#honestly this is still the only product on earth that has made me so vividly feel real GREED

[abessive-art]

Reading a review for Kim’s aerostatic jacket crying + shaking + seething with envy

[partyinthemysterymachine]

🌻🌻🌻🌻 🚜 it's like a little garden!

hello lil garden <3 im gonna pick all the floweurs :3

there are like two dreams i remember pretty vividly: one, i had stigmata. (fun fact: i’m a jew) i woke up and i could feel the pain in my palms and feet. i was like. maybe in fifth or sixth grade. everything happens when i’m 13 or 14 because i have exactly zero memory and Bad Brain Disorder Origin Years just makes everything a sad mockery of mashed potatoes

the second dream i remember vividly was essentially that i discovered a door to Wonderland (and listen here u lil shits: i’m not a big Wonderland person, not even a Mad Hatter kinda gal despite whatever my past has said about me, and also my Jervis Tetch is super valid and prob one of the best out there you’re welcome) in this honestly gorgeous old mansion. the kind that’s just. tons of dark wood, narrow halls, winding and yet there’s a lot of natural light, like gorgeous. and i found a door to Wonderland and holy fucking shit

what i would give to actually find a door to that Wonderland, bye y’all peace it’s been a gas but i gotta run

so after i left i wanted to go back, and i had a rough time finding the portal and ok long story short it turned out i had to go deal with a unicorn cult (it was more intense than that but hey, cults amirite) in order to get the reagents to go back to Wonderland and i suddenly found myself falling in a huge cave and the spirit healer from WoW was there so that says a lot about where i was in my life at the time

still tryna go back to Wonderland

i made this guy in Sims4 and he’s really fuckin cute and i named him Lane Morgans. i’m gonna put his tag on this post so maybe you’ll go take a look at him and see how amazing he is but i’m just gonna jerk myself off here too

(also sidenote, Salutations (my farmer in sdv, also top notch) is his uncle and when i wrote up his first char sheet i fucked up his last name bc his last name can’t be Morgans, but i’ll give him another one Soon(tm) (no i won’t))

Lane is a retired rollercoaster engineer who is now writing romance novels. he’s doing absolutely amazingly and his twitter a mess in a good way. he wishes he was Chuck Tingle’s bff. his novels aren’t modeled after Tingle’s (hehe), he writes very well rounded, interesting, and diverse romance that doesn’t take itself seriously. because i do what i want, he’s pretty well known and on several bestsellers.

he’s like in his 40s by now i think and he’s a late transitioner. he’s a divorcee (he and his ex wife are really good friends it’s all good) and he had his son Ellis awhile back (who is just a whole dutch cookie tin of crayons and then some). at a singles mixer he met a gardener who would be his future husband and everything is amazing now

also side braids and ponytails run in the family i guess

(actually Salutations has been side ponytail like all his life and Lane was enchanted by it so he side braids. Salutations is very proud)

i still think about it honestly i was really into keeping up to date with junk food news and food product for a while there but the popular sites were starting to piss me off with their rating systems and reviews like holy entitlement and superiority complex, batman! so i dropped out of it, like the only one that is still super valid is onsecondscoop.com tho it’s been a real hot minute since

i have a lot of my parents’ vinyls and that includes The Beatles white album with some water damage bc i guess my dad knocked something over at some point but also the good stuff like Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt, America, Seals and Crofts, a lot of musicals, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens (now Yusuf), Earth, Wind, and Fire, Marvin Gaye and more!!! (and i left a whole shitload in chicago too) and it’s very telling about my musical tastes. 

i had ordered Arctic Monkeys’s AM album and it skipped on No. 1 Party Anthem and some other song and so i was like :\ and ordered another and you’ll never guess,

a few songs stand out to me:

Gordon Lightfoot’s Approaching Lavender 

Seals and Crofts’s Hummingbird

Fleetwood Mac’s Silver Springs

James Taylor’s Never Die Young, Line ‘Em Up, Shower The People

(the Fleetwood Mac and James Taylor songs are specifically the ones i was introduced to with, as in the Live versions of Silver Springs and Shower The People)

for those who don’t know i’m also a huge Enya fan (LOTR was good to me) and Dark Sky Island was sick af btw, and also Donna Lewis’s entire Now In A Minute album is pretty fuckin close to my soul

however probably my favorite song, most sacred to me, hard to explain it but just the. whew the memories attached is I Love You Always Forever

furthermore a song that still really creeps me out (that also has an origin story attached to it) is 98 Degrees a cappella cover of She’s Out Of My Life (yep! still no thanks)

i grew up around a cappella since my mom is like a lifetime member of the Sweet Adelines womens a cappella organization or w/e so yeah and i’m not ognna link this on bc it’s a bitch to find just by itself, but Lida Rose from The Music Man is also a fist clench...

