#i miss vine so much

[jessss-ica]

Does anyone else find enjoyment from watching vine compilation videos on YouTube or is it just me?

[aplaceformyfixations]

found an uncropped casey frey vine

[nefkyo]

they took my leg they really did

At least it doesn't hurt, where'd you go for the pain if yo leg is gone!

[agoldengalaxy]

the boys are back!!

[qde-jiko]

Re-listening to taz balance, i miss the tres horny boys so much man

Also i thought avi was a half elf until halfway through finishing the piece, it was exhausting trying to fix 😪

[missfisherandjack]

DI Jack Robinson In The Episode “Death On The Vine”

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012-2015) ↳ 2x10 Death On The Vine

[a-s-levynn]

"It's too late for me now, I am altered / There is something beneath" A Series of Small Offerings - III/7 - day27

[vii-doodles]

Love yourself

[mercutiosblog]

road work ahead? uh, aye, I surely desire it doeth.

I shalt be delighted to travel it astride mine proud horse

[danwhobrowses]

Okay so I was gonna do a big gush over all the new Bells Hells outfits on the recent cr episode (a surprise since I had expected that they'd show them for the live show), but instead I'm gonna encourage you to check out @agarthanguide who is answering asks about the process of designing them, they're very insightful, and I'm sure they're more than happy to answer more - within reason ofc.

[creampuffqueen]

bad news: didn’t get the internship i applied for for the spring semester. it filled up way too fast. there’s still a possibility i’ll get it if enough people drop, but i won’t hold my breath. my good luck had to run out at some point i guess. also if i don’t get it for the spring i am on the list for fall so i will get to do it at some point

good news: parents are visiting this weekend and they’re BRINGING MY DOG WITH THEM!!!!! 🥳🥳

[morganee]

Mike's Monologue Lie

inspired by this post by @theonebyler

[cuteniaarts]

Here *throws random and actually much more important than I realised at first OC redesign at you after two and a half years since the OG*

Meifeng, Ming-Hua’s cousin! I just randomly remembered that she exists while putting together my OC family tree and since the only art I have of her is… nearly 3 years old and mediocre at best, and Kat and I have recently spent so much time focusing on Red Lotus siblings, I thought “Hey, why not redraw her? Just because she’s a cousin and not a sister doesn’t make her any less special than Lien-Hua, Summiya, Aiza or Haya!” (On that note… Nia give someone a brother challenge. The only one that counts is Aiza and she’s only a brother half the time)

Some headcanons about her, both new and old (the old copy-pasted over and slightly edited to save everyone the second hand embarrassment of going to look at my old art), which will go under the cut because this has gotten LONG:

Old:

Older than Ming-Hua by around 10 years

Her dad is the older half-brother of Ming-Hua's mom who’s… not the most fond of their side of the family

Has never left her home in the Foggy Swamp Water Tribe

Master healer, specialises in children. Can't have any of her own because of the high pollution levels in the swamp which is why she puts all those motherly instincts into teaching and caring for kids

Got a scar on her leg while saving Ming-Hua from some wild swamp creature when the latter was a child who was absolutely convinced she could handle everything herself and never listened to anyone. Ming-Hua still insists she had everything under control that day

She tried to understand Ming-Hua's perspective on things, she really did, but ultimately tribe mentality and fear for her cousin’s safety, believing her not to be nearly as capable as she claims to be, won over

Attempted to stop Ming-Hua from running away but was, obviously, unsuccessful

Was the one consoling Nuying after Ming-Hua left

Helped Suiren learn waterbending and held genuine affection for the girl, although she ultimately refused when Suiren begged for the chance for her and Midori to escape from Haya and live with the tribe. She thought that while Suiren would most likely adjust well, Midori was simply too Gaoling to survive in a place as dark, damp and isolated as the Swamp. She regrets that decision every day since she found out Suiren became an assassin

Mourned Ming-Hua more than anyone else in the tribe when informed of her death

New:

Was the one who babysat Ming-Hua a lot when Nuying was going through one of her depressive episodes after Cadeo left, and Ming-Hua actually enjoyed spending time with her because she was a lot less overbearing and protective than her mother. Was the first person to start calling her Ming. Sometimes Ming-Ming, but Ming-Hua had a tendency to deliver a very hard kick to the shins every time she tried that

