#i literally saw a meme on facebook saying that

[playingonedchess]

steaktake more like misteak

[elliespassagerprincess]

can u pretty please with a cherry on top make a part 4 to the milf abby 😔🙏🏼💟

Headcannons: Milf!abby anderson x reader (part 4)

part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4

Authors note: Ladies and pookies I'm back! This last week has been the worst and most painful week of my life but, I'm back and better than ever <3

☆ Milf Abby who gets your initials tattooed on her ring finger.

You felt her calloused hands grab your waist as you stood admiring the ring she got you.

“it’s pretty” you muttered

“you’re pretty” she said with a smile

“shut up Abby” you shoved her to the side as you felt your face grow hot.

The two of you stood in silence for a while, enjoying the peace and quiet you both rarely get with Aubrey

“you know” Abby started “if the bride gets to wear an engagement ring, what about their partner?”

Your brows furrow, at the thought.

“that actually makes a lot of sense Abby. We should get you a ring-“

but before you could even finish you sentence Abby lifted up her right hand revealing the tattoo.

“what the fuck Abigail”

☆ Milf Abby who refers to you as her wife long before the wedding.

“Yeah my wife and I went there”

“she’s my wife”

“my wife likes that show” “you know what they say happy wife happy life”

☆ Milf Abby who buys you white dresses as gifts just to see what you would look like in white, because she really couldn’t wait for the wedding.

☆ Milf Abby who’s literally a perfectionist and plans the wedding without a planner.

“No, you aren’t folding the napkins right” “that isn’t the right shade of pink”

☆ Milf Abby who asks her daughter to be the ring bearer and the maid of honor.

Aubrey looked at you with curious eyes as Abby placed the box onto her lap.

“dude what’s this?”

“Aubrey I’m not your friend, who taught you that word?” Abby sighed

“grandpa did” “of course he did. He really needs to stop-“

 “Abby lets focus on the box” you interrupted her, knowing this conversation wasn’t going anywhere.

“Can I open it please?” Aubrey asked you, with a polite smile.

“of course she’s nice to you! You little gremlin-“

“Abby!”

Abby felt Aubrey pinch her arm at the gremlin comment

“why would you-“

“ok” you said with a stern voice “lets open the box, you guys can fight later”

sometimes it felt like you were living with children.

Aubrey’s small hands grabbed the box, eagerly tearing away the wrapping paper. In the box lay a simple white dress, with paper rings. The little girl gently grabbed the fabric, inspecting it. She saw the rings and it took her a while to get it.

“I’m carrying the rings?!” she yelled

“and we were hoping you’d be our maid of honor too” you pulled out a basket from behind you and the girls smile grew.

☆ Milf Abby who begs you to let her go with you when you go wedding dress shopping.

“please”

“Abby its bad luck”

“fuck the bad luck”

☆ Milf Abby who sends you thumbs down emoji’s the whole time you were gone.

☆ Milf Abby who doesn’t want to sleep in separate houses the night before the wedding.

☆ Milf Abby who sends you cringe Facebook minion memes and jokes because she misses you. This was your first night apart in months, but she knew after tonight she would be waking up with you next to her for the rest of her life.

☆ Milf Abby who barley slept that night. She wasn’t sure if she was nervous or excited.

☆ Milf Abby who gets ready extremely early. Her hair was out of her normal tight braid, and the hair fell to her shoulders. Her black suit hugging her in all the right places.

☆ Milf Abby who starts at herself in the mirror too long, and she suddenly notices her wrinkles, she suddenly notices the grey hairs.

☆ Milf Abby who gets cold feet.

☆ Milf Abby who starts crying because you didn’t deserve this.

You needed someone younger, some who doesn’t have back pains and complains about their joints hurting. Someone who wasn’t turning 50 soon.

Someone who won’t die soon.

You needed more than Abby.

Abby’s loud sobs filled the room as she looked at herself in the mirror.

She should call this off.

“Abby?” her head snapped to the direction of the door. It was her dad. She quickly wiped her eyes, and she sniffed a couple of times. “hey dad” he slowly walked towards her, and he gently sat next to her, putting his hand on her shoulder he muttered “you okay?”

The blonde sitting next to him broke out in sobs, her head fell to his shoulder “oh honey” he breathed as he held her close.

“Abby what’s wrong?” He felt his daughter tremble next to him. “i- I’m keeping her back in life” Abby started, and Jerry just sat and listened to her.

“I’m so old I’m probably going to die soon. Who wants to be married to a grandma? One of these days I won’t be able to get out of bed without complaining. And she’s so pretty and young- she-she deserves everything, and what can I give her? My future dentures?”

“have you ever thought that this is what she wanted?”

Abby lifted her head to what her father said.

“The fact she’s marrying you proves that the love she has for you is endless. She’s willing to look after you when you do get those dentures. She wants you as much as you want her Abby, don’t let your insecurities stop you from being with the love of your life. And yeah, you’ll get old, but she’ll be with you”

☆ Milf Abby who goes to the venue earlier than everyone to make sure everything is ok.

☆ Milf Abby who stood at the altar with sweaty palms, waiting for your arrival.

☆ Milf Abby who started crying as soon as you start walking down the aisle.

 ☆ Milf Abby who couldn’t take her eyes off you the whole ceremony because she realized that this was it. She was marrying you.

☆ Milf Abby who shed more tears than you did during your vows and she cried even more when Aubrey came with the rings.

☆ Milf Abby who practically jumps on you when they said she could kiss you.

You felt her hands grab your face, and she brought you in for a rough kiss.

The crowned screamed around the two of you and you heard the clicks of all the cameras. You felt Abby’s lips smile against yours before she pulled away putting her head against yours.

She whispered “I’ll love you forever”

“I love you too abs, forever and always”

[chil-aglia]

This is gonna sound strange, but can you give us some incorrect quotes for the rottmnt OC’s? (If you know what incorrect quotes are) I just thought it be fun and maybe someone might draw it 😂

Omg dude, I love incorrect quotes, you don’t even know—

So of course I’ll give you some.

Ronin whenever he has to team up with the Mad Dogs

Raph: You killed him.

Ronin: Actually I believe he died of natural causes.

Leo, checking the body: knife to the neck.

Mikey: I thought you said he died of natural causes.

Ronin: There is nothing more natural then dying from a knife to the neck.

Donnie, nodding: What would be unnatural is if he survived.

Ronin: See Donnie gets it.

Adriaen: Donnie's a lab explosion away from being a mad scientist, that doesn't help your case.

Raph: WHO ATE MY LEFTOVERS?! WHEN I FOUND THAT PUNK I'M GONNA-

Adriaen: It was me.

Raph: Give them some more. You haven't eat much have you?

Adriaen: That’s not funny.

Ronin: I thought it was funny.

Adriaen: You don’t count. You started laughing in the middle of a funeral because you started thinking of a meme you saw on Facebook.

Mikey: Sometimes I drink milk straight from the container.

Leo: The cow??

Donnie: What?

Raph and Adriaen: Leo, W H Y?

Ronin: I dare you-

Raph: Leo is not allowed to accept dares anymore.

Ronin: Why not?

Leo: “I have no regard for my own personal safety”, as some would say.

Adriaen: I have the sharpest memory. Name one time I forgot something

Leo: You forgot me in a Walmart parking lot, like, three weeks ago.

Adriaen: That was on purpose. Try again.

Adriaen: Leo, can I talk to you for a sec?

Leo: Oooooh…someone’s in troubleeeee

Raph:

Mikey:

Donnie:

Adriaen:

Leo: It’s me. I don’t know why I said that.

Leo: Hey, do you think I could fit fifteen marshmallows in my mouth?

Donnie: You are a hazard to society.

Ronin: And a coward. Do twenty!

Ronin: Would you take a bullet for me?

Mikey: ….Yes?

Leo: *Angrily bursts into the room*

Ronin, running away: Great thanks!

Adriaen: I fell—

Leo: From heaven?

Adriaen: No, I literally fell—

Leo: In love with me the moment you saw me?

Adriaen: MY ARM IS BROKEN!

Leo: Okay, but do you think I'm pretty? Be honest

Ronin: You can de-escalate any situation by simply saying, 'Are we about to kiss?'

Ronin: Doesn't work for getting out of speeding tickets, by the way.

Raph: *sitting on top of the fridge* Hello Adriaen, welcome back!

Adriaen: Why are you on the fridge?

Raph: I live in this house, I can sit where I damn well please.

Adriaen:

Adriaen: Where's the spider?

Raph: Near the bathroom, I panicked.

Ronin: So like, how many swords do you own?

Leo: Sword of a lot.

Ronin: Blocked.

Leo: Parried.

Ronin: Wanna hear some dark humor?

Donnie: Fine.

