#i genuinely don't know if this is good

[spyglassrealms]

had a fucking hilarious dream that tumblr replaced the "block" function with the far funnier "glock" function, which did the exact same thing except whenever anyone blocked you a random bullet hole, like a png of a bullet hole, would appear on your blog. discourse blogs were unreadable bc you'd go to the page and the sheer amount of bullet hole pngs stacked over the blogs obscured everything. I woke myself up laughing

[overlymetaromantic]

Dungeon Meshi, or as I like to call it, Marcille's-increasingly-difficult-to-ignore-revelations-that-her-endless-devotion-to-Falin-may-in-fact-be-more-rooted-in-lesbianism-than-she-originally-thought

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[uncanny-tranny]

I recently had to do a project in one of my psych classes, and man, I knew that CBT was used for every little thing, but seeing over and over, "do CBT! CBT is the best for every mental illness!" was so jarring. I'm absolutely biased because of my own experiences, but I just don't think it's as universal a treatment model as it's touted.

If you didn't benefit from CBT, it's not because you're lazy or didn't try hard enough or lacked intelligence or foresight into your own needs. Frankly, it's a therapy model that (I think) shouldn't be the only readily-accessible model and among the only therapy models covered by insurance. Some of us should not be treated in a CBT model and that's okay. It's not a sign of poor character or unreasonable demands, and if you don't think it's a model that works for you, then it's your right to express that!

[barghest-land]

ata tu corazón, mi amor, y arrástralo por la tierra

[ministarfruit]

time to head backstage!

[teaboot]

tranny freak :)

[violent138]

My personal headcanon for Clark Kent interviewing Bruce Wayne (when neither of them know each other's secret identity) is that Clark is the one person Bruce doesn't flirt with and leaves with a halfway coherent interview. A reluctantly impressed Perry White sends Clark repeatedly to get quotes, and work on more articles, leading to Bruce and Clark having several calls, some of which jokingly get called "off the record calls". This goes on for several months before they realize that's just called being friends, they hang out, and they have their identity reveal, it's less jarring because they know a lot about each other and Bruce informs Clark that he's sending Clark a suit made of more durable materials when Bruce realizes how rippable it is during making out.

[raiiny-bay]

Love, Dhes

Parker,

It's unfair how time with you feels so short. How the last 10 years have felt like no time at all. I like to think there are other versions of us out there, somewhere. Maybe in another timeline, another universe. I like to think we find each other no matter where we are or what we're doing. That we're together and happy and I get to love you in a dozen different lifetimes. That's what I hope, anyway. And I hope when this lifetime ends, we get to start over and do it all again. Because once just isn't enough. Not for me. Not with you.

I hope the next 10 years pass slower.

Love, Dhes

[j0ly0n]

[conundrumoftime]

One of the fun things about shipping Haladriel and about Galadriel's story in Rings of Power, for me, is that we know exactly where this is going to end up. And I wanted to babble for a bit about where that place is because I have seen so many people view it as "she is retired to some woods to be a passive wife-and-mother who can do magic but in a mystical New Age-y way", and: no! No.

So a quick overview of where she will end up by LOTR:

Very much not removed from the war against Sauron.

She is constantly mind-battling against Sauron: One of the lines that inspired McKay and Payne's whole show was her talking about this: "I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought." In one of the versions of the Annatar story in Unfinished Tales, Sauron immediately realises she will be his 'chief adversary', and has apparently not changed that assessment 3500 years later.

She co-ordinates joint efforts against Sauron: The White Council that Elrond talks about in LOTR, the combined force of Ring-bearers, wizards and elf-lords that first drives Sauron out of Dol Guldur - she's not just on that, she founded it.

She gets Gandalf back after Moria and the Balrog: Galadriel learns what's happened to Gandalf from the Fellowship when they arrive in Lothlórien. The the Fellowship are sad; the elves of Lothlórien mourn; Celeborn loses it a bit and says Gandalf 'fell into folly'; but Galadriel sends Gwaihir the eagle to get him, returns him to health, updates him on the situation with Boromir, gives him some messages to take to the others, and sends him back on his way.

She is possibly in Lothlórien because of its position of strategic importance: from Unfinished Tales here, she 'saw that Lórien would be a stronghold and point of power to prevent the Shadow from crossing the Anduin in the war that must inevitably come' and that's why she and Celeborn go there. (There are other versions as with almost everything else in Tolkien, but this is one of them.) She's not there to hide away from Events.

2. Calmer than in TROP, but not all-wise and all-sweet and still pretty scary.

She is still tempted by power and world domination: "I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer [...] In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the morning and the night!"