Never left Nuying’s side when she got sick in the years following Ming-Hua’s disappearance, no matter how much everyone, including her own father, told her to stay away, there’s nothing she can do to help her. In her final moments, Nuying was delirious with fever and called out for Ming-Hua. Meifeng didn’t have the heart to remind her that her daughter left so instead let her hair down, covered her own hand in water and told Nuying that she was “right here, mom. I’m right here” and stayed like that until Nuying passed

When Ming-Hua returned, Meifeng was the one to break the news to her. Later, when Ming-Hua asked how and when it happened, she couldn’t quite stop herself from snapping at her because she should have been there, Meifeng shouldn’t have had to pretend to be her so her mother could die without worrying about where her daughter was. Their relationship never really fully recovered after that fight

Still, she had met Suiren when she was little on the rare occasions when the Red Lotus passed through the Swamp and Ming-Hua chose to take her daughter to visit the tribe. She never met Midori, but she did see Ming-Hua pregnant with her once

Didn’t know about Ming-Hua’s imprisonment until an 11-year-old Suiren told her because world news don’t reach into the heart of the Swamp. She just thought they had decided to stop visiting. The news crushed her but… a part of her couldn’t help but go “you should have fucking listened to me when I told you to stay, then this wouldn’t have happened”

Her teaching Suiren waterbending involved mostly the basics of combat (she herself doesn’t know much of it since she’s a healer), plantbending and healing. Suiren reached her level of mastery and proficiency as well as figured out icebending on her own through sheer determination and spite (she’s so much like her mama 🥹🥹🥹)

Is the only one from the tribe Suiren had ever confessed to about being an assassin. That knowledge broke her heart and she spent all those years absolutely terrified that Suiren would meet Ming-Hua’s fate. When Suiren stopped visiting at one point (when she left for her mission to kill Kuvira, got injured, recovered at ATI, reunited with her parents, broke Kuvira out and started living with her, etc etc) she had assumed that it really did happen, until Suiren randomly showed up one day with Kuvira in tow (Meifeng did not approve bc of the whole spirit vine thing 😅)

Absolutely reunited with Ming-Hua at some point and it was an extremely emotional moment

Ripped Cadeo a new one when he suddenly appeared looking for his daughter after 45+ years after it became common knowledge that the RL are all alive and no longer wanted by the law

All in all… quite an interesting character that I really should do something with at some point, bc how come Ming-Hua’s family is the only one to get 0 attention in our discussions?? #justiceformeifeng2024

[intertexts-moving]

gmmmm :]]]

[boom-baebee]

Valerie has such t girl swag like I'm going crazy over her

[cookinguptales]

So I listened to The Angel of Vine, an old (fictional) mystery podcast written in the form of a true crime podcast. It's about an unsolved murder that took place in old 1950s Hollywood, the private investigator who was trying to get to the bottom of it back then, and the podcaster trying to get to the bottom of that story now.

(Well, I guess five years old... is kind of old for a fiction podcast... Their website says a sequel is planned? But the story seemed extremely self-contained...)

Anyway. I liked it. The production values were high, the voice acting very good, the story solid. I thought the mystery was kind of predictable, honestly, but that's more of a me problem, I guess. It was still fairly atmospheric and I enjoyed the ride. The ending left me with some questions, but a comfortable number, I think.

What felt strangest, though, was that it actually reminded me so much of an old /nosleep story I always enjoyed, Dead Angels. I actually went back and checked and they came out right near each other in 2018. Seems fitting.

That's always been one of the stories that stuck out to me from my time trawling /nosleep, so maybe that was part of what helped me guess where things were going. (And... yes, I'll admit that the editor in me wants to make that story perfect, but I still think the writing is lovely. Just bear with the typos.)

Some further thoughts under a cut, for those who haven't consumed either (or both) of the stories.

I think we kind of have a fascination with art and Hollywood and starlets dying in order to become immortal. It already happens, the way Hollywood, especially old Hollywood, really chewed them up and spit them out. The Marilyn Monroes, the Judy Garlands, the little girls who became women who became just as famous for their pain as their art.