Ronin: Okay.

Ronin: Knock knock-

Donnie: I'm sick of your shit, turn the goddamn lights back on.

Leo: I would like to offer some friendly advice.

Donnie: I don’t need your help.

Leo: Consider it unfriendly advice then, fuckface.

Ronin: *sitting on a bench*

Adriaen: Why do you look so sad?

Ronin: Sit down with me so I can tell you.

Adriaen: *sits down*

Ronin: This bench is freshly painted.

Adriaen:

[In the group chat, feat. Ronin]

Donnie: For the last time, “your” and “you’re” are different things!

Donnie: “Your” is a possessive, and “you’re” is a contraction of “you are"

April: My fire

Leo: The one

Raph: Desire

Mikey: Believe

Adriaen: When I say

Ronin: I

Leo: WANT

Raph: IT

Mikey: THAT

Ronin: WAY

Donnie: I'm blocking all of you

*Donnie has left the group chat*

And that’s all. Artists, do your thing

[cup-and-chaucer]

Really the problem with these BookTok books like Romantic Comedy is that...they are commodities. The answer to Fran Leibowitz's brilliant quote, "A book is not a mirror, it should be a door." is that, with advent of a literary social media, we are not reading to engage with a story or an idea but to attain an ideal. Marketing is built on the tension of relatability and aspiration. We see commercials set in clean, pristine suburban homes with happy, well-behaved children because it feels like it something we could attainably be if only we had the right brand of cereal or peanut butter or dish soap or life insurance. We want to see ourselves in those places that feel within our grasp. With the rise of books as a commodity to be marketed, rather than as art or entertainment, we increasingly want to see ourselves in the books we read. We want to see aspirational versions of ourselves either reading the book (aesthetics bloggers like Dakota Warren) or within the pages of the books. This why so many of those romance books feel so...conflict-avoidant. Don't get too close to reality or imperfection.

As the idea of a corporate morality (think: rainbow capitalism) emerges, it comes out in books too. Books have to have queer or PoC characters...not because those characters are essential or interesting or natural parts of the landscape or have their own purpose in the books but because the people reading the books want to feel like they are reading diversely and want to believe they are the type of people who also have queer or PoC friends. It doesn't matter if these portrayals are sanitized or feel tokenish.

A book like Romantic Comedy, where the characters mouth literal Facebook think-piece memes I saw during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 as their political beliefs, without much self-reflection on the fact that these are two culturally powerful white people who are saying those things to signal that they are good people. It feels like a distraction and a benediction so you can support them in their rockstar fantasy romance, white guilt free. They are saying you are a good person for liking this book because the people in it are good the way you want them to be good and in the way you also want to be good. And they don't have to mean a word of it, they don't have to examine themselves any deeper, if the box is checked and disclaimer signed.

It's also why I think there is so much moral puritanism in reading now. We can't read Lolita because most of us don't want to be associated with its content and what we read, because it is now synonymous with what we buy and own and identify with, is a mirror to who we are and what we aspire to be. The problem is that books are not material things, not really, not the way jeans or furniture or cooking utensils are. They aren't forms of self-expression for the reader, the way fashion or make-up or paint is, they are simply a collection of thoughts from the imagination of an individual put into the world to tell of an experience or make an argument for us to read. That's all.

And all of this, all of this, all of this fucking capitalism is going to get conflated with the very real need for representation in literature and media, for more equitable publishing, for uplifting marginalized voices and experiences.

*sighs*

[queersatanic]

wait, no nut november is fash? i thought it was likea kinky edging thing

It’s one of those “haha it’s just ironic shitposting… unless” sort of things that the far-right often uses, but this one is specifically centered on why men need to preserve their manly vitality and pornography is evil

Yet it would be naive to ignore that there’s significant overlap between the general ideology behind NoFap — and, to a degree, No Nut November — and that of the far right, which has increasingly coopted the principles of masturbation abstinence. Because the challenge is associated with abstaining from porn, some people associated with the movement have taken the extra step of harassing adult performers on social media, giving it an additional layer of troubling implications. “In the past [No Nut November] has always been like, ‘Oh, look at this ridiculous thing some people are participating in,'” says adult performer and director Casey Calvert. “This year, people [in the industry] are talking about, ‘Oh, actually this is connected to the far right and maybe we shouldn’t just be saying hahaha, No Nut November.'”

A new meme brings these implications into sharp relief. Coomer is a reference to a meme of an unkempt, skeezy-looking bearded man in a white tank top with vaguely Semitic features, accompanied by descriptive text like “doesn’t even know anything about politics,” “extremely aesthetic right arm (huge muscle),” and “has never heard of NoFap.”

It’s been circulating on 4chan for the past year, but Alex Hawkins, the vice president of the porn tube site xHamster, says he started seeing it in the replies on his company’s Twitter feed back in September, when presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted about limiting access to pornography. At first, “we didn’t really know what it meant and thought it was funny,” he tells Rolling Stone. Then, in late October, the coomer resurfaced thanks to a Twitter campaign led by a user named TeapotLad, in which users vowed to change their avatars to the coomer should they fail No Nut November. PewDiePie shouted out the campaign in a recent YouTube video, as did far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson, who is perhaps best known for being one of the many extremist figures, including Milo Yiannopolous and Alex Jones, to be banned from Facebook. “No Nut November and the Coomer meme represent a deeper meaning,” he said in a tweet. “Porn is evil. It literally re-wires your brain and causes erectile dysfunction. Take the pledge. Don’t be a Coomer.”

The term has also been used in the context of “OK coomer,” a play on the “OK boomer” meme, in response to tweets critical of No Nut November or masturbation abstinence in general. “It’s positioned as this epic battle between the weak beta masturbators and the strong, alpha NoFappers,” says Hawkins.

Like most memes, “coomer” carries with it more than a tinge of irony, and it’s not always easy to determine whether it’s being used flippantly or to actually deride men who masturbate. But the implication is clear: masturbating is an urge that should be resisted at all costs. David Ley, PhD, a clinical psychologist and sex therapist who studies pornography and mental health, saw the meme after he tweeted his criticism of No Nut November, referring to it as “a creepy little smorgasbord of insecurity-driven hate with anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia all rolled up in one,” he tells Rolling Stone.

[schismusic]

Joy Division, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love New Order, too

Spring is weird as hell because one time you have this glaring sun that powers you up like being plugged into a wall outlet, then not five minutes later clouds begin to gather and you feel like you're going to die if anything goes south. So the most obvious combination to represent two sides of this same coin, emotional and meteorological, is Joy Division and New Order.

Sometimes you need Transmission or Shadowplay for the sunny days — impassioned jolts, sparks flying everywhere. Sometimes The Perfect Kiss hits harder on a cloudy afternoon, coming back home and in need of that extra push to not fall asleep in the train. It's surprising to realize the versatility displayed by both bands, or the same band in two different iterations according to whomever you ask. Peter Hook says, as late as 1993, that the laziest member of New Order is Ian Curtis. Or again this other person, in the comments under the Atmosphere official video on YouTube, who went to see New Order (Hooky-less New Order, which might be a relevant distinction) at the O2 Arena a couple of years ago and they gave an encore, says "Those of us who stayed got the privilege of watching Joy Division perform three of their songs". Interesting outlook on the matter. I personally saw Peter Hook and the Light play both Joy Division records and, I'm pretty sure, an encore comprised of just Love Will Tear Us Apart at the Arti Vive Festival in Soliera, back when it was still free to attend some of the events. I remember being pretty mad that Hooky had stopped to take pics with basically everyone and then left exactly as I was approaching. In retrospect I don't exactly blame the man, it was like midnight anyway. I remember nothing of the back trip home.

My first contact with Joy Division happened when I was thirteen and very much in my prog era. I was in Rome staying at an aunt of mine's place for my fourteenth birthday and she told me I could get a CD, since I had gotten some money saved up over time. Some Facebook page dedicated to Pink Floyd I'd liked (yeah, Facebook at age thirteen — I literally just wanted to play a fucking Flash game, back when Facebook allowed them, and I ended up getting to be terminally online. Crazy how things turn out) used to share a lot of memes and fanart relating to the Unknown Pleasures album cover, and me being a massive Pink Floyd head at the time I thought "I mean, if these guys are pushing this band so hard, that's gotta mean something". The album cover was pretty striking, admittedly: a far cry from the paisley ass paintings that I had grown to accept as the gold standard for the music I liked, but its simplicity struck a chord closer to The Dark Side of the Moon, or perhaps The Wall. Those were records I liked a lot, probably called them "the best records ever made" to more than one person, not like they aren't but that's a very bold statement to make when your listening experience consists exactly of

Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor when I was six;

Daft Punk's complete discography (minus Random Access Memories, which wasn't out yet) when I was twelve;

Pink Floyd's complete discography, courtesy of a CD collection coming out with some Italian newspaper, that same year;

a couple random classic rock records recommended to me by older friends and relatives usually well into their fifties or sixties at the time, random people on Internet forums — which, for clarification, I did not actively attend, preferring to just lurk from time to time — and the OndaRock "milestones" page.

