#giving myself permission to be weirder on this blog

[hypnotical-nonsense]

do you ever think what bliss it would be to bury your hands in a woman machine's cables, all corded around your fingers. the way she'd arc into your touch like it's fresh gasoline? she'd start an electrical fire for you. you're gonna burn up inside her and you won't even say thank you.

[wheredidhiseyebrowsgo]

Stunning work! has anyone told you that you remind them of stiles bc this whole blog is stiles vibes tbh. Ugh anyway you're the best 😘 do you by chance know any newish fics where stiles is underestimated by the pack or his dad and they are proved wrong. Again you're the best, very talented and a true gift to this community 🖤🔥

Nope. Never heard it. But I definitely do talk too much about random ass shit. In fact when I introduce myself I give people permission to tell me to shut up if needed. Case in point, on to the fic!

Call Me Stiles by orphan_account

(1/1 I 1,556 I Teen I Sciles)

When Stiles was on the playground as a child a bully laughed at her first name. Her response?

“Call me Stiles then, you Moron.”

Now that Stiles is older her life hasn't gotten less complicated than when she changed her name, and her best friend turning into a werewolf? Icing on the cake.

Just when she thought her life couldn't get any weirder...

“You must be Stiles.”

So Take a Long Shot by relenafanel

(1/1 I 2,650 I Teen I Sterek)

Stiles is ten when his father teaches him how to shoot. He sucks with a handgun, more likely to shoot off his own foot than the target.

The same cannot be said for his skill with a long-range rifle (but he's no one's weapon).

Eventually, Stiles knows, the secret will come out, because there are just some people he will save at all costs.

(That day comes when they're hunting a redcap through the forest and can't reach Derek in time)

None of These Things (Are Happening) by Horribibble

(1/1 I 3,211 I Explicit I Steter)

After years away, Stiles returns to Beacon Hills just in time to put Isaac's insides back where they belong.

It's cute how people think he's trustworthy.

-

Peter can smell the violence inside him, the urge to do something grand and possibly cataclysmic. It’s there—mixed with a balance and natural calm, but in the undercurrent, it’s there. He has seen things beyond the scope of Beacon Hills’ petty horror show. He has learned things.

Stiles' lemonade by Sundiver 

(9/? I 42,887 I Mature I Steter)

Stiles is being kept on the fringes of the McCall pack, seems like forever, his relationship with his father is non-existent and to top it all, he's being traded to the all-mighty Hale pack for an alliance. Stiles previous plan for dealing with problems was going away for college, but that's out of the cards now. Stiles doesn't have a plan for this new low. Yet.

[skullearrings]

music for 7 juvenile black pine snakes: album breakdown

i’m opening this blog as a way to talk about things that interest me that twitter doesn’t give me enough space for. probably mostly posts about my creative process and inspirations, although anything could happen. since the album has recently turned two years old, a breakdown and analysis of music for 7 juvenile black pine snakes (released on paradise records april 1, 2020) feels like a great place to start! join me, i have a lot to say.

this album was largely produced in late march 2020, right after the pandemic hit my area and we entered lockdown. i was working my first big job at the time, a zookeeping internship at a tiny rural reptile zoo. i had been struggling a lot emotionally even before entering snake-surrounded quarantine, and with everything in my world getting weirder by the second, it felt appropriate to make a batch of songs that were as abrasive and convoluted as my life and thoughts felt. what followed was music for 7 juvenile black pine snakes, one of my most unusual albums.

i considered naming the album “music for no one” at one point (due to my belief that no one but me could enjoy listening to it) before i realized that that was super boring and my brain instead latched onto the titular snakes. the songs slithered back and forth from idea to idea, just like a snake! it made perfect sense! or at least it did at the time, snakes were predictably on my mind a lot during that phase of my life.

looking at the album song by song:

1. it’s called batesian mimicry open a book sometime

batesian mimicry is when a nonvenomous/nonpoisonous species evolves to imitate the appearance of a similar venomous or poisonous species to ward off predators. for example, snakes that copy the stripes of the coral snake to make other animals think they’re also venomous. this has little to nothing to do with the content of the song, but like i said, snakes were on my mind a lot at the time.

most of the distortion effects on this album come from the therapy and antiknot plugins. antiknot is great, 50/50 chance of making something hugely unappealing and a 50/50 chance of crashing audacity. these chances are independent of each other by the way. i don’t have too much else to say about this song, but i think it sets the tone well for the others. lets you know exactly what you’re getting into.

