL and tag that many people.

Tagged by @mandalorian-general thanks for the tag! ^^

E - Everyday by Weyes Blood

V - Vow by Garbage

E - Echolalia by Yves Tumor

R - Rocket’s Tail by Kate Bush

O - Oxytocin by Drab Majesty

U - Under The Moon by Foster The People

T - The Lovecats by The Cure

O - Opheliac by Emilie Autumn

F - Femininomenon by Chappell Roan

T - Twilight by Bôa

O - Oblivion by Grimes

U - Unpunishable by Ethel Cain

C - Cuts You Up by Peter Murphy

H - Hierophant by King Woman

I made a Spotify playlist for all the songs too lol https://open.spotify.com/playlist/47VMK24hsf9fdzUTIue7fk?si=QiRTZSSgR9W4O75X-bBB6Q&pi=u-IsHOJPD5Txij

Tagging (I know the rules say to tag as many as your username but idk that I’m gonna do that lol) @fictionalred @lev-1athan @gothdrpepper @clawless92 @automated-exchanges @dysphoria-things @ghostofasecretary @cowboybabeop @graveyardlilies @ghouloriented and anyone else that wants to do it!

[tanoraqui]

Celechwes 1, 7, 20, 29?

[Ask meme]

What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

Literally nothing, like, she's here to see someone but they're in a meeting and she's asked to wait a few minutes, about...2 seconds. Then her foot will start to tap, followed by her leg bouncing about a minute later, followed by her standing up and pacing, or at least wandering around to look at everything in the room, and/or to eavesdrop on the meeting (though eavesdropping, she might sit still for, and I suppose that would count as "something to do.")

Things like "enjoying the feeling of grass and wind on her skin" or "cuddling with loved ones" (which lying on the grass counts as tbh) count as "something to do", though. She can sit still for those for...a few hours, before she gets antsy.

7. What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling?

The sea, the shore, fishing. It's wide expanses of land not water that have her heart, but the shore is where she grew up, and fishing was what both her parents did; she remembers it fondly and makes sure to visit her mother for at least a few days once a decade or so, and now and then will even willingly trap herself on a small boat with nothing but her mother and some fishing nets for a full day.

20. If they were asked to explain the difference between romantic and platonic or familial love, how would they do so?

how the fuck does the writer explain the difference between romantic and platonic--

Family, she would say, is your roots, your bedrock, your sea floor. The people and the parts of you that you couldn't tear out if you tried, and if you did and somehow succeeded, you'd be so overturned that you'd be a different person than when you started.

Romantic vs platonic (friendship?)...okay, [briefly consults Laws and Customs of the Eldar, then throws it out the window] as I've headcanoned elsewhere, Elves have one word, lets translate it as "marriage", to mean the physical act of sex; the social act of joining families/starting a new family branch; and bonding their fëa forever, sealing the bond with a vow invoking Eru. It is possible to do any of these things separately, or 2 of them but not a third, but the physical and spiritual are connected in such a way that the more, um, intensive and/or involved the sex, the more the participants have to make a conscious, difficult effort not to spiritually bond. They CAN choose to not make such a bond Permanent by not invoking Eru about it, but they're still gonna be close whether they like it or not for a While. Marriage bonds are strong, and it's hard to shut your partner out.

Consequently, relationships that in marriage tends to involve...levels of mutual obsession and closeness that a human would probably consider unhealthy. Like, Elwë and Melian staring at each other in a forest for 200 years was an anomaly, but it was an extreme-tip-of-the-bellcurve anomaly, not a full Spiders Georg situation, you know? But, this is key: it is not unhealthy for Elves! It's just how they are - you find someone you love enough to bind your souls together for eternity, and you do it! (Also, because for Elves, fëa generally comes before hröa [physical form], most Elves would be what modern Men call "demisexual", ie, only after starting to fall in love do they get sexually horny for someone. Fervent "I'm going to write a ballad about them/create a gem to mimic and elevate their beauty/carve a ship's-head in their image to bless my every voyage" is a different, much more common kind of horny.)

Celechwes isn't innovative or counter-cultural here; she'd define "romantic" vs "platonic" like anyone else: is it going to develop to marriage, or not? Relationships which develop to marriage, for Elves, may be what modern Men of our 21st century deem "romantic", "platonic", or anything in between or somewhere else entirely.