So browsing through the surprisingly expansive CDs section of this electronics shop in Rome, and being mesmerized by a vinyl rack in the days when Music on Vinyl was the final frontier of pretending you could re-analogue the digital ("you mean to tell me these are like CDs, but bigger? Whoever designed these truly lived in the future"), I came across that very same album art that had stricken me so hard. I had listened to the first seconds of the album on YouTube, but that weird drum sound — so echoey, so distant, ultimately not particularly powerful, meaning it didn't really sound like Bonzo: it sounded more like my own band, which at the time didn't even exist yet — I didn't really know what to make of. This store I was in had one of those preview listening machines that would scan the barcode on the CDs and give you a small snippet of the song. I pull the CD up to the scanner, the scanner lights up green, I put on the headphones and the solo from this comes up:

Clearly they had to be kidding me. I had come to know, sneaking into infinitely many rehearsals with the band from my mother's town, what it sounded like when someone tried to play lead without something else filling up the arrangement (even though I didn't really know all that, or at least lacked the vocabulary to properly express it) and, for Christ's sake, didn't these guys notice rehearsing? It sounded empty, weirdly so, and it wasn't my thing, I thought. I put that CD away and picked up a band I knew I'd like — Genesis, specifically. So Nursery Cryme became the first CD I've ever paid with my own money, the very day I turned fourteen. Not a bad pickup. I remember being very impressed with the fast blurring lead guitar on The Musical Box and digging the sweet pastoral atmospheres of For Absent Friends and Harlequin. I still think of that record more often than one would probably assume looking at this blog, or my most played on Spotify. At the time, that was the best move I could take, really: why beat my head against a record that, as your average prog nerd ballbreaker, simply wasn't speaking to me?

Then all of a sudden in August of the same year my friend's dad hands me a 16 gigabyte USB drive, full of random music from all eras of rock. A lot of it remains inscrutable to me for a really long time, most notably Tom Waits (see related post), but I spent the whole month reading random folder names, seeing if something catches my eyes, and at one point I come across the Mars Volta. Open the folder up, read the names of their first three records, and my first thought is "Christ, these guys look incomprehensible. I'm about to have some fun". Long story short: I end up having a lot of fun, the Mars Volta turns into my favourite band at the time and finding out that they had previously been called At the Drive-In makes me gain some measure of respect for punk rockers: if they tried hard enough, I must've thought, they could prog as hard as anyone. In the meantime the ghost of Joy Division remains at the back of my head. I feel like I'm missing something, for the first time in my life: it's not them, it's me. Too bad that same realization didn't occur to me when it came to the people in my life until much, much later, but that's being fourteen for you I suppose. Early King Crimson and the Mars Volta were the pinnacle of violence to me, and not even the very few Metallica songs I'd downloaded just to see what would happen scratched that itch. It felt a bit too cauterized for some reason (I would later find out I had been looking in the wrong direction the whole time: the Black Album "sucked", according to my favourite metalhead of the time, who somehow catalyzed my interest from the very second I saw him in the school's courtyard. Hard to imagine why I would imprint on people like puppies do, but what the fuck, not like I've ever outgrown that anyway, I've just gotten better at managing it). But I felt there was more than violence to this, or different forms of violence. When Christmas came around and my relatives tried to get me presents, my mother asked if there was anything specific I was interested in, and I basically told her "look, if they can get me some CDs off of this list, I'm golden". It had some bangers on it, namely Noctourniquet by the Mars Volta — it's one of their best and I will die on this hill, be warned — and The Downward Spiral, which might as well warrant its own post in an ideal world. But the best of them all I think came from a random purchase, once again with the little money I had lying around at the time.

Closer appears to be, right away, a bit more concrete, and if there's something inexperienced music fans like is a pretty packaging that conjures a strong emotional response before they've even played the record. Compare a color-inverted graph of pulsar emissions to a literal funerary monument. Opening up the booklet I was shocked to see that Genesis was used as a negative point of comparison (bad omen, I thought) by people close to the band, and I came across much more detailed information about Ian Curtis's untimely demise — at that time, something far too removed from my experience to be faced with the delicacy and attention it deserves. Atrocity Exhibition hits like a ten-ton truck, a reference which at the time I wouldn't have been able to make for obvious reasons, and Isolation exposes all the nerve tissue under the skin. Passover comes in and strips everything even barer, and then A Means to an End turns… danceable, for some reason? Big emotional moment with The Eternal and Decades, which I thought actually took them closer to my usual tastes. And yet at the same time I kept looking at Colony, Heart and Soul and Twenty Four Hours as the most compelling cuts. Geometric assault sounding like sheet metal if it were music; rhythmically driven emptiness that serves as a minimal backdrop for depressed poetry, and finally a rocking ebb-and-flow that would probably inform a lot of my interest in GY!BE-like post-rock in the coming years. Very interesting to think that the same guys who'd done Unknown Pleasures could think of this. To this day, when asked, I still do think that Closer is the best Joy Division record, but what does it even mean when the records are exactly two, compilations notwithstanding?

It was around this time that it came to my attention that both Joy Division and another band called New Order had a record called Substance out, both published by the same recording company, both coming out within a year of each other. Looking it up, it turns out it's fully intentional, because New Order is simply Joy Division minus Ian Curtis. It would turn out to be a tad bit more complex than that. Anyway, I look New Order up and kind of have to do a double-take. Synthpop? In my Joy Division? More likely than you'd think, considering Isolation exists. But yeah, that sort of seals it — I wouldn't care about this New Order for a million years. Until all of a sudden a couple of years later David Sylvian bursts like a comet in my face, which of course leads me straight to Japan, the same year as I'd come across Berlin-era Bowie, and you can probably guess where this is going, right?

Well, you'd be wrong. I still don't check out New Order. There's a whole new world open to me — vaporwave and therefore R Plus Seven come to my attention, which leads me to dissect that record like an alien tool of unclear purposes. This of course leads me onto an ambient tangent, taking me back to my Tim Hecker listens of that same year, which has the effect of renewing my interest in "pure" electronic music and the then-rising post-dubstep movement. The sheer experience of sound, the dazzling modernity and innovation, is what's in at the time. I have no time for nostalgia-pandering dimwits: the future awaits. Then all that jazz from the first Godflesh post hits, then God pulls the funniest gag in the history of viral infections to my memory, and I have some time to actually look back, a bit less prejudiced. As it turns out, synthpop is not the devil, as some of you might have surmised by now, and as I relisten to Blue Monday I realized I have never listened to either of the Substance record. I do know some, most perhaps?, of the tracks on the Joy Division one, and I do think the New Order one has the more striking cover art — not to mention I knew, by this time, that this was the one to give Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance its name, and that Your Silent Face soundtracked one of the most memorable moments in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. As the ultimate Hideo Kojima stan, I couldn't let this slide, so I pop the record on and get hit with this:

Way to go, guys. Holy shit. I knew that Ceremony was a Joy Division cut before they could record it, but what the hell — Bernard got it, too. It wasn't a matter of singing ability with songs like these, it's just getting it, finding the right energy. They had that right energy. And then it hit me just as many times these dudes have made Blue Monday over and over again before actually getting it right, and everytime I look into it it's funnier and funnier to realize just how many different attempts it took them to finally be Kraftwerk, but augmented — with the stellar results we all know. Everything's Gone Green, 5 8 6, Temptation potentially, all lead up to this one moment in the history of dance music where somehow three dudes and a girl hailing from Manchester managed to out-gay the Pet Shop Boys (by their own admission, apparently), to shake the whole world's collective booty, to do whatever it is they were supposed to do in this last comparison that would ideally make the previous one a bit less obnoxious but whatever, it's 3am as usual, you know how it goes by now don't you? But then after Blue Monday the record keeps going, and thank god it does, because it's banger after banger. How do these guys keep doing it?