2. they said stay away from the wolves

permission to psychoanalyze myself? too late, i’m gonna. i had realized that i’m aromantic only about a month before this song came to be, and that coupled with my bisexuality and my upbringing in a very sex-negative-purity-culture-one-man-one-woman christian church was making me do a lot of thinking about what my sexuality meant to me. taking a look at what i think and what i want and processing how it fits into my life and questioning: was what i wanted dangerous? was i dangerous? in hindsight i feel like this song was my way of asking that. i mean, just listen to those lyrics i picked. i hope to explore my aromanticism further in a future release, but it’s a big topic that’s close to my heart so i can’t guarantee it will happen quickly.

3. we all have our ways of coping with being nonvenomous

this title comes from dealing with feelings of powerlessness, feeling like a venomless snake faced with a predator i know i can’t take down. snakes probably do not think about this or know what “coping” means.

i’m fond of the horn loop in this song, i could listen to that alone for a long time. this is one of those instances where the samples used are very revealing of my personal music taste. that ending, from a song called seventeen which i’ve loved since i was seventeen myself? yeah. it has no business being on a vaporwave album but that’s kinda the whole point of this album isn’t it

4. i’ve never been to music school and you can’t make me go

this song didn’t have a real theme besides sounding weird, so i gave it a title that nodded towards my amatuerish production style. am i being a bit too self-critical? if i am, it’s only because of the awkwardness inherent in trying to voice your personal emotional issues through other people’s work. is this album better if you don’t know what inspired it? if you can just look at it as wild experimentation without direction? track 4 is probably too late to be asking that question.

5. there’s a new life out there i haven’t started yet

i’ve tried to recreate the style of the choppy sample work in the beginning on other tracks. it’s never come across exactly how i want it to, the way it did here. to me it really does feel like a new world opening up, one that is bold and uncertain and even scary, but necessary. the end sample comes from a song i encourage you to check out on your own: júlia nem akar a földön járni by napoleon boulevard. i do a lot of sample hunting in spotify-generated international music playlists that have given me some real gems over the years. including the first sample of the next track...

6. can we share a pizza when all this is over

“this” is the pandemic, of course. “we” is me and my old college friends, who i had not seen in several months and who i still have not recently spoken to.

i think the section starting at 1:38 is still some of my finest work. rarely does my own music actively make me emotional but this song manages it. i almost don’t know what else to say - this is such a personal album that oversharing when talking about it is almost inevitable and yet i still struggle to find the words for why some parts resonate with me the most. i do love that i was able to use the little spoken word bit from ghost quartet at the end - i always appreciate when i can include something from a piece of art that genuinely means a lot to me as a person.

7. you never got a chance to meet ariel before she moved away but i think you would’ve liked her

ariel is a real person, i will explain why the song’s named after her but without too many details because i already feel guilty for using her real name. we met, we spent a lot of time together under circumstances that were stressful for both of us, i felt very close to her, then she left. i wanted to honor the impact she had on me somehow, so this track belongs to her.