29. Do they usually live up to their own ideals? 

Morally, yes, though at some point in Mandos she's going to realize she's been kind of selfish wrt her "who cares how they got here, what matter is that they got here just in time" opinion of the now-First Kinslaying. (Ie, it wasn't "First" when it happened any more than World War One was World War One until at least 1939.) In terms of "is she living her best possible life", no, and she never will again, not since the orcs started encroaching into the wild and free Beleriand of her youth. By the time Morgoth is gone, and by the much later time all her family is out of Mandos, Beleriand is gone as well.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

your academic and fandom rambles delight me!

Thank you! 💜

[aeide-thea]

greek poetry nerd mutual

(possibly i am conflating posts you have written about poetry and translation with tags you have posted mentioning Greek but this is How My Brain Knows You, apparently)

hey, i’ll take it! :)

ultimately i feel like you’re correct that i’m interested in greek poetry insofar as it’s the, like, venn-diagram overlap of a bunch of my other interests, rather than because the thing itself has a totally singular appeal for me, but like. you could stick greek poetry in a summoning circle (or, you know, tumblr post) and i’d show up: it counts.

(truly wild that i made this sappho post less than five years ago. that really was a whole other K talking. but also i guess i did some homerposting in march so like. an Ongoing Interest for sure!)

thx for playing! :)

[come tell me what kind of mutual you think i am!]

[vardasvapors]

Chunkification replies

freeforaugust replied to your post “Please lmk if I should put any other warning tags on this but Does...”

I think most calorie calculators and diet apps have the option for weight gain in addition to weight loss. If you're sedentary due to low spoons or whatever, ignore this, but it's actually a good idea to try and gain muscle mass when gaining weight. This is also one of my SpIns, feel free to message me as well!

hylianthvs

replied to your post

“Please lmk if I should put any other warning tags on this but Does...”

nutrition is one of my special interests message me if you want an infodump

 I would be fucking over the moon to receive a nutrition infodump guys thank u omg uh i have no idea at the moment where to start asking questions about this but i’ll take u up on these offers

hylianthvs replied to your post “Please lmk if I should put any other warning tags on this but Does...”

I feel this, I pretty much stopped tolerating calorie dense and high protein foods after I started taking welbutrin. if you can tolerate nut butters, those are very calorically dense. starchy carbs like potatoes, sweet potatoes (with sons of butter obvi) are great. one time I lived off chocolate milk for about a month. if that doesn't disgust you, Boost brand nutrition shakes taste just as good, not all weird and powdery like your average protein shake

omg i DO really really like peanut butter i will try to do more of that. i’ll try that brand out for nutrition shake purposes if i can find it

ghostofasecretary replied to your post “Please lmk if I should put any other warning tags on this but Does...”

a friend of mine has had success with seeing a nutritionist? ofc health care professionals vary a lot, but my friend also had no mindset flags, really, and her experience was pleasant. my friend's advice is to drink a lot of whole milk, use copious amounts of butter, and eat meat. i'm a vegetarian but i find that putting olive oil in basically everything (salads, sandwiches, stir fry, literally just soaking french bread in it, etc) is helpful for keeping weight on

rityeah i tried a nutritionist too but this is where i got just ‘insistence on protein shakes and horrific peanut butter smoothies’ repeatedly lol. olive oil is a fave of mine tho i will get a big bottle of that hmmmm

actualmermaid replied to your post “Please lmk if I should put any other warning tags on this but Does...”

Also also: I think apps like myfitnesspal have settings to track weight gain and not just weight loss, if such apps work for you.

mpi can def download it and make an attempt.....my main issue is that i can no baseline knowledge that most apps in my experience require but,

actualmermaid replied to your post “Please lmk if I should put any other warning tags on this but Does...”

Now if you want RECIPES enriched with butter/bacon/cream/whatever, I can help with that lol

YES PLEASE

actualmermaid replied to your post “Please lmk if I should put any other warning tags on this but Does...”

Extreme tl;dr of how to gain weight is “calculate your TDEE and then eat 500 calories more than that per day, every day.” Everyone has different strategies/diet plans for how to make that sustainable so I guess just figure out what works for you? Idk

I don’t know how much Reddit you use, but r/gainit has resources for people trying to gain body mass for whatever reason. A lot of it is fitness-oriented, but they have a multi-purpose FAQ, and people are there for all kinds of reasons.

i don’t use reddit at all but that sounds like a great rec thankzx

okionlywanttoreadforever replied to your post “Please lmk if I should put any other warning tags on this but Does...”