now on a more depressing note but one i have mention, Spice Girls’s Viva Forever is uuuhhh hhhhhhhhh hhhhhhnnnnmmmmmmmmmmm 

anyway my dad used to travel overseas for work and when i was younger he went to Germany (and he’d go back there several times after) and he brought me back my first jar of Nutella. naturally i lost my entire shit, and imagine my surprise when Nutella got really big in America lmao he’d brought that jar home like. uh. 7, 9 years prior?? idk guys, ages and math, but it was funny to me

best fucking gingerbread recipe is by Nigella Lawson and i found it in her book How To Be A Domestic Goddess and it’s right fucking here ur welcome 

i’m definitely one of those people who picks a book with a cool cover, reads a couple pages and then decides if i’m taking it or not and that’s how i found like so many good books

ask me about The Passage series and how i am both in love with it and kinda mad (also lmao @ the failed TV show y’all fuckin dumb as hell)

[doctorstarinken]

One Time For TeedaMac

Troye,

I’ll never forget the day we met. I pulled up to the studio at CalArts not expecting much to be honest. Nikko had told me he was going to bring a rapper and I my general attitude was “Yea, okay. Sure.” 

You were a big dude, man. But you were a different big dude. Kind of like a Patrice O’Neal, Shaq, Biggie kind of big dude. Physically big, huge personality, big laugh, and more importantly you had a huge heart. There was a quiet confidence you displayed while you patiently waited your turn to hop on the mic that evening. Most people get -- myself included -- don’t really know how to act inside a studio. I’ve learned to tame that part of myself by being really, really enthusiastic and be really encouraging of everyone’s creative process. You’re not like that though. You just sat back patiently, cracked jokes, and picked our brains on our collective views on music. 

That’s the other thing that won me over. I could sense that you were just a big music lover and music nerd. You asked me my views on trap, and I gave you some bullshit generic response to which you replied, “That doesn’t really tell me your opinion though.” I respected that. Before you even knew me, you had a charming gall to you to say what needed to be said. 

Fast forward to when you got behind the mic.

Man... there are a few musical moments I remember vividly. The first time I conducted an orchestra, my undergraduate audition, my first day as a contracted/hired songwriter in a large studio, the first rehearsal I ever had with the lady who later become my wife, and the first time I heard you jump behind that Neumann. 

Everything about your performance that evening was so flawless. Your voice, the lyrics, the flow, content, vibe, et al. You just had everything, man. And the best thing about it, you were fucking cooler than ice cold, bruh. You can spot talent by how hard -- or in this case, how not hard-- someone is working. There has always been such an ease in your delivery. Even when you fucked up, it was done with grace. 

__

Just as I’ll never forget the evening we met, I’ll never forget the day Nikko called me to deliver the bad news. I was in Honolulu teaching underprivileged high-school students how to film score using affordable software and was lucky enough to work in a truly world-class studio. The folks who contracted me were also kind enough to allow me to use the studio to work on whatever projects I wanted to work on as long as I had finished working on the student projects beforehand. 

It was exciting. I was flown out to Hawaii, was given a ridiculous per diem, didn’t have to pay out of pocket for lodging, and more importantly, I was working in the same studio that where a lot of my favorite records were made. 

The plan was to get a lot of post-production out of the way for our project. Seemed like the perfect situation. Get flown out, work in a dope studio, and work on your own personal projects after-hours. What could possibly go wrong?

Just like I’ll never forget the evening that I first heard you rap, I’ll never be able to shake the feeling I got when Nikko called me and told me you were diagnosed with cancer. 

__

I gotta be honest. I still can’t believe you were diagnosed with cancer. I still can’t believe you didn’t beat it. I still can’t believe you’re gone.