So I spend some time with that record, then it fades down, then it comes back up last month, when the weather calls for it and its parent company. Which is when I find myself watching the Control movie for the first time, surprisingly enough seeing as I already enjoyed the work of Anton Corbijn as a photographer. Looking at all that, it is revealed to me that Joy Division never really having died is not a bug, it's a feature. Everyone is gasping, I get it, but please pick your jaws up and check this out: the band has never learned how to play their respective instruments. One might go so far as to argue they play their own stuff their own way, and that's basically it. Nothing could be further from the truth. These guys jammed, a lot; that's how Joy Division wrote songs, that's how New Order wrote songs, even going as far as having Bernard Sumner fucked up on acid so he could find the chorus to Temptation or the whole band bombed out of their minds on X in Ibiza clubs to write, basically, the entirety of Technique — and even then, not really, there's a couple jangly tracks that the X would most likely render unlistenable but what do I really know? Point being: it might now have been sparked by a music teacher or instructor, it might not have been the product of a process comparable to that within Television, which led them to organically seek out better, more "by the book" musicianship, but New Order were incredibly familiar with their instruments, had formed an element of comfort and understanding that counterbalanced the alien-ness to music terminology.

Peter Hook recently uploaded a Yamaha-sponsored video to his Instagram, which I am pretty sure has a say in running, where he jams on a Yamaha bass and, you know, it sounds like Hooky alright, but it's never a discernible bassline until he kicks into the A major strumming that opens Love Will Tear Us Apart. Before that, he just strolls around the neck, leisurely strumming away at power chords imbued with that thick chorus and reverb combo he became renowned for. I would never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined I'd find myself thinking "okay, awesome, stop talking — I want to hear you jam a bit more" referring to one of the musicians who were part of possibly two of the craziest storiest in the history of contemporary rock'n'roll, also notorious for playing the rockstar whilst carrying the minimum possible baggage of technical knowledge he could. Once again, this is nowhere near a knock to the man — quite the opposite. Ian Curtis asked "persistence, well, what does it matter?", and Hooky (and, of course, the other members of New Order) found a way to constructively answer that question. Moments before Coil, but a bit later than Israel Regardie, they said "persistence is all" and built a brand on finding a way to consistently sound like splendid, eternal, golden children: "like crystal", impassionate, tightly-knit performers with the purity of a child's heart. Ian Curtis had, in certain ways (at least artistically), the purity of a child in his heart, which some might even argue was a distinguishing feature of most of his literary idols — if you think about it, William Burroughs could be your dirty-minded classmate who walked in on his parents sharing an intimate moment in the bedroom (had his parents been gay men, the metaphor would probably fly better, but that most definitely wasn't the case). So the heart of Joy Division remains untouched, if a bit more naked. Heroes of post-punk, sons of the silent age, you can sleep soundly tonight.

[ohchosen]

AUTHOR PORTRAIT ... get to know the author behind the blog! repost, don't reblog !

BASICS

NAME:        val AGE:         24 PRONOUNS:         she / they YEARS OF WRITING:          ok how specific are we talking. because i can say like circa 2010 i was on facebook writing bad twilight fanfiction + rp ( which then progressed into bad thg fanfiction ) or i can say elementary school and my little short stories i was always ad - libbing. regardless, it's definitely something i've had a knack for my whole life and it was literally just a matter of time before i found out about rp. and yes before you ask it was my personal facebook. when i was 11. that had all of my relatives added. yes they saw it. years writing on tumblr is different and i think i jumped ship and found out about tumblr rp around 2012 / 2013 and with that came my first formative decision which was to watch supernatural. you know where this is going. yes it was bad. no i'm not showing anyone.

REFLECTION

WHY DID YOU PICK UP WRITING?           i needed a hobby and had unrestricted internet access. i kind of answered this in the question before so jokes on me blah blah blah but without getting too personal i had a very difficult time in school with mental health and tumblr, known weird kid haven, was my little safe space where i could freely pursue what i enjoyed and was really my first venture into fandom spaces. i started in the supernatural rpc [ horror music ] and slowly meandered my way through book fandoms, to animanga, and finally settled on the video game community where i've been good and SAT for like six years now.

DO YOU HAVE ANY WRITING ROUTINES?          not necessarily. it's a miracle if i'm able to sit down long enough to open up my drafts and get going, but if i can lock in i'm all set. i find it hard to listen to music while writing because my brain cannot separate the two and i will accidentally start writing down the lyrics but i've never actually considered tuning into instrumentals so ,, thank you vos. writing that down............

WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE PART ABOUT WRITING?         stealing from vos in stealing answer solidarity but the rp community aspect. it can be awful and exhausting as some of us know good and well but it can also be incredible depending on who you surround yourself with. it's so validating finding people who share your little niche interest or even niche - er pairing ( hi vos ) and then to just completely devolve into sending memes and posts and screaming until 2 am in dms. i've met so many of my closest friends through rp, and stealing vos' answer again, but the characters i write who turn out the most developed are those who have been shared with friends. noctis would be nowhere near as fleshed out as he is if not for the people i met in the ff fandom all those years ago.

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOUR WRITING.         oughhghh, um. i'm bad at taking compliments and even worse at complimenting myself so bare with me.

i've definitely grown a lot in terms of style and prose, and i'm actually pretty happy with what i'm able to spit out in terms of aesthetic styling as compared to even a few years ago. one of my biggest insecurities ( that still pops up here and again mind you ) was never being able to match length, and i was in the worst writers' block for a few years that i finally managed to escape out of around 2020 and now i can confidently say i'm writing more regularly than i ever have. so to answer the question: it has been my personal growth in my writing and it turning into something i can be confident in and proud of.

i really do enjoy the mundanity of editing my replies. i love to see the progress i make edit by edit and how cohesive and put together a piece of writing becomes the longer i work on it. i fully 100% devote myself to one reply at a time, which is a nightmare for quantity but sooooooo rewarding if it means i can put something out to the best of my ability and not stress myself out worrying about whatever else i owe. i am a self appointed slowpoke, and i've learned over the years to not let myself feel guilty about that because as long as it can become something i devote time on and put effort into, then it really shouldn't bother me how long it takes.

three things is too much to ask for lets all just walk away slowly.

A QUESTION FOR THE NEXT PERSON

HAVE  YOU  MADE  ANY  STRONG  CONNECTIONS  /  FRIENDS DURING YOUR TIME WRITING?          i'm pretty sure this question was intended for vos only but its way too late now and i've already written your accolades so you have to deal with it. this post is just going to be exceptionally long now.

vos @stagehunt my right hand man who has been with me for every gacha related poor financial decision. everything you said i'm literally sending right back to you. i knew no one in that fandom and was in way out of my depth before stumbling across you and your blog. i am so thankful we crossed paths and shoved our little barbie dolls together and said kiss because developing, and i mean really developing tomo would not have happened without your input. at this point you definitely deserve writing credits on him too because the way he turned out would be nowhere near the same if not for your influence. i've had a blast experiencing genshin's story with you and knowing without fail you'll be thinking the exact same thing whenever hyv fumbles the bag again, and yes. one day i GUESS i'll play more than 7 hours of hsr. luv u xoxo.

plum, @sherez, my love, my heart. it's crazy how fast the years have flown by and now all of a sudden i've known you since 2018??? i still remember seeing you from afar on ez and always being blown away by how much love and devotion you put into your characters. we are quite literally bonded for life after surviving the [ redacted ] rpc and i can't think of anyone better to come out beside than you. you can't get rid of me bitch!!!!!!!!! the amount of effort and care i've seen you throw into v, and how far she's come in terms of development blows me away. she is easily one of the best written characters i've ever had the pleasure of reading and i am so excited to keep following her growth. besides how freakishly talented you are, it's astonishing how much we have in common. bc who tf else would i be talking to about forgotten mcr lore in the year of our lord 2024. if no one got me, i know plum got me. booket....... booket for my sweety.......

lu @tactition its crazy how in the short little time we've spent together how much i've bonded with u. if i got down on one knee and pulled out a ring would u say yes.... my yaoi soulmate........ its INSANE how well our character Types (tm) mesh together, and i know karma is coming with its kiss for me when i finally download nier and have to atone for what i put u thru when i made you play final fantasy. please be gentle with me im delicate........... real talk tho.. you have so quickly become such an important person in my daily life and i literally feel myself go !!!! whenever i see a new dm from you because i know its always gonna be good. your character takes blow me away and even for myself who's nearly 7 years deep into the final fantasy scene, it amazes me how you still manage to shed light and new perspective on characters i've known for years. let’s kiss freaky style.

i've very much condensed my little bubble into people i actually want to surround myself with atp, and there's always a handful of mutuals on every blog that i don't necessarily talk to but who have been with me for years now so. sorry you can't leave or i'll become a danger to myself and others. kisses :*

WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE MOST INSPIRATION FROM? this is definitely a muse - specific question since it varies from character to character. with noctis specifically, it's mostly music. i have a few different playlists for him after writing him for so long, and while i can't listen while i write they all offer different types of mood setting for him. other times, its media involving fantasy tropes or characters that have similar struggles to him, off the top of my head ( and something i connected early on ) is the character u.enoyama r.itsuka from given. there's a lot i could say here regarding which aspects i took inspiration from but the majority was the similar personality he has to noctis, the internal thought process he offered when i read the manga, and the way he struggled with his sexuality that struck the loudest chord. don't quote me on any of that since i haven't been caught up with given for like 5 years now but !!!!! yeah the end.