I don't know any diet resources, but it's easy to find healthy high fat food information online like on Healthline and Webmd

thanks! yeah it looks like high fat is gonna be easier for me is tru

[lorata]

maiapacifyer It was whatever fic you mentioned that enobaria was drawing katniss’ corpse before the quarter quell lmao literallyjustanyurlatthispoint I don’t know if you were asking for a specific story but you wrote a Solvestice ficlet of Devon and Emory painting his wall in 2021. I think it’s also significant in Cut to the Feeling (the Devon/Misha beginnings) ghostofasecretary 2017's Cut To The Feeling is the first flag i have for Devon's painting wall b/c i remembered how Misha was described as a whirlwind painter; then Petra noticed he didn't paint over Enobaria's red effigy of Katniss in 2015's Interlude: Shadows Fall

god bless people's memories lol THANK YOU FOLKS

What sort of things are on Devon’s mural wall and who paints them?

oh geez......... does anyone remember where I wrote about that, i can't remember what fic it's actually in

devon's living room is half sunroom, half blank walls that he uses for murals, and he invites his friends (and new bb victors) over to add to them whenever they feel like. if the walls get full up he removes the old layer and paints over it with white so they can start again

what's on them depends, sometimes it's fun & silly, sometimes it's therapy, sometimes it's a mix. if he needs to paint something super dark he usually redoes it later so he isn't surrounded by it after he's worked through the feeling

(there was SOMETHING sad about the wall postwar, i don't remember if it was an enobaria POV of devon's house in canon or if it was an emory painting in canon divergence that devon couldn't bear to paint over. TOO MANY THINGS my mind is blurring together)

[rusalkii]

11, 17, 18, 26? (feel free to substitute "most" with "current favorite")

11. Where is the most beautiful place on earth and why?

The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

(Pictures my dad’s.) We had spent the vacation with my French relatives and the cheapest flights home went through Barclona, so we spent a day there. All I remember of the city is standing inside the cathedral and thinking that it was from sci-fi, or elvish - something unearthly. 

17. How about the sweetest song you’ve ever heard?

Certainly not the sweetest, or particularly soft musically, but I like Florence + the Machine’s No Choir:

And it's hard to write about being happy 'Cause the older I get I find that happiness is an extremely uneventful subject And there would be no grand choirs to sing No chorus could come in About two people sitting doing nothing

18. Do you know how to play dominoes?

Nope.

26. If you could buy one material thing, and money was not an issue, what would it be?

I kind of want to say “a nice apartment somewhere” but I don’t want to be tied down to a place just yet and I feel like selling it when I want to move goes against the spirit of the question. Second thought was “a car” but a lot of the expense there is insurance/maintenance. Mostly the expensive things I want are like “a nice place to myself” or “the ability to travel”. My next big purchase is probably going to be a laptop that actually costs over $500, but that seem somewhat outside the scope of the question. Probably still a car, if it was a nice new with good mileage and a warranty I could handle the insurance and it would increase my freedom of movement by a lot, especially given public transit is not going to be a great idea for the next year or so.

[everoutoftouch]

tagged by @fictionalred <3

Last song I listened to: How Can I Make It Okay by Wolf Alice https://youtu.be/iEfxTD13eLM?si=QHLVM_XVMqb_UC7O

Currently reading: I’ve been stuck on The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix for awhile. I keep meaning to finish it

Last watched: The Daily Show with John Stewart

Currently obsessed with: the rain 🌧️ ☔️ 😌

tagging: @ghostofasecretary @dysphoria-things @mandalorian-general and anyone else who wants to do it!!!

[a-small-batch-of-dragons]

so i finished my rewatch of tdj with a friend and i mentioned how i had so many brain gremlins about the dike app and she was like ‘so write it’

so

i actually don’t know if this is the kind of content this fandom goes for but if it is let me know, may or may not be planning one of these for my name whenever i finish that

actually the dike app is one of the most integral and least talked about part of the live court show because it enables the mob justice that the elite wanted to satiate while also revealing the flaws in democracy and justice systems through holding people accountable in this essay i will

 As a disclaimer, I am not Korean, nor do I claim to have any expert knowledge of the Korean Justice System. I am coming at this analysis from a Western perspective and I make no claims on the singularity or exceptionalism of the arguments I make here. I will not be touching on the ethics of having a live court show to a large extent, nor will I be speculating on why the DIKE app was designed the way it was on a software level. I am simply pulling at a lingering thread that the show left hanging and seeing where it goes.