And, she doesn't just turn down the One Ring because it's abstractly eeeevil. She turns it down because she knows what she, specifically, would do with it. Sam sees a vision of the Shire, and tells her "I wish you'd take his Ring. You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up the Gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folk pay for their dirty work," to which she says that yes, she would: "That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it."

And saying she wants to rule the world here is not me joking about! This is Tolkien describing that moment in LOTR:

It was not until two long ages more had passed, when at last all that she had desired in her youth came to her hand, the Ring of Power and the dominion of Middle-earth of which she had dreamed, that her wisdom was full-grown and she rejected it

People are scared of her: The only scary moment we directly see is the Ring temptation, but she does other unsettling things. When she meets the Fellowship she tests them by reading their minds and offering something they really want to see if it would make them "turn aside from the road and leave the Quest and the war against Sauron to others." (She offers Sam a garden; the One Ring later on tempts him with the same thing.) Even the hobbits are a bit disturbed by this and Boromir, who's already said he doesn't want to go into Lothlórien because people who do that never leave again, absolutely does not trust her.

Éomer, a few chapters later:

'Then there is a Lady in the Golden Wood, as old tales tell!' he said. 'Few escape her nets, they say. These are strange days! But if you have her favour, then you are also net-weavers and sorcerers, maybe.'

She's scary! She's ancient and powerful and people are scared of her.

3. Married, but not in the character-limiting way the nerdbros want it to be and would have you believe it is.

I am not telling anyone they should ship Galadriel/Celeborn or even find it interesting just because I do, but, the angry nerdbros fancasting Celeborn as Henry Cavill and talking about how he'll come back to tame her and tidy her neatly out of the narrative are writing their own little AU headcanons because that is not what's in the text.

She's the more powerful one. Partly because she's one of the 'High Elves' - she's Noldor and has lived in Valinor seen the light of the Trees - which for various reasons about the way Tolkien's elves work just makes her more powerful, partly because she has a Ring of Power and Celeborn doesn't. It's her Mirror; she's the one reading people's minds; she's the one locked in endless mental battles with Sauron; she's the one the Rohirrim (whose lands border Lothlorien's) tell each other scary stories about. Celeborn at no point ever seems to have an issue with this, and calls her his 'treasure'.

They work together. Even in a big-action-sequences sense: after Sauron's defeat, Celeborn 'led the host of Lorien over Anduin in many boats' to Dol Guldur, where Galadriel 'threw down its walls and laid bare its pits'. But the rest of the time, too: she says of him that 'together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat'.

You really get the sense that they have been married for a loooooong time. An actual sequence of events in LOTR, somewhat condensed:

The Fellowship reveal there's a Balrog in Moria;

Celeborn goes "!!!!", complains about dwarves waking it up and says he'd never have let Gimli into Lothlorien if he'd known that;

Galadriel smacks Celeborn down for being rude to their guest;

Celeborn apologises to Gimli;

Galadriel tells the Fellowship that Celeborn is accounted the wisest of elves;

Boromir says something about "old wives' tales";

Celeborn, whose wife is one of the oldest beings in Middle-earth, tells Boromir not to be so dismissive because "old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know";

Galadriel hands Celeborn a drink.

Whatever is going on here is clearly something that works for them, is what I'm saying! And you don't have to find their marriage interesting just because I do, of course; but what it's not is some trad fantasy of domestic subservient-wife anything.

So where her TROP story ends up is ultimately with LOTR Galadriel: powerful, important, tempted to rule the world, a bit calmer than in TROP, a bit happier than in TROP, co-ordinating big strategic efforts in the war, married to someone who's got her back and adores her and they fall out a bit sometimes but generally work pretty well together, and still having Sauron constantly trying to get into her head. I am fine with this! I am more than fine with this.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Lackadaisy Enrichment

[wishesofeternity]

The thing about HotD is that it while it absolutely minimizes the agency and ambition of both Rhaenyra and Alicent, this is specifically used to glorify Rhaenyra and frame her as righteous while condemning Alicent and framing her lacking. That's the key difference in both their textual portrayals that has directly led to 90% of the fandom hailing Rhaenyra as the second coming of Christ while spewing the most hateful vitriol at Alicent just for existing. But y'all are not prepared for that conversation.

[blueskittlesart]

*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?

tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.