i think this song is one of the places where the disparate samples blended together work the best as a whole without being too much weird for the sake of weird. keeping it a bit more simple. i would later reuse the “paulstretched sample on the last track for a grand emotional finale” trick on deTached, which is something of a sibling album to this one. maybe that’s the next album breakdown?

~~~

thanks for taking the time to read, it means a lot. this is my first time doing this and i don’t know exactly what to say, but a personal disjointed ramble felt appropriate for a personal disjointed album. i look forward to writing more and i hope you enjoyed

[the-desolated-quill]

A Good Man Goes To War - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen A Good Man Goes To War. I remember at the time thinking it was dumb, but I had forgotten just how dumb it actually was until now. I’ve seen bad Doctor Who before. I’ve seen stupid Doctor Who before. But A Good Man Goes To War reaches new levels of bollocks I didn’t even think was possible to reach. It’s really quite astounding.

So Amy is trapped on Demon’s Run with Eye Patch Lady about to steal her child. And already we’ve hit our first problem. I’ve mentioned in the past how rubbish Moffat is at writing female characters, and this episode is where its most obvious. Eye Patch Lady is taking her baby away and all Amy does in response is throw sassy putdowns at people. Now if someone were to take away my child, I’d be in fucking hysterics. I’d be shouting and screaming and trying to put up a fight. But as I’ve said in the past, Amy isn’t a character. She’s a plot device. And Moffat writes her as such. She is pretty much nothing but a walking womb.

Meanwhile the Doctor is travelling around time and space and calling in markers in order to save Amy. And here is our second problem. Does this sound like the Doctor to you? Expecting favours from people as a repayment for helping them out in the past? Again, I find myself asking, has Steven Moffat ever actually watched Doctor Who before? The Doctor helps people because it’s the right thing to do. He doesn’t do it with the cynical expectation that they’ll return the favour at some point down the line. It’s just wildly out of character for him.

I suppose I’d be a little more comfortable with it if we actually got to know the Paternoster Gang. Find out how they met the Doctor and why they feel they owe him a favour, but we don’t. For some strange reason people really seem to like the Paternoster Gang, but for the life of me I can’t see why. They’re complete non-entities. There’s nothing remotely interesting about them. Strax is basically just the shit comic relief, diminishing any possible threat the Sontarans could have in future stories with every unfunny one liner, and we learn precisely fuck all about Madame Vastra or Jenny other than they’re gay (on a side note, why do they keep casting Neve McIntosh to play Silurians? Don’t get me wrong. She’s a good actor, but the Silurians aren’t like the Sontarans. They’re not clones).

At this point it seems appropriate to talk about LGBT representation. Specifically how rubbish Moffat is at doing it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that Moffat is willing to put gay characters into his stories, but the way he does it is a tad dodgy to say the least. See, when you’re writing a gay character, there needs to be a lot more to them than just being gay. Russell T Davies understood that perfectly. There were a number of queer characters during his tenure as showrunner, most notably Captain Jack Harkness, and they were all written fairly well for the most part. What I especially appreciated was how their sexuality was never the primary focus. Rather it was just another aspect to their character. Look at Jack Harkness. He’s openly pansexual, but they never make a big deal out of it. It’s just casually mentioned and treated as any other character trait. Plus there’s a lot more to Jack than just being pan. He’s an outgoing adventurer. He seeks redemption for his conman days. He puts on a cheery facade to hide the dark traumas he went through during his long, immortal life. This is good LGBT representation because what it does is it normalises his sexuality. The show treats him as any other character. There’s nothing special or different about him. He’s no different from a heterosexual person. He just has different sexual preferences, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong or strange about that, and so the show doesn’t treat it as such. I think that’s a really good message to send to kids.

Then we come to the Moffat era. Madame Vastra and Jenny are gay. That’s their sole defining character traits. That’s not representation. That’s tokenism. Whereas the queer characters of the RTD era felt like real people, the ones in the Moffat era feel like cardboard cutouts with the word ‘gay’ written on their foreheads. And it just gets worse when those two Cleric marines show up:

“We're the Thin Fat Gay Married Anglican Marines. Why would we need names as well?”

Ugh! Okay, let me tell you precisely why I hate this line so much. It’s incredibly important, particularly in a kids show, to represent and normalise the LGBT community. My issue is this. If being gay is perfectly normal (which of course it is)... why is Moffat drawing so much attention to it? That would be like me making a big fuss about the colour of the sky. The only reason you would do that is if there’s something unusual about it, which is precisely the opposite thing you should be conveying. It’s heavily implied that the Thin Fat Gay Couple are the only ones who are gay, and that’s treated as a novelty. They’re such a novelty in fact that they don’t even have names. The reason I hate this so much is because they’re not characters in their own right. Rather they’re the equivalent of a carnival sideshow attraction with Moffat as the ringmaster inviting spectators to pay tuppence to poke the freaks in the cages. Rather than putting in the effort to write gay characters that are actually well developed and complex, he’s just using these shallow caricatures to boast about how seemingly progressive he is. He’s more bothered about winning brownie points and massaging his own ego rather than providing compelling representation for minority figures. 