 To begin with, let us examine the premise on which the live court show was created. The opening of the pilot introduces us to a future dystopian Korea where the President is announcing the start of a live court, where the trials will be live-streamed for the entire nation to see. The people of Korea will be able to act as a jury for this new court by voting live as it airs via an app they can download onto their phones. This news comes at the end of a speech about the state of the country, including the Gwuanghwamun Riot, which he states is the culmination of public outrage due to ‘ungrounded propaganda against the privileged.’ (Ep. 1) Throughout the course of the episode, it becomes clear that the members of the caucus view the live court show as a distraction for the public, or at the very least, a method of satiating their need for progress. The live court show will have ‘the entire nation take part’ in the restoration of ‘law and order,’ which fulfills this need. The President’s speech is played over footage of the riot. We see people throwing things, breaking things, smashing windows and destroying property. The parallels drawn between the riot and the formation of the live court show effectively connect them as two acts of mob justice. One is the more expected version; an angry group of people enacting violence in a public space in protest. The other, more obfuscated. Yet both are what can be described as ‘baiting crowds,’ crowds that form with reference to quickly attainable goals. “The crowd is out for killing and it knows whom it wants to kill.” (Cannetti 49) The live court show takes the crowd’s destructive wrath and arms it in a different way, under the legitimation from the ruling party and the notion of justice, the killing is done with silent violence, or at the very least, an abstracted one. The live court show functions as a government sanctioned mob justice. The real executions of the sentences are carried out by the crowd witnessing them. The DIKE app enables this by providing the casting of the vote and bearing witness to the sentencing. In this way, the hunger of the crowd is satiated and its ire redirected.

 Of course, a crucial aspect of the baiting crowd and the roar of mob justice is that the mob is out to kill and it knows whom it wants to kill. The live court show can only offer targets for the mob that it selects, and herein lies another aspect of its creation. The cases are selected by the presiding judge and, at least in theory, the members of the caucus. As such, the mob only has power when it is given to them. Voting for the outcome of the trial then becomes a poor man’s currency that can only be used in a rich man’s game; there is an illusion of justice being carried out when it is completely under the caucus’s control which cases get chosen and what the sentence will be—we see the Prosecution offering sentences for each trial and the choice of which cases are tried comes up many times throughout the show. A ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer is not worth much when the question has already been crafted for you—there is a reason that you can object to a leading question in court. From the caucus’ perspective, they can satiate the hunger of the crowd by offering them a say in what happens to the defendant, but the defendant is someone they choose whose sentence will be passed by someone they can control. The public does not have as much power over the execution of their justice as it may seem. Of course, this assumes that they are able to control the presiding judge, but examining the live court show by itself, there is a logic behind its creation. Once the baiting crowd has attained its victim, it disintegrates; “rulers in danger are well aware of this fact and throw a victim to the crowd in order to impede its growth.” (Cannetti 52) As such, the live court show is used as a method of control instead of freedom, a way to calm and distract the roar of the public when its voices grow too loud by projecting the illusion that they are being listened to.

 So we’ve discussed what the live court show was created to do, now let us examine what else it does. Regardless of which judge presides over the live court, there are consequences to live streaming a trial for people to vote on. One important aspect that has yet to be covered is the visibility of the live trials. These trials are designed to be seen, they are designed to be interactive, they are designed to be open. But within that, there are shadows created—some intentional, some unintentional—that undermine that sense of visibility. I make a point of saying visibility and not transparency because as discussed earlier and evidenced in the show, while the trials are indeed visible, the machinations going on around and behind them are anything but transparent. We as the viewing audience have more of an insight into their nature than the in-show public would thanks to the privilege of the fourth wall and we still get misled. When it comes to systems of power, visibility and transparency are two very different things, and while transparency serves to place the power in the hands of people who use the system, visibility in many ways serves to take that power away from them.