Intellectually speaking, I know you’re not here. What I mean to say is that, I recall visiting you before you got transferred to Keck and that I recall driving up to Fresno to see you for the first time since I got the news. I remember the day you called me and told me you were in a hospital in LA and that I could come visit you. I remember the weekends I’d spend with you kicking your ass on 2k and saying something along the lines of “Son, even if your make-a-wish was to get better at 2k, I’d still kick your ass. Fuck you. Guard this money ass three pointer.” I remember making jokes about how I preferred when you were incapacitated because at least you didn’t talk back. Honestly I think the nurses were a bit shocked, but we just had that relationship. We could say the most fucked up things to each and laugh about it. 

During the day of your memorial, your pastor said that you fought. You fought everyday to survive and you battled this bullshit disease until you couldn’t and that the rest of us in the memorial should do the same. That is to fight everyday for life. 

Truthfully, I haven’t fought everyday since you passed. It’s difficult. In my own selfish understanding, it wasn’t just that I lost a friend and a brother, I lost my fucking career. I poured everything I had into our record and while it’s very painful for me to listen back to it, I know it’s fucking good. It’s one of those things where I actually don’t care for people’s opinions about this record because I know it’s good and if someone doesn’t like it, it’s not for them. We made this record for us and we were about ready to usher in a new paradigm shift in hip-hop.

I know that probably sounds hyperbolic as fuck, but what good does believing in a record I can no longer perform in public do for me? Whether we were actually as good as I think we are is irrelevant, I knew we were going to the very top because I finally had a proper MC in my corner who saw eye-to-eye with me and an MC who could body any piece of music I gave them. 

You elevated what I wrote. Without you, everything I wrote were just these bland academic exercises in showing people how well I can music. You gave my work heart and soul and turned it into art. 

But now you’re gone and you have been since October. And as much as I’d love to fondly look back at our short time together and as much as I like to imagine of what we were both robbed of, I don’t think it’s really healthy for me to do so anymore. 

__

I’ve always wondered about the human soul since I was a child. My grandfather died when I was very young, followed by my uncle, and during my teenage years my other uncle quite literally died in my arms. I’m not a stranger to death. I grew up christian so every Sunday I was reminded of the death and resurrection of Christ. 

But for whatever reason, your passing really hit me hard. I wish I could say that I’d see you again some day, but I really don’t know where we go when our time on Earth is done and I think that’s what scares me the most. The idea that all I’ll ever have are the memories I shared with you is the scariest part. We didn’t know each other that long, but we grew close. You got to know me and I got to know you through our shared work. The music I presented to you was a tangible representation of my best self as expressed through sound. In turn, you gave me the best representation of yourself through your lyrics. 

Collaboration is a sacred bond. My friend, Max, who I so wish you got to meet, told me that when he got on the phone with me to console me after he had learned I was grieving your loss. While there are a lot of things I don’t know about the nature of reality, I can say with full confidence that my favorite thing about being an artist is the communion that occurs where people are in a room trying to create something out of nothing. While I don’t know where we go after we die, I do believe in the divine because I have experienced with when working with talented people like yourself. There is a quiet agreement that we are all trying transcend our current situation and hopefully share that with the world. 

Teeda, you were more than a friend and collaborator. You were my brother. I didn’t grow up with biological brothers, but there is an old adage that goes “you don’t have to be blood to be brothers.” While blood is thicker than water, the frequencies we pushed out into existence is the only connection I need to call you family. 

While I wish I could wipe you from my memory as having to live with the fact that one of the most beautiful humans I’ve ever known has left at such a young age is too painful, I know that your spirit will always live on. I see your face in Alonzo’s and I’m always so hyped whenever Joss shares pictures of your son on her IG.  

I wish it had worked out differently. I wish you had beat cancer and that we had gone on the road and fucking killed stages from here all the way to Manila. I wish we had more time to make more music and that we could have made your wildest dreams come true. I wish you could have shown your mom just how ridiculously talented her son is. (She shared me that story on how she asked her A&R friend to talk you out of rapping only for him to be like “Yo, he’s actually super dope. He’s a little raw, but if he keeps at it he can be something.”) I’m not sure if you heard, but at the end of your days at City of Hope, your mom would play our song all the time and the nurses and medical staff would always look in amazement that it was our song playing. One dude even said that you sound like J. Cole. I mean... I’m not the biggest J. Cole fan, but I know you loved him and thought he was better than Kendrick. I still think that opinion is mad trash, but you’re dead now so I guess you literally took that stance to your grave. Respect. 

I had so many plans for us. I really did believe we could have done whatever the fuck we wanted to. You made us that good. But I have to let those plans go as I have to let you go. I wish I didn’t have to, but I gotta do like you and fight for my life everyday that I’m on this planet.