[steddieas-shegoes]

falling again

for @starrystevie's birthday. i hope your day is as stunningly beautiful as you are and that this super short thing is something that brings you some joy ♥️

cw: mild blood and injury | rated e, 18+, minors dni

♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

nothing can prepare you for the moment you fall.

whether it's while walking, on a roller coaster, or in love, you can never truly be ready for the stomach-swooping, heart-stopping moment of realization.

steve's had this feeling plenty.

when he was young, he fell from a branch of a tree and nearly broke his leg. tommy rushed to get his mom, who scolded him the entire drive to the emergency room, claiming that he must get this silly adventurous side from his father. but the moment before he fell, he saw blue and green, the sky and the grass meeting together to make a serene picture before the pain blistered across his skin. even in the peace, he felt a sense of dread.

when he fell for nancy, it was much the same, but all he saw was pink. her lightly tinted chapstick, her favorite sweater, the notebook she always jotted homework assignments in. steve felt that softness pillowing his head as he dreamt about her every night, picturing a future that would be taken before he could even hit the ground. but even in his dreams, a blackness curled around the edges.

falling into the upside down isn't graceful, but it gets easier with practice. as he falls one last time, he sees gray and red, sadness and guilt and blood. it's all dread. it's all anger. it's pain and regret. and it's a fall he hopes is worth the nausea.

when he finds eddie, alone, sitting in a corner of a home he doesn't recognize, dust floating around him as a warning, he falls again. he doesn't recognize the sinking feeling, the sharp intake of breath, the moment when the world spins and gravity forgets to have a purpose. he focuses on saving this man who did everything to save the town that hated him.

he helps him stand.

"i can't walk," eddie gasps just as steve sees why.

his ankle is broken, much like dustin's was. it's bloody and angled wrong, a sign of weakness to creatures that surely lurk in the shadows waiting for any sound or movement of their prey. it wasn't obvious at first because steve was too caught up in him being alive.

"i can carry you."

and he does.

steve carries him for half a mile, meets up with el at the same spot he came through. no one says anything.

steve falls, but this time, it's into gold and orange and yellow. this time, he has eddie with him.

he doesn't think about that falling feeling again until he's sitting by eddie's bedside in the hospital. he's sitting in a chair, alone except for eddie asleep in his bed and the constant whirring and beeping of machines making sure he stays alive and heals, when he feels it. a turn of the stomach. a pull in his chest. a tingling in his hands.

the silver of eddie's rings catch his eye. despite being covered in dirt and grime from hell, the rings shine.

steve looks at eddie's calm face, his eyes closed as he finally gets to rest in a safe place and feel no pain.

he feels his throat tighten around an inhale, his fingers clench without his permission. his leg bounces.

he's restless and the only reason he can think as to why is because he's falling.

he doesn't say anything, not to eddie, or robin when she gives him a weird look, or dustin when he outright asks why he seems so jumpy.

he doesn't say he's afraid. he doesn't say that something is bubbling inside him, begging to pour out, make a mess of something that should be simple. he doesn't say that the reason he never gave up on eddie is because he'd already been at the top of the hill and there was no backing out now.

but he can't refuse eddie when he asks.

they're finally alone again days later, and eddie watches steve puttering around his hospital room, tidying up the mess the kids left behind during visiting hours. steve can feel his eyes on him, but doesn't look back. if he looks, he'll hit the ground, and he's been hovering inches above for too long to let it happen right now.

"have a seat, stevie."

"in a minute."

"steve."

eddie's tone tells him he sees him hovering above the ground. eddie's voice says that he knows the fall was hard on him, and that he knows he's trying to stay off the ground.

when steve looks at him, his eyes say he's ready to catch him.

when steve sits, the fall is over, and the coasting starts.

there's a corkscrew later, when eddie gets an infection and has to stay in the hospital for another week.

and another drop when he gets home and finds that the town still hates him, that his uncle was forced out of hawkins because no one understands what he did to protect them all.

an unexpected turn leads to their first fight, the one that almost had steve giving up on roller coasters altogether.

but eddie never lets go of his hand. he's in the seat next to him, holding tight, making sure that they can feel the butterflies together. even when they have to leave hawkins, and the kids, and when eddie can't see his uncle wayne for months, he keeps steve next to him. even when his scars don't heal right and he hates the way the one on his neck looks, he lets steve's hand cover his.

and when holding hands isn't quite enough, when they both have to freefall from a plane not knowing exactly where they'll land, eddie's arms wrap around steve, holding him so they can pull the parachute together.

when they find that the darkness is too much, they chase light with hands against scars, reminding each other that there’s still blood flowing in their veins. lips press against freckles and dimples, tongues trace imperfections that feel like a gift.

grips tighten against thighs, legs parting while fingerprint bruises are left behind.

they’re made to fit into each other, push and pull like the tide, giving more than the other knows how to receive. they take turns stretching each other open until they’re sore the next day, smiling to themselves and each other as they go about their day with a reminder of their night.

steve and eddie become steveandeddie, and just when steve thinks the roller coaster has reached the station and he can get off the ride, it starts all over again. every time is a new fall, a drop that he knows will just end in more pleasure and happiness and fun.

nothing prepared steve for this fall, not even the ones he had before. but part of the beauty of falling for eddie munson was the unknown.