NEW QUESTION: how do you relate to your character personally? are there any overt similarities to the two of you?

tagged by @stagehunt my lover..... tagging - @lunabrae @tactition @sherez

[dykeishheart]

Every so often you see a ridiculous post, usually something with sexual content presented humorously, and a reblog comment will say something to the effect of "this is why this website is unprofitable"

And while those are funny, it's just patently untrue.

Firstly, it behooves us to establish a baseline of terminology, because in current discourse there's a major disconnect between what 'unprofitable' means when used by tumblr users and when used by tumblr executives.

Unprofitable in lay use typically means 'there is a net negative cash flow for this company' while in executive terms it means something more like 'the revenue generated here is unfit for long term growth'. The key distinction is that root word profit; In reality Tumblr is profitable by the first definition but unprofitable by the second. If tumblr wasn't bringing in enough money to at least balance out operating costs it would have been gone long ago. MySpace still exists, Tumblr will likely occupy that same space until it literally can't afford to anymore. The real issue is that tumblr's business model doesn't generate its own growth, and therefore doesn't continually expand its proft above operation like every corporation expects to.

Basically when users on here talk about profits they're measuring velocity, while executives are measuring acceleration. How much will the money increase its own collection, how can we make that happen faster, and how can we maintain that acceleration curve?

Now that that's out of the way, let's look at Tumblr's actual business model. Compared to Twitter and Facebook, tumblr lacks two key things: Public acclaim, and user incentives for engagement loops.

The first part is easy. Tumblr isn't a famous platform like Facebook is or like Twitter is. Outside of Tumblr, nobody talks about Tumblr. This means it's not viewed as a strong market for advertisers, it's not generating waves of new users, and it's not gonna get attention for doing critical maintenance or breakthrough innovation because the crowds simply aren't here. There are millions of Tumblr users, but it really doesn't mean the same thing as the collective hundreds of millions of users across Facebook and Instragram that all generate tons of ad and data revenue for one corporation.

The second part is more complicated because it gets into the psychology of social media engagement, and I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert on how that works. But the crux of it is that the mechanics of engagement with Tumblr are just different from that of Twitter in a few basic ways that mean huge differences in how the space is utilized.

Firstly, Tumblr is fairly obtuse about post longevity; the halflife of a tumblr post is effectively eternal because posts from the first year the website was open for public use still circulate. Posts didn't even have dates put onto them for users to see until like two years ago, unless you modded your website layout with third party tools like Xkit. This is great if you want a website where your art can last forever, but terrible for creating large surges of engagement super quickly on hot button topics and posts. This latter model is how basically all social media operates nowadays, with posts basically dying after 48 hours. There's always a frenzy on every meme, headline, picture, thinkpiece, and political fuckup that inevitably creates micro-surges of engagement for whoever saw it. This creates vicious cycles of attention seeking in just about everyone involved, but it just doesn't work that way here. I get periodic validation from writing I've posted years ago and that gives me the feedback I'd normally have to post hourly to attain on twitter, so there's really no drive for me to constantly be posting. This lack of need to constantly generate content feeds into the first issue of public acclaim; if everyone isn't constantly posting then the content which does leak out from here isn't enough to cross most of the thresholds to motivate people to migrate to the platform and give it public acclaim.

Secondly, the people who *do* post constantly aren't rewarded for doing so in any meaningful way. People who generate tons of content for YouTube and Instagram and TikTok make actual literal money from doing so. People can use Twitter and Facebook to advertise themselves, their products, their podcasts, their personal websites, whatever. With enough of a presence on most social media, there's monetary drives involved. And this motivates some unsuccessful users to keep trying to gain personal acclaim because it's no longer a social media platform, it's a shovel salesman in a gold rush. Tumblr does not have this. Tipping was added a while back but from what I can tell it's not widely used, and even if it was that's still money coming from other users and not the platform itself. Nobody is posting on tumblr to try and make it big and get real money doing so. The people posting a lot on tumblr are people like writers posting updates for their fics, artists posting their art, sex workers promoting their OnlyFans, porn blogs, stolen meme accounts, and the odd wizard here and there. Most people here are engaging for social fulfillment, which is ironically the least profitable motive a social media platform can offer its userbase.

[west-tokyo-incidents]

Incorrect quotes because I'm on that bs again. Starts off Puck/Renji but just goes all over the place.

Renji: I owe you one.

Puck: That’s ok. You can just date me and we’ll call it even.

---

Puck: Talk dirty to me, baby~

Renji: The dishes.

Puck: Wh-

Renji: They’ve been there for 4 days and it’s your turn to wash them. You still haven’t cleaned them and I have asked you to do so several times.

---

Puck: I'm trash.

Renji: As someone who's environmentally conscious, it's my duty to pick you up. Does 7 work for you?

Puck:

Puck: You smooth motherfucker.

Puck: And yes it does.

---

Renji: At first I thought you were foolish and incompetent.

Puck: My apologies for whatever misstep I may have taken to dispel that impression. It was an honest mistake, I swear.

---

Renji: You look good in that hoodie.

Puck: You know where else I'd look good?

Renji, zero hesitation: My bed.

Puck, at the same time: By your side- wait, what?

---

Uta: I got an idea!

Renji: Does it involve breaking the law?

Uta: By now don’t you think that’s a given?

Renji: I was just trying to be optimistic.

Uta: Don’t bother.

---

Chiaki: Know why I called you in here?

Uta: Because I accidentally sent you a dick pic.

Chiaki: *Stops pouring two glasses of wine.* Accidentally?

---

Uta: There. How do I look?

Chiaki: Like a cheap French harlot.

Uta: French?!

---

Chiaki: Who would you swipe right for? Puck or Uta?

Renji: I would delete the app.

---

Puck: I'm so happy, I could kiss you!

Renji: Um...Neat.

*later*

Renji, lying face down on their bed: I said "Neat," Uta. Who the fuck says neat these days? It's not neat to say neat but I said it anyways because I'm fucking stupid.

Uta, reading a book: Don't beat yourself up too much, Renji. Everyone gets nervous sometimes. Remember what I did when Chiaki confessed their love for me?

Renji: Didn't you thank them?

Uta: *closes the book and looks at the ceiling* I fucking thanked them.

---

Puck: That's ridiculous, Renji doesn't have a crush on me.

Uta: Yes they do.

Chiaki: Yes they do.

Renji: Yes I do.

---

Chiaki: I spy with my little eye something that begins with the letter “s”.

Uta: *looks over at Renji and Puck* Uta: Is it “sexual tension”?

---

(Post Renji-Uta fight)

Puck: How the hell are you still alive?

Renji: Honestly, I’m just as confused as you are.

---

Uta: There is no i in happyness…

Renji: There is if you fucking spell it right.

---

Renji: That's not funny.

Uta: I thought it was funny.

Renji: You don't count. You started laughing in the middle of a funeral because you started thinking of a meme you saw on Facebook.

---

Chiaki: Do you have any skeletons in your closet?

Uta: Literally or figuratively?

Chiaki: I have to specify?

[ahasiw-okitowin]

Okay do you want to hear former crush/friend updates? Of course you do this is tumblr we are nosey here

Using a cut for the sake of your dash

Dang I don't even remember what the last thing I posted was... I'm gonna post a quick recap because this is SO on my mind right now (against my will)

Bear with me I'm sick today and working with about 37% brain power

So I had been seeing a friend of mine (J) that I was referring to as my crush. Quite a few months of dates (that they referred to as dates) things were very intimate and romantic and shit. Truth be told was kind of one sided in terms of effort/emotional labour, but they're going through a lot so I was trying to be supportive. Important to note that any time things got physically intimate between us THEY initiated it, and I have been very clear about my feelings/intentions, because I literally have no other option but blunt.

And then a month ish ago they matched with a fairly close friend of mine on a dating app. The friend (K) told me asap, K didn't realize who they had just matched with, and K immediately seemed convinced that J was trying to throw a wrench in our "relationship" (for lack of a better word)

When I asked J to give me a heads up if they were interested in a friend of mine, they were super shitty about it, saying "I don't like that you think I need your permission to like your friend" and called me possessive. Eyeroll.

We were making plans to meet up and chat about what we wanted/where things were going, I gave them my availability, but they never got back to me. A week later K came by my house and let me know that they had hung out multiple times since then.

(Side note: K initially seemed to be trying to help me out by letting me know about the dating site thing, but they very quickly got SUPER WEIRD about it, and for some reason were offended that I didn't want anything to do with this situation. We had a couple conversations where K grilled me about how I would feel in various romantic type situations involving the three of us, and while I was clear that I was not interested in any of that, it seemed like K was trying to... almost convince me??? It was SO weird. K ended up getting super upset, seemed far more emotionally involved than made sense to me, and ended up storming out of my house angrily.