So I guess it makes sense that we also look at these sacrifices the same way that we look at victims of true crime. They're celebrities, too, frozen in time like an actress in a movie, except they were frozen by death. We love a martyr, a beautiful victim, an Ophelia, and I think it's really telling that the most famous unsolved mysteries really do end up being part of Missing White Woman Syndrome, y'know?

Both of the stories I'm talking about now feel inspired by real-life cases like The Black Dahlia, but I think both stories are also interested in... y'know, the eroticized violence of it all, the way people get obsessed with glamor and pain. The way that there sometimes is a violence to the way we consume the women we love and idolize and adore, and whether it's as explicit as a serial killer using dead women as a canvas or as hands-off as Britney being driven to madness, there really is a sense that art is suffering, and certain kinds of suffering make the most beautiful art.

But... I think when people say "art is suffering" they usually mean the artist is suffering. That the art comes from that suffering. But I think both of these stories are really playing with the idea that we turn others' suffering into our art, we get obsessed with it, we consume it, and it becomes an act of love and violence.

I guess... there certainly is an element of the way that we view women in all this... There are questions brought up (especially in The Angel of Vine) about the brutality that's popular in pornography, about consent, about the way some people funnel that into consensual (or nonconsensual) kinds of othered sex acts.

There are questions here about why we seem to love women most when they're beautiful and silent, suffering and just a little bit unknown. Paintings don't talk, y'know...? Neither do dead girls.

I guess it all comes down to consumption and memory and the agony of the sublime, though. I don't know. I'm still kind of sick, so maybe I'm not making any sense.

Personally... I actually hate true crime as a genre and subculture, though I love fictional media about true crime and how it interacts with society. So I did enjoy The Angel of Vine (just like I enjoyed more lighthearted looks at a similar subculture, like American Vandal and Only Murders In The Building) and I thought that, in some ways, it was making commentary about true crime while simultaneously aping it, y'know?

Like it talked about the way a (relatively) innocent man's life was ruined by speculation. It talked about the way the victim's life became secondary to her death and to those that killed her. It talked about the very real lives that can be destroyed in the service of an obsessive search for the truth. It talked about how sometimes, murderers want to be remembered for their crimes. They want this to be how their victims are remembered forever. They want their lives to be overwritten by their deaths, and we become party to that when we consume these stories. It's all about control, it's all about the narrative, it's all about who we allow to have the final word.

I guess... in the end, it makes sense that we're really starting to see a rise in media about actresses being murdered purely to be remembered. The quiet part of Hollywood is being said out loud. We're starting to talk about the abuses of actresses more and more these days, and sometimes in terms that seem... voyeuristic, maybe, rather than supportive. It's something that I noticed and did not particularly like during the whole big #MeToo movement.

I'm not criticizing that movement, to be clear. I think it was incredibly important and there's a reason why there was this sudden outpouring of truth and support and empathy. But I also do think that the scandal itself started to become entertainment for some people, and there became a strange push for every woman to start revealing the details of her eroticized trauma in order to remain part of the conversation. Those details got eaten up, just like the details of the more famous actresses' assaults were.

It's the empathy and consumption and revictimization every time an actresses's "nudes leak." It's the empathy and consumption and revictimization of women whose sexual assaults and/or murders are detailed on true crime podcasts. It's just. It's always down to consumption and memory and whose memories matter.

It's... idk, it's Ophelia, y'know? We love a pretty dead girl, especially if we have just enough information about her to feel like we know her -- without actually feeling the trauma of knowing her, of having a loved one and losing them and having the whole world swallow them whole.

It's all just complicated when we're dealing with women who wanted to be famous, just presumably not like this. And maybe, the cultural desire to punish them for that...? "Celebrities chose this life" and all that shit that paparazzi say. "I just want the victims to be remembered." Media bullshit.

Ah. I've tired myself out again, and I'm rambling. But I do think it's interesting, and I'm gonna be thinking about these topics for a while. Live fast, die pretty, etc. Memories live forever. Manuscripts don't burn. All that stuff.