He treats his female characters the same way. He boasts about how strong Amy and River Song are, but they’re really not. Yes they’re seemingly independent at first glance, but they very frequently fall into the same, tired old sexist tropes we’ve seen dozens of times before and we never actually learn anything significant about them outside of their lives with the Doctor. Look at this very episode. Amy loses her baby, but she never reacts in a believable or empathetic way. She just resorts to her sassy putdowns and pointing guns at people because that’s the only way Moffat knows how to write women. In fact Amy isn’t even that independent. In a rather telling scene, the Doctor asks Rory’s permission to hug Amy as though she’s Rory’s property as opposed to the strong, independent woman she apparently is. Moffat keeps insisting he’s a feminist and yet he doesn’t see anything wrong with a woman not being able to hug another man without her husband’s permission first.

This is the biggest reason why I hate Moffat as a writer so much. It goes beyond the plot hole riddled stories, the convoluted series arcs and the bad characterisation. Moffat is a man more concerned with looking progressive rather than actually being progressive.

So anyway, the Doctor and Rory (who is dressed in his Roman gear for some stupid reason) manage to save Amy without a single drop of blood being spilt (you know, if you don’t count the Clerics that got killed by the Headless Monks during the Doctor’s deception or the millions of Cybermen that the Doctor kills just to make a point. Brief side note, why would the Cybermen know or care where Amy is? Okay their Legion monitors everything in that particular quadrant, but somehow I doubt that extends to pregnant women. Plus it’s highly unlikely the Cybermen would want to divulge any information after you’ve just blown them up).

Actually it’s a shame that the Headless Monks were wasted on this stupid series arc because I actually thought they were a pretty cool idea. The theology is well thought out and it could have potentially served as a damning criticism of organised religion (thinking from the heart as opposed to the head. I like it). Instead we get treated to more bollocks. So the Monks, Clerics, Silence and Eye Patch Lady have all teamed up to kill the Doctor because apparently he’s a very bad man. Why do they think that?

I don’t know! I’ve got no fucking idea! I mean I’m not going to pretend that the Doctor is a saint, but if you want us to believe he’s a dangerous warrior, you’re going to have to show us some actual evidence. And that’s the problem. There isn’t any. Yes the Doctor has killed, but it’s always been for the greater good. To help others who couldn’t defend themselves. He may not be perfect, but he’s a good man at heart. Unless you give me a compelling reason to believe otherwise, I’m just going to snort and roll my eyes. Obviously Moffat isn’t giving us the full story until much later, but all it does is negatively impact this one. Basically, in this episode, the only reason we’re given as to why Eye Patch Lady thinks the Doctor is evil is ‘trust me. He just is.’ Not good enough.

Also, if you want to kill the Doctor, WHY NOT JUST KILL HIM?! He’s standing right there! Don’t let him finish his monologue! Just shoot the fucker! (Also raise your hand if you saw the Flesh baby plot twist coming. If you didn’t, you’re lying).

And it just gets worse when River shows up at the end to lecture the Doctor about how he’s too violent.

Now I’ll repeat that.

River Song, the gun toting archaeologist who massacred a bunch of Silence in her last appearance and clearly enjoyed every minute of it, is chastising the Doctor for being too violent. Fuck off!

And then the moment none of us have been waiting for. Who is River Song? She’s Amy’s daughter.

Um... I mean... OOOOOOH! Well I did NOT see THAT coming! And here’s me thinking she was Rassilon’s second cousin! Silly me!

Yeah, not only was this head thuddingly obvious what with the aquatic surnames and everything, but also Moffat gave the game away right at the beginning. Melody Pond. get it? Give me fucking strength.

What’s even weirder is that the focus is all out of whack. The reveal is directed more at the Doctor than Amy and Rory (you know, her parents). But why would the Doctor care? And more to the point, why should we care? Okay, River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter. That’s some interesting information, but that’s hardly mid-season finale material. What we really care about is who River is in relation to the Doctor. And I suspect that’s what the Doctor is more concerned with too. And while I think of it, how is the Doctor learning about River’s true parentage constitute as ‘his darkest day?’ He doesn’t seem to take the news badly or anything. In fact the opposite.

It’s all so mind-bogglingly stupid. A Good Man Goes To War represents the point where Moffat officially starts to disappear up his own arsehole, weaving a convoluted web of bullshit whilst forgetting all the ingredients that make a good story. The answers we’re provided for some of the series arc mysteries are painfully obvious, unsatisfactory and just plain daft, none of the characters act like actual people or behave in a believable way, and crucially I don’t give a shit about anything that’s happening onscreen because at no point does Moffat ever give me a reason to care. Better get used to this folks because these issues are going to become the staple of the Moffat era going forward.