It was really odd. I thought I knew K fairly well but I saw an entire new side of them and I could not for the life of me sort out what the hell they were trying to tell me. K genuinely seemed upset and offended that I did not want to do a throuple or hinge type thing. I'm not explaining well, but it was all enough for me to feel like HELL NO I want nothing to do with this. )

Anyways, I sent J a text making it very clear that from this point forward I wasn't interested in anything beyond platonic friendship, and told them that if we hung out again I would need them to keep their hands to the self.

Since then K has sent me a couple memes here and there, I haven't responded because our last interaction was so off-putting that I really just want them to leave me alone.

I haven't said anything to J since, either.

ANYWAYS the relevant update bit is that in the last week J (who doesn't generally spend much time on social media) has been changing/updating and posting pictures on their facebook all of a sudden. They changed back and forth between some multiple year old cover pictures, posted new selfies, bunch of shit. We used to interact on fb mostly, and them suddenly posting was notable.

Then I started seeing interactions from them on my tiktok account, watching my videos, and then following a new account that I made. Then the next day they posted a video of them singing on tiktok.

Now I don't want to assume that the world revolves around me, but this has been such novel behaviour that i started to wonder if they were trying to get my attention????

Anyways today they commented "meow" on a video I posted of Molly.

I know them, and I know how crappy they can be at communicating, so at this point I genuinely think they're trying to get my attention. I'm still hurt and upset and right now I am undecided if I even want to be friends with them!

So I'm going to continue not answering them. I bet my friend Dez that if I keep ignoring them it will keep escalating.

God forbid they just communicate like a grown up 🙄

[josiebelladonna]

me: compiling a recipe book because I’m literally watching the Internet collapsing around me, and I don’t want to lose my bookmarks. I’m also very quickly seeing the benefit of the longevity of a journal, that it could outlive me and someone else could find it and continue those recipes.

me: baked cookies for my brother’s kids last year and he barely thanked me

me: was quite literally traumatized when my mom fell in the dark during a public safety power outage last week—I have gone on record to say that they are anything but about safety and my mom’s fall was the epitome of that; I’ve even gone so far to call them “cruel” and even “barbaric”. I flat out told the power company they’re lucky she didn’t go to the hospital because I wouldn’t hesitate to take legal action.

me: was friends with Chris Cornell, but you would never guess it because I hardly ever talk about it (I talk more about my weight loss than I do Chris). I hardly ever talk about it because I know I’d either be seen as really annoying or no one would believe me.

me: write as much Testament fanfic as I do because I really do love Alex and the feelings are mutual. Seriously… why the fuck would I lie? Do you people seriously hate everything so much that you automatically distrust anything that isn’t as belligerent and distrusting as you are?

me: feel Alex is being abused by his longtime girlfriend (to the point I am genuinely angry when I even picture her name being in the facebook reactions) and this is another thing I don’t talk about much because you don’t say something as momentous as that and then leave it like it’s a meme. Talk about it, make it known, and remain aware of it but not in the bullshit gossipy way that Bandom accounts do all too often. And, my approach has always been one of “you should get out of this and take time to yourself, and I’m always going to love you regardless.”

me: have never considered myself to be a “Bandom” account, but rather just a girl who likes people and things.

me: contrary to what anyone will tell you, I’m really only opinionated when I want to be, meaning I’ll speak my mind about something… but only when I feel like it, and I know when to put a pin in things. There is a myriad of things that I have no opinion on—in fact, there are more things I have no opinion on than things I do. and yet most people in Bandom still see me as the antichrist for the green druidess incident.

me: I actually lampooned this in The Confectioner’s Tale, with the first chapter saying that there’s a rumor declaring that she puts human flesh and blood in her bakes.

me: consider myself more “pro-Jewish” than anything, but I’ve said that I understand why Israel exists. It’s a country, it has its problems, but I can’t bring myself to hate it, though. In fact, when I read more and more about what they’ve done for us (from the chips in our devices to “staple” foods to medicine), it’s actually a cool little country in a lot of ways. And I saw the writing on the wall almost right away on October 7th, mainly from my own confusion (I literally didn’t know what anyone was talking about when the attacks happened).

me: currently planning a vegetable garden because I foresee produce, among other things, taking a hit when Trump enters office again

me: have encouraged people to pick up physical books and things. The Internet is fading fast, save what you love.

me: feel that my own generation is mostly to blame for certain foods and ingredients like cooking oil coming under fire, and… truth be known, I don’t need to share a link to say that most people are on my side with this. Food blogs tend to be about the aesthetic of the food and not so much how to make it, and as a result, people on the outside looking in see it as a “pretty thing” rather than something to take seriously. “You guys are eating way too much salt, chemicals, and ingredients that have been processed to death. When you eat something truly natural, your digestion doesn’t know what to do.”

me: have talked about perimenopause and often with the tone of “why is no one talking about this?”

me: I hijack those “ask memes” because for the longest time, nobody would send me asks, especially when I would post those, and I would delete them after a while. When I finally started getting asks, they were either rude or spammy, so I thought “why bother”, and I shut my inbox for a few years. Every time I get an ask anymore, I have to gather up so much courage to even so much as look at them, and 9 times out of 10, I just look at them. I fully expect it’s someone who came to scream at me (it’s why it says “go ahead and give me hell”, because that’s all anyone wants to do, it feels like).

me: have talked, in length, about the pain I feel when it comes to sexuality, to the point it’s the one thing I am really gun shy about. To the point I hate myself for it.

me: despite being gun shy and completely unconfident about sexuality, I’ve been told that I have written some of the sexiest, sweetest, most heartfelt, and most tender erotica you’ll ever read

me: feel that tiktok has completely scrambled everyone’s brains whether they use the app or not, and again… In this sense, I’ve been told I’m one of those people who will often say out loud what everyone is thinking but no one will admit it because of arbitrary fanfiction etiquette (which is weird because I actually don’t see myself in that way).

me: not a fan of “reader inserts” because I never like how they’re written and they also feel lazy. Reader is this and this and this and this and this and this and this… you couldn’t just… come up with an original character?

me: I was once told I have this almost “dark whimsy” about me (idk either), but I guess it’s from my true love of often dramatic art, theater, British comedy like Monty Python, the old Top Gear, and Alan Partridge, great horror and comedy movies, and also plenty of literature, and yet there’s something “tragically romantic” about me, the artist writer and baker with the engineer’s brain who can’t have the love of her life and she can’t help but continue living with this fact. I have always been in love.

me: and yet, I don’t consider myself to be a “tortured artist” or something like that. I think I did briefly a long time ago, but I turned away from it because it didn’t feel like me. There’s only been a small number of people who have fit into that trope, and I’m not even close to being one of them.

me: I actually wouldn’t mind leaving the internet for good. Barring my writing accounts, a big part of me just wants to let my accounts die natural deaths. I don’t think anyone will miss me or my tumblr. If anything, I think tumblr will benefit from me not being here anymore. I tend to fall on deaf ears, anyway.

Metalheads in Bandom: josie is the Taylor Swift of Bandom, what a weirdo.

The Tiktok generation: what the hell is her problem, like is she delusional or unnecessarily obsessed. God, she’s gross.

Assholes who have me blocked: she’s a [insert unfair and outlandish label here], blocked!!!!1!!!

[grandduchesswearingsneakers]

This is wild, I'm in that Feral Neurodivergent Memes group on Facebook. Just saw a comment posted on it that was so so relatable, and I clicked the profile out of curiosity. I saw your tumblr link in the bio and knew it sounded familiar. I think you were literally one of the first people I followed on Tumblr, years ago. Small world!

I hope this isn't odd, but I just wanted to reach out to you and let you know that you're not alone. I still remember years ago seeing posts you made about AvPD, and it stuck in my mind because it was one of the first places I'd seen it mentioned outside of my googling about it, and that made me feel less alone. So thank you for that.

(I would've commented on fb, but there are just some people on my friends list whom I don't want to see me talking about my mental health. But I'm the one who just heart reacted)

Omg,that’s insane! This is actually the second time this happens ,what are the odds?!

That is so heartwarming 🥹 how lucky I am to have had some-any effect on another person.

I hope your journey for discovery has been proved fruitful and I hope you’ve found ways to heal.

Just wanted to say that your blog pic always stood out to me for some reason, I loved seeing you on here but maybe it’s the time lines, I don’t see you on here as often now.

Thank you for reaching out, sometimes it feels like I don’t exist due to the severe isolation and loneliness,I wish I could explain how much joy this brings.