 When the live trials take place, they can be seen on screens everywhere in the nation. We see them in public squares, on television networks, and on the DIKE app itself. The public watching the trial can vote and immediately see the results of their vote on the graphics, totaling the votes from the DIKE app and displaying the total number of votes and their respective percentages. The consequences of voting are immediately visible. What this does in turn is make the effects of disciplinary power immediately visible, or as Foucault would describe it, “it is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.” (187) The reason that the threat of the live court show is so prominent is because it puts the focus of the entire nation on the defendant, rendering them the most visible person. This is the mechanism that traps you in the disciplinary web.

 There are two aspects, however, to an effective system of surveillance that Foucault describes. One is visibility, the other is unverifiability. (201-2) The defendant knows they are on trial. They know the trial is being live-streamed. They know that people are watching. They know that their verdict is going to be decided based off of the votes cast by people on the other side of phone lines and mobile apps. But they can’t see them. In a strange inversion of the Panopticon that Foucault describes, “in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen,” (202) the defendant is in a circular room, seen by all, whereas the mass outside is able to look its fill without ever being seen. The DIKE app enables what Foucault calls “a principle of compulsory visibility,” (187) where the power is dispersed among numerous anonymous and temporary observers, each of which has the ability to judge and control the fate of the defendant. There is no way to verify the existence of this power; even during the trial in Episode 3 where the individual videos and testimonies are called in, there are no checks, no verifications—this is something the trial hinges on—and yet it works. Because the risk of the defendant being surprised and the anxiety over the awareness of being observed is so heightened, the system works. Episode 3 is the clearest illustration of this principle in its entirety, but the implications stretch out over the rest of the show. Because of the nature of the DIKE app and its role in the live trial, it creates a constant field of visibility. It turns each person into the observer of themselves, knowing the constraints of the power. If everyone in the country is your jury, how must you comport yourself to avoid an undesirable verdict? You must first be arrested and convicted before you stand trial, that’s true, but the ever-present threat the live trials pose are far more effective at creating an atmosphere of discipline. As such, it breeds a loyalty to the crowd and a disloyalty to the individual. If the allure of the crowd is to disappear into one of the anonymous observers, to become part of a mass that forgets everything but the roar of the next collective kill, then the other side of that is the threat of being under the observatory’s roof, of being the one with all the eyes that cannot be seen. If those are the only two options, it makes sense that the public would eagerly look the other way when another body is thrown into the live court, or do the dirty work of eliminating the caucus’ rivals for them.

 Or, at least, it would had the caucus not chosen to prop up a judge who had a personal vendetta against all of them, but we all make mistakes.

 The truth of the matter is for the first few episodes, the live court show works exactly as it is supposed to, it’s just aimed in a direction the caucus doesn’t want, namely, at them. The public is satisfied with the sentences Yohan delivers, the defendants are most decidedly not. Public support for the live court show continues to grow, even through controversial decisions and escalating stakes. And the live court show grows more and more powerful to the point where it becomes instrumental in overthrowing the caucus itself. Hurrah.

 The whole course of the show is Yohan’s journey to vengeance or justice—take your pick—on the caucus for what happened with the church fire. But one thing that goes overlooked in the main drama of the show is the notion of accountability. The notion of accountability and Yohan’s character make up a significant amount of the plot points, especially considering Gaon as the viewing audience’s main character. The live court show under Yohan’s jurisdiction is about holding people accountable to their actions: Ju Il-do and his contaminated water supply, Lee Young-min and his abusive actions, Nam Seok-hoon and his sexual assault charges, and Jukchang and his vigilantism. In Episode 3, we have the line: “I will see to it that no case is overlooked,” and we see the public respond to it. Additionally, it’s clear Yohan understands that the live court show is mob justice. In the same episode, we see Gaon realizing why Lee Young-min’s trial needed to be open to draw out the testimonies from the people watching, and we see Yohan encouraging the Prosecution to change the indictment from simple assault to habitual assault, saying that “if you take too long, all this fury may be directed at the Prosecution next.” (Ep. 3) Later, in Episode 13, during his confrontation with the President, we have the line: “I will summon you to the live court show and expose all of your schemes, until the angry citizens turn this place into a sea of fire and drag you out by the collar, like a dog .” Mob justice is volatile, easily redirected, and as we’ve seen, a force unto itself. The DIKE app becomes the vessel through which it is carried out; the streaming of the slum riot in Episode 13 is successful because of the DIKE app, as is the climactic showdown in Episode 16. The technology created by the caucus has become its downfall by enabling the very observation and visibility it was supposed to divert. And here we see the DIKE app divorced fully from the live court show; the live court show was created and run by Park Du-man, a member of the caucus, shut down and to be replaced by an emergency court instead, whereas the DIKE app became synonymous with Yohan, the PD, and the platform where the public can vote and have their voices heard.