Working with you to craft the songs we have crafted will always be one of the highest honors I will ever undertaken in my life. Knowing that someone as talented as you considered me a friend, brother, and a collaborator will always be one of the highest compliments that anyone can ever bestow upon me. 

Rest easy, OG. I truly hope we can chop it up in another dimension when my time here is through. I’ll keep a lookout on Zo for you. I promise. 

-DMR

[aki-chan2014]

7,8 and 38 for the Meme for Fic Writers, if you don't mind answering them!

7.Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Oh my holy cheesebeans. Honestly, I’ve written so many fics, it’s a touch difficult to pick just one. But here, I’ve picked one! It’s from the one-shot 'How It Ends (And Begins, Once Again)’.

Izayoi could picture her here, how utterly ecstatic shewould be by everything here, pulling out and inspecting everything, possiblyeven deciding to make something right there and then and donning thestrawberry-patterned apron hanging on the kitchen door (it looked like one he’dgiven her for a past birthday, but newer) before proceeding to do just that.Perhaps he’d be roped in with helping, but it was not as if he had a clue.Sure, he had spent countless hours over the years, sitting in one kitchen oranother, watching her do her thing, but that was the point. He was neverwatching the procedure, it was always her. How she moved around the kitchen,the way she’d run her fingers along the packet sides or the labels on thebottles before selecting what she wanted from the cupboard, how she carried thedifferent bits of equipment to and from where she needed them to be. Theexpressions she had-frowns, smiles, blank concentration, confusion-whenmeasuring out ingredients, when tasting the mixture, testing the oven, watchingher creations cook, taste-testing the final product. The sounds of herfrustrations when it didn’t go right and her utter delight when it did. He hadmemorised it all, and as a result, he could conjure her up here, and now, alltoo easily. It was almost as if she was really here, right now, and he wasalmost disappointed when he reached out to touch her shoulder and reality madea fool of him.

How, exactly, do Imanage, existing like this for the rest of time?? It was not as if otherrooms didn’t evoke other similar potent feelings in him, other imaginings ofRuruka. But there was something particular about the kitchen, and thosememories. Perhaps because he knew that while she was in the swing of things,while she was in the creative zone, her demons had little to no power over her.Perhaps. Either way, he knew that from this point on, it was here that he wouldconstantly be making a lonely fool out of himself with his memories. And yet,it was here he wanted to stay the most.

So he got up from the chair he had been sitting on, and wentto make himself a cup of coffee (and, imagining Ruruka doing her thing, madesure he wasn’t getting in her way while he was doing it). Once he had done so,he went back to the chair and sat down again, and continued to watch her.

It just flows really well, don’t you think? :) I certainly do.

8.Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

“So, the school festival.”

Tada wrote ‘school festival’ on the blackboard and drewthree circles around it. Adding in a few arrows around the circle, he wasreminded of launching the Ending the End Class project, back near the beginningof the year. We are making progress.

“Does anyone have any ideas they want to put forward?Anything at all?? We might even be able to combine ideas, too.”

“Well, it’s going to need to be pretty amazing, right?”Hirigi said. “I mean, to get people to thisplace.”

“Yeah, it’s gotta be worth the trek up here.” Jori agreed.

“In other words, we need to be out of the ordinary. No maidcafes or anything like that.” Kuroba stated. Tada nodded.

“That’s right! Not that there’s anything with the usual farethat school festivals come up with, but I think we should definitely play onour distinctiveness.”

“I’d say Kinomoto-kun’s flowers should do the trick in thatregard.” Koujiro commented. “I mean, it’s freaking autumn and they’re still bright. Like, how does that even work???”

“Well…” Kinomoto prepared to launch into a long explanation,only for Ruko to cheerfully go over and cover his mouth playfully. After a fewmoments of squirming, she released him, and grinned before going back to herseat. Kinomoto, to his credit, didn’t seem particularly fazed or annoyed as heblinked a little and then spoke again.

“In any case, the flowers that we do are just a littlething, really. The real beauty comes from the nature that was already herebefore us. I think that we should do something that highlights this to thegeneral public. Maybe then they’d understand how wonderful the earth is…”

“That would work.” Eriko agreed, and she wrote this on theboard, next to one of the arrows.

“I agree!” Tada said. “So, anything else??”