I wish you best health and good luck in a world that hasn’t been too kind to us. We deserve so much better.

[minutesofaey]

nothing slaps harder than that one meme i saw on Facebook

"sorry for not keeping in touch, i literally have nothing to say"

[psychomoxxie]

70s Breakup Songs, Depression, and Future Freakouts...

I'm writing in -- and am switching back to -- this blog, for this post; it's the oldest blog I have, I think it's been around since 2017 or so, and the other blogs I write in post to this one as well, so there's continuity. The reason being that the Wordpress one is read by the guy I am about to write about...

I recently ended -- or rather fizzled out of -- a short-lived whirlwind romance with someone that turned out to be just...wrong for me. Let's just leave it at that...

Everyone is ultimately looking for connection -- real connection. It's especially so for someone like me, where making connections with people can be so difficult. I have lived a very rough, fraught life thus far, with a lot of loss, a lot of reasons to close myself off. And yet, I still crave the sort of rare connection that will make me feel truly seen, and understood. Because isolation is the road to despair, and I don't need that. Who does? I don't care how strong you are (and I know how strong I am). Everyone needs to feel they are truly seen, and being seen means being accepted, warts and all.

Ok, perhaps I should elaborate. We started a friendship online, and connected intensely in many ways; mainly intellectually. He was brilliant, which, if you know me, you know how appealing that is. However, in person, he was quite narcissistic and self-involved, and I don't mean that in the "I saw some memes on Facebook on narcissism and am talking out of my ass", I mean based on my former college education, and access to the DSM which is sitting several feet away from me on my nightstand, and also growing up with a parent who was one herself.

The first night we met, he went for the jugular by saying something he knew would be hurtful to me, based on our conversations online and on the phone. I should have left then. But, I figured, I was going to give it a chance. Then, a few nights later, we were walking and I told him I was in pain, and couldn't walk fast. So, in response to a rather frustrated comment I made when he kept moving ahead of me, he snapped at me, then the rest of the way walked even farther ahead of me, meanwhile I was limping behind him unable to walk faster -- nor was I willing to try. He knew I was in pain. He was feeling childishly shitty about my comment, and wanted to show me his displeasure. Fuck that I was in pain.

There were other things, as well. Sexually, he was one of the most confused, conflicted, awkward, and closed-off people I've ever met. He misrepresented himself that way, as well; building this tension and illusory feeling of chemistry between us for months, and then, when we met, flipping things completely on their head with how seemingly disconnected he was from me, and more importantly, from his own self.

It was just...very strange how he was an entirely different person once we met, after speaking literally for hours, every day, for months. Somehow, I thought this would be a safer way to go about getting to know a person, after doing it the traditional way my whole life. But, you know what? Once again, I got it wrong. Apparently, I simply just don't know how to get this shit right.

And so, my little kumquats, even after being single for EIGHT YEARS, intentionally, after much soul searching and maturing, I ended up making the same damn mistake, once again. I gave it the old college try for the two weeks he was in town, but after those little stunts he pulled, especially the last one, I was pretty much done.

And so, my dears, I have made a very important decision;

To quote Holly Golightly, I am through playing the field. The field stinks.

In other words, I am through with men. Not because they are evil, or anything like that. But because my radar is broken. I do not know how to choose healthy people in a relationship. I do not choose men who treat me properly. And so, I simply need to stay away from them, period.

I had several long conversations with my very dear friend, S, while all this was going on. She said some very astute things to me. One of which was, I should have left the night he made the shitty comment to me (the very night he arrived, no less). I didn't listen, but moving on...she told me that perhaps I am simply not cut out for long term relationships. I don't have the character makeup or the tolerance that most women seem to have for what most men seem to put women through; the compromises and little deaths of dignity, etc. The abuses, in particular. And I think she is right.

I was enamored for awhile, with this man's intellect, with the way he allowed me to open up, for a time, emotionally; however, it was all a confection, ultimately. None of it was real, because the REAL him was certainly not the person he presented to me online. He presented a false face that was just a reflection of what he knew I valued. In fact, values are what he spoke about a lot.

I live my life doing a lot of service work. Both in my jobs, and in my personal life. I take care of people, and it's what I have been doing for years. Simply because when the situation arises, to me, it's the right thing to do. Lately, I've been taking care of the man I consider to be like a father to me for the past few months, because it's the right thing to do. I'm too sick to work right now, but I take him to the hospital, arrange rides, got his insurance adjusted to cover treatment, make sure there's food in the house (even if it's frozen dinners when I'm too sick to make real food, which has been the case this past week especially). I do what I can, because I love him and it's what you do for family.

This guy, we'll call him Cracker, knew all this about me and sold me on a passel of bullshit about how he was the same way. But when I came to know what he was really about, it was clear he was a person who was able, in person, to only speak boastingly about himself, and things he accomplished years ago. There was no real substance to it.

And when it came to actual kindness, well...as I found out, it was just as shallow as the rest of him. He was -- at least as compared to the circles I move in -- very well off financially. And the funny thing is, this guy was willing to have me eventually move in, get married, and I'd never have to work again. But can you imagine the life I'd have with someone like that? I cannot. I'd wither and die with a life like that.

And that's where the rest of the point of this post comes into play.

Because I've been thinking a lot about my future, lately. My health has been getting worse, and I have nothing set aside for my future. How could I, living paycheck to paycheck for all these years? I've been unable to work for stretches of time due to my health. I've been hospitalized for depression several times, long term, since my son died. I have no safety net at all.

Right now, I have a place for my cats and I to live. But when Joe dies, I have no options. I could literally end up on the streets, and where would my cats end up? I'm even more afraid for them than I am for myself. They could end up in a shelter, and put down. Ok, I'm equally terrified for all three of us.

I've been so good at getting services in place for Joe, but when it comes to getting disability for myself, things are at a standstill. I keep getting blocked at every turn, and I've been unable to work, except for the freelance writing job, which is barely enough to keep us in cat food, were I not sharing expenses here. I need to find a way to get things rolling, get the disability benefits. But it's very difficult, and I fear for where we will end up.

It's clear that I cannot get a job outside the home anymore. The Ehlers Danlos has progressed to the point where I am in constant pain, and exhausted all day. I need to lay down most of the time. After coming home from Joe's hospital visits, I have to go straight to bed, and rest. This is my reality, now. And it is terrifying to think what will happen once he's gone.

I’ve been proposed to by another male friend, recently, but it’s just another trap, ultimately. He’s in love with me, and I don’t return the feelings. 

How easy it would be if I could be the kind of woman who could compromise herself for her own security. I wish I could. Maybe I’m stupid for not doing so. But I just CAN’T. And I feel this dreadful sense of urgency now to figure things out, but what kind of future is in store for a chronically ill middle aged woman whose only talent is writing? And whose depression seems to be getting worse. 

I have been trying to get an appointment with a psychiatrist for months now, since my healthcare was finally reinstated via public aid, and it’s getting to the point where I’m not sure what to do. I called my doctor for a referral yet again today, so we will see what happens. I’m at least on mood stabilizers, but I need another medication as well, and I can’t take SSRI’s because of the bipolar piece. I don’t get manic often, but SSRI’s will kick me into a manic episode within a month, so I need some kind of solution. 

I am probably going to find some way to figure this all out, eventually. But I have no idea right now what that might be, because I’m so depressed that it’s hard to find my way through the web of complications and inability to see a real future for myself. I cannot — WILL not — latch onto some fucked up relationship in order to “save myself”, because that would kill my soul. 

Let’s hope it doesn’t literally kill me, because I end up on the street with no other options. I’m too old for that shit. 

But this is the life I choose — to be as true to myself and my reality as I can be. I cannot live a lie; I can’t marry someone to benefit myself, as easy as it would make my life. I cannot compromise myself that way. Maybe it’s crazy, to value my freedom and my ability to be mySELF more than my security. But anything else seems like a trap to me. And so, I MUST figure out some alternative. I certainly didn’t plan for my life to turn out this way. My health wasn’t supposed to deteriorate when I hit my late 20s. My son wasn’t supposed to die at the age of 19, spiraling me into a depression that I fight daily. I wasn’t “supposed” to be born with a mentally interesting brain that makes it five times as hard to manage all of the above. But, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, as my grandmother was fond of saying. 

If I had money, this would all be manageable. But, I don’t. And although that’s unfair as fuck, and ridiculous, it’s reality. And I need to figure it all out, somehow, and I need to do it soon. But getting on disability is worse than the government machinations in the movie Brazil, and I am very nervous indeed for my future. 

Well, this has been a rousing post, I know. But my prospects are looking grim, and everything is colored by my current depression. I try to live my life doing the RIGHT thing, as opposed to the easy, or self-serving thing. It’s foolish to hope that somehow it pays off, but I keep hoping that if there is such a thing as karma, maybe I will be alright in the end. Me and my cats. Because without them, I’d be lost. They keep me sane. 