 But Yohan isn’t just holding the caucus accountable, it’s everyone. As mentioned above, the live court show has ethical questions I will not be looking discuss here, but it provides a layer of abstraction to the votes people cast within it. There’s only a certain amount of resonance and/or personal investment you can get from tapping a button on your phone, even if you can directly see what’s happening. Even if the sentences are pronounced after the verdict, you’ve still cast your vote, you’ve still had a hand in deciding the fate of the defendant. This comes to a head in Episode 14, when every vote cast raises the voltage on the electric chair until the defendant is executed. The exact consequences, implications, and ramifications of this I will not be discussing, but the distance between the traditional concepts of mob justice and the distanced, often guiltless versions present in newspaper readers and those who participate in cancelling people on line is closed rapidly. In this forum, the DIKE app quite literally becomes the hands and fists of the executioner’s crowd, enabling the mob to kill Jukchang with their own hands. In some ways, this is the recognition of the extreme proposed by Foucault’s analysis of Panopticon, where the inmate is subject to the perils of being in the disciplinary web. In the act of holding the public accountable for the votes they cast and the consequences of participating in the system, we see the crowd start to disintegrate. We see people starting to question whether or not this is something they should be doing, we see a mother yanking the phone away from children who keep voting for Jukchang to die. When a personal connection is formed, when you are no longer part of the crowd and are instead an individual, the anonymity of the crowd no longer protects you and thus, you are no longer safe in the disciplinary web. As soon as you become visible, the system no longer benefits you.

 But is that true?  It isn’t the system of the live court show the public has faith in, it’s Yohan. We see this in how the public reacts after Gaon’s press conference where he says it was all rigged; they do not care. Three times over the course of the series, Yohan puts himself—or is put—in the center of the courtroom, on trial for the mob to serve their justice. And yet, every time, he isn’t a defendant, he’s a person. The mob has every reason to treat him no differently than the other people that have been caught in the disciplinary web, and yet, they don’t, because mob justice is volatile and easily redirected. A central theme in the show is that democracy is inherently flawed because people can be easily manipulated. Justice systems too are subject to people with agendas, and agendas change. It’s not a coincidence that the reason the public lose faith in the systems that brought them the live court show is the man who made himself appear as a person in front of it.

 On a textual level, this is what the live court show and the DIKE app do. But, metatextually, what purpose does it have in the show itself? Well, for one, it helps to reinforce the idea that we are all, at the end of the day, just people. The systems we have in place are manipulated by people with the privilege to do so but that also means there are ways to fight them as a person. Getting lost in the crowd is one of the major allures of it and trying to think as a person in a crowd is difficult. But if we all think as people and not crowds, that’s how we move forward. Crowds disintegrate, people are left. And we see this; we see it in the way the PD chooses to help them livestream the slum riots, we see it in the people in the Dream Home project that choose to put themselves at risk to help Gaon get the footage, we see it in the intern who opens the door for Lawyer Ko and the others to help them go live. Episode 16 is a realistic portrayal of what would happen: the mob is satiated and the systems roll back into place, ready to forget the lessons they’ve learned from the violence. But human beings are not systems, they’re humans, and nothing human is ever perfect. There are simply too many people for this to be forgotten and for the real legacy of the live court show to disappear into oblivion. There will always be at least one person left alive to tell the story.

 And, well, we all know what people are like about a good story.

Obviously, I make no claims that any of these are complete thoughts, nor are they fully fleshed out, but they were bonking around my head for a little too long for it to be comfortable and I haven’t personally seen anyone talking about the DIKE app like this yet so! Thought I’d throw this out there, see what people thought.

stuff i cited:

Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish

[kawuli]

ghostofasecretary replied to your post “So, my dad is retiring at the end of this semester and he's turning 70...”

gods that sucks. fwiw my body started reacting badly to singing sometime in elementary school, i tear up when i sing for...maybe over 15 minutes, and singing hymns reliably makes me sob, so you are not the only person with this reaction

Why are bodies like this? <3