“What about a caféwith a different sort of theme? Like, a theme relating to the food?” Akirapiped up.

“So…what, like cakes specifically? Or maybe a particularkind of cuisine? Oooh, we could recreate an all-American diner! That would beso cool!!” Koujiro enthused.

“I think it would be cool if we could make food from adifferent culture.” Tsukuda commented, half shrugging.

“French food, maybe.” Eriko commented randomly. “Or perhapssomething else European? Italian cuisine is supposed to be good, I’ve heard.”

“Oh, it really is!” Haru agreed. “One of my uncles took meto an Italian restaurant downtown when I was about 12, and I really enjoyedit!”

“Yeah, I like those ideas too. “ Tada said. “My mother’sclass did a restaurant for their school festival, themselves, as it happens. Aramen one, to be specific.”

“Well, that’s rather ordinary.” Ayako sounded disappointed.

“What if I said that it was ramen made with ingredientssourced from this very forest?” When everyone stared at Izzy, he shrugged.

“I was talking to them the other day, and they happened tomention it.”

“Yeah, Izzy-kun’s right about that.”

“That’s pretty cool though! I don’t think I could have everthought of that!” Haru exclaimed.

“How come you didn’t suggest it yourself, Tada-Chan??” Rukowanted to know.

“I didn’t want to, well, overtake the festival or anything.It’s not just about me and my mother, it’s about all of us.”

“Still!” Tsukuda retorted. “You could have at least put iton the mindmap.”

“Well, I can always do that now.” Tada cheerily replied. Hecarefully wrote ‘themed restaurants’ next to another arrow, then did a fewother arrows coming off of that one, and wrote down some of the specific ideasmentioned, including that of the ramen. Then, he turned and invited more ideas.

“A games room?? Like, arcade games?”

“Something for kids?? Like, an interactive playground??”

“A mini movie theatre!”

“Maybe a shop?? We could make little things, pretty things,and sell them!”

“A kissing booth!!!”

“What about a mini concert?? We’ve got some musically talentedpeople here, after all!”

“Or we could put on a play!!!”

“A museum.”

It took a moment, but the quiet suggestionreached every corner of the classroom, and everyone else’s clamouring ceased.

This is from Chapter 48 (‘Welcome to the Museum’ part 1) of 'Ending the End Class’. As with Q7, I had trouble picking a particular dialogue scene from any of my fics, but I decided to choose this one, because I remember it vividly as a scene that came to me almost fully formed, from the moment I accepted Hana into the story’s cast. Certain things were tweaked as the cast formed more, and then as I wrote more of the story it evolved more, but even so, I had this very clear image of the conversation stopping with Hana’s suggestion of a museum, and what that would look like. And it was one of those scenes that, when I actually wrote it, it came out exactly as I envisioned.

There’s also a little snippet from the as-of-yet unpublished part 2B of my fic 'Before the Beginning, and After’. To be honest, though it’s probably not my objectively best work, emotionally it is-this fic is pretty precious to me and even though I’m about 100% sure nobody’s even reading it I’m really looking forward to finishing and publishing the final part. Anyway, though it’s still admittedly in a first-draft stage, meaning the final version may look a little different,here’s the particular snippet:

“I….I…..”

What, what do I say?What am I meant to think of this?

“If I did join the police out of school, can I say it’syou?”

“What?”

“If I was asked, ‘what made you want to join the police’ canI say that it was you, like you’d probably say that it was your uncle thatinspired you?” she explained.

There was a beat of silence after she said this, and onceagain she had the distinct sense that she had said something stupid. But to hersurprise, it was Naoko whose cheeks seemed to be red.

“Well, if that’s the truth, then there’s no reason for youto not say it.” She answered.

“Okay.”

It’s from the POV of the character Hanayo, talking to the other third-year in Niðavellir, Naoko, while they’re guarding the school one night, talking about their futures after graduating. Admittedly the full scene provides better context, but it’s essentially a look into the mind of a character who’s never really thought about her future and has always been afraid to-here, for the first time, she’s getting to think about her future in a way that actually shows her a glimmer of hope.

 38.Talk about a review that made your day.

The very lovely CandiedStars left a wonderful review on my most recent chapter of the SHSL Survivors’ Society. I’d had a lot of trouble with writing that chapter, and knowing that someone really enjoyed it made me feel better about it. Not to mention, what a honour it is being the author of someone’s favourite SYOC!