I just want a peaceful life, maybe with a roommate or two, with my cats; some plants and some sunshine. Nice people. Music. And for god’s sake, some stability.  I could see continuing to live with Max as a roommate, in future, once I have some sort of income via disability or whatever shakes out (and there will be SOMETHING, I know I'll figure something out, one way or another, I always do). But I absolutely cannot continue to live with Saorsie. I have had enough of living with the insanity and chaos of addicts for at least six lifetimes. But that is up to him, and a conversation for another day. And I don't have any idea what his plans are for when Joe is no longer with us.

All I know is that I want peace.

Is that too much to ask? Like the song says -- I will survive.

At least, I bloody well hope so.

[smokeybrandreviews]

Get Out

My kid brother posted this meme on Facebook stating that the best games from the PS2 era were Resident Evil 4 (Which, f*ck no, that port was trash!), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Need For Speed: Underground 2. Personally, i disagree. My list would be Persona 3 Fes, NBA Street vol. 2, and Tekken 5, in that order, with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City coming in at a close fourth place. Why isn't San Andreas on that list? Because i f*cking hate it. Now, don't misunderstand me, as a game, it's unassailable and deserves all of the shine it gets. Mechanically, what Rock Star was able to do with that title, pushing the PS2 to it's absolute limits in order to develop a true classic of the genre, is definitely worth mentioning. I give them full marks for that. No, my beef is with the actual content of the game. The very idea of San Andreas is offensive to me, and the fact that it's so popular only compounds that ire. That's my life. I was the black kid who grew up in the ghetto during the Nineties. That's a lived experience for me and, even though it's a game with made up scenarios that go way over the top towards the end, it still felt like disrespect. Rockstar made light of all that violent sh*t, all of those horrible experiences I endured at an age where I should have only been concerned about toys and cooties, and sold it. That sh*t wasn't fun. It wasn't a game. I ad two guns pulled on me before I made it to the sixth grade. The firs time a cop saw me as a threat, I was four years old. I've been to three separate house parties that have been aired out. That means shot up for those of you who aren't from where I'm from. When you're in it, its life. It's every day sh*t. When I got out of it, when I survived my statistical death and/or incarceration, looking back on all that sh*t, it was f*cked up. It shouldn't be a goddamn video game. I know people who weren't fast enough to get out of those parties. I know people who were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and cat a wayward bullet. That sh*t isn't something i can just “turn off” and walk away from. I carry those experiences with me everywhere. They informed my entire life, for better or worse, so to see a goddamn video game portray them to the masses with suck flippancy, is f*cking infuriating.

San Andreas wasn't a loving satire like Friday or an introspection like Boyz n the Hood. It felt like the Rockstar developers just watched a bunch of hood films and made one themselves. It felt like a bunch of white boys watched Menace II Society and said, "I want to do that." So they did. And then it got worse. San Andreas got so big because suburban white kids made it that way. I'm not one to hoard my culture from anyone. Black people make dope sh*t. From music, to fashion, to food; Out culture is f*cking dope. Literally, when people say anything about “American” culture, it's almost all black. We created Blues. We created Rock n Roll. We created Rap and Hip Hop. We made Nike a thing. Friends exists because Living Single f*cking killed. The CW exists today because we, as black people, supported them for years in the ratings. Same with Fox. Blackness, black people, are the backbone of everything “American” and we have to survive in a country that fetishizes our struggle, but hates us for that struggle. “Everybody wanna be a n*gga, but don't nobody wanna be a n*gga.” Paul Mooney, rest in peace, was speaking truth to power with that statement and San Andreas is the physical manifestation of that sentiment. Much like everything we produce, white people co-opted it and decided to make it their own. My lived experience was turned into a goddamn video game for white, suburban, consumption and, just like my music, they took that sh*t and ran. Motherf*ckers made that sh*t the best selling game on the PS2. Think about that; San Andreas sold MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of copies, topping all-time best selling charts because of white dollars. Now juxtapose that against the content of said game and tell me I'm talking out my ass.. San Andreas sold so well so non-black kids could detach themselves from the reality of that life, and safely cosplay as poor black kids from the hood. If games are a form of wish fulfillment and escapism, then these privileged white kids were making light of me entire goddamn life! Pretending to be a gang-banging gangster was a game to them. Running from strays was fun for them. Moving drugs and getting caused by cops was this make believe life they could just save and walk away from when they were finished. How is that not wildly f*cked up? It's super weird to me more black folks don't take issue with that. I'm not saying San Andreas is racist or that you're a bigot for enjoying it, I'm saying the game, itself, is problematic as f*ck and if we're looking back to hold ourselves accountable, I feel like this thing should really be addressed as well.

[smokeybrand]

Get Out

My kid brother posted this meme on Facebook stating that the best games from the PS2 era were Resident Evil 4 (Which, f*ck no, that port was trash!), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Need For Speed: Underground 2. Personally, i disagree. My list would be Persona 3 Fes, NBA Street vol. 2, and Tekken 5, in that order, with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City coming in at a close fourth place. Why isn't San Andreas on that list? Because i f*cking hate it. Now, don't misunderstand me, as a game, it's unassailable and deserves all of the shine it gets. Mechanically, what Rock Star was able to do with that title, pushing the PS2 to it's absolute limits in order to develop a true classic of the genre, is definitely worth mentioning. I give them full marks for that. No, my beef is with the actual content of the game. The very idea of San Andreas is offensive to me, and the fact that it's so popular only compounds that ire. That's my life. I was the black kid who grew up in the ghetto during the Nineties. That's a lived experience for me and, even though it's a game with made up scenarios that go way over the top towards the end, it still felt like disrespect. Rockstar made light of all that violent sh*t, all of those horrible experiences I endured at an age where I should have only been concerned about toys and cooties, and sold it. That sh*t wasn't fun. It wasn't a game. I ad two guns pulled on me before I made it to the sixth grade. The firs time a cop saw me as a threat, I was four years old. I've been to three separate house parties that have been aired out. That means shot up for those of you who aren't from where I'm from. When you're in it, its life. It's every day sh*t. When I got out of it, when I survived my statistical death and/or incarceration, looking back on all that sh*t, it was f*cked up. It shouldn't be a goddamn video game. I know people who weren't fast enough to get out of those parties. I know people who were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and cat a wayward bullet. That sh*t isn't something i can just “turn off” and walk away from. I carry those experiences with me everywhere. They informed my entire life, for better or worse, so to see a goddamn video game portray them to the masses with suck flippancy, is f*cking infuriating.

San Andreas wasn't a loving satire like Friday or an introspection like Boyz n the Hood. It felt like the Rockstar developers just watched a bunch of hood films and made one themselves. It felt like a bunch of white boys watched Menace II Society and said, "I want to do that." So they did. And then it got worse. San Andreas got so big because suburban white kids made it that way. I'm not one to hoard my culture from anyone. Black people make dope sh*t. From music, to fashion, to food; Out culture is f*cking dope. Literally, when people say anything about “American” culture, it's almost all black. We created Blues. We created Rock n Roll. We created Rap and Hip Hop. We made Nike a thing. Friends exists because Living Single f*cking killed. The CW exists today because we, as black people, supported them for years in the ratings. Same with Fox. Blackness, black people, are the backbone of everything “American” and we have to survive in a country that fetishizes our struggle, but hates us for that struggle. “Everybody wanna be a n*gga, but don't nobody wanna be a n*gga.” Paul Mooney, rest in peace, was speaking truth to power with that statement and San Andreas is the physical manifestation of that sentiment. Much like everything we produce, white people co-opted it and decided to make it their own. My lived experience was turned into a goddamn video game for white, suburban, consumption and, just like my music, they took that sh*t and ran. Motherf*ckers made that sh*t the best selling game on the PS2. Think about that; San Andreas sold MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of copies, topping all-time best selling charts because of white dollars. Now juxtapose that against the content of said game and tell me I'm talking out my ass.. San Andreas sold so well so non-black kids could detach themselves from the reality of that life, and safely cosplay as poor black kids from the hood. If games are a form of wish fulfillment and escapism, then these privileged white kids were making light of me entire goddamn life! Pretending to be a gang-banging gangster was a game to them. Running from strays was fun for them. Moving drugs and getting caused by cops was this make believe life they could just save and walk away from when they were finished. How is that not wildly f*cked up? It's super weird to me more black folks don't take issue with that. I'm not saying San Andreas is racist or that you're a bigot for enjoying it, I'm saying the game, itself, is problematic as f*ck and if we're looking back to hold ourselves accountable, I feel like this thing should really be addressed as well.