#i need to revisit it at one point.

[katierosefun]

i have a wip titled 'rip rachel zane pls divorce mike ross' right now--

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[valvarads]

Wake up. This isn’t who you are! Healing the patients and bringing back their smiles… That’s the real you!

KAMEN RIDER EX-AID Episode 19

[h0riz0nstuff]

More old favorites from HZD

Getting to the GAIA Prime stormbird early A good angle on stabbing watchers xD Cauldron Zeta

[batsplat]

from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that

(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time

on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind

and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:

you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war

you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)

following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over

it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him

taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going

moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that

this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'

especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?

yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late

I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to

[e8luhs]

finally getting to that stage where ive been away from my abuser for long enough that i can finally stop like... feeling bad for him or whatever even though he was ~saaaad~ when he was abusing me. i mean okay yeah i still feel bad for him sometimes i still feel guilty sometimes i still miss him sometimes because at one point we were friends jesus christ. but i dont feel so utterly plagued by it as much as before which is nice. unfortunately it does mean that my brain is stuck re-playing everything with a new light being shined over it for the several hundredth time but at least im not flagellating myself about it as much anymore. like im finally starting to think more about how i feel than about how he feels. that is something. kind of bare minimum but its something after ages of blaming myself for everything that happened

[cctinsleybaxter]

I always assumed people were at least dimly aware of Yossarian's first name and exclusively use his surname according to convention (i.e. alienation), but it might be more thematic and more insane if only the higher-ups/bad guys know it

[moe-broey]

No context but I got So distracted. I did not set out to do All That today. I don't even know where the fuck I am anymore. It was all an impulse decision and I didn't even write down the second distraction because it was So Strong. In my mind. But then a second distraction hit my two braincells. I have no idea whwre I am anymore. I was just gonna whip up a shitpost doodle and then go back to my main project. I never even got to the shitpost doodle. 🧍

[deklo]

part of me wants to draw some jerejean but the other (bigger?) part of me has no emotional connection to either of them (yet?) so i have no idea what to actually draw :-)

[mirrortouchedsea]

7 snippets, 7 people!

Tagged by @inkstaindusk though I do not know if I follow or know 7 writers but here's 7 snippets at least

confessions - Enstars, Madara/Tatsumi

“Confession typically requires one to be in a confessional, but it isn’t unheard of for people to do impromptu confessions.” 

“And you can’t tell anyone about what’s said to you, right?” 

“What’s said during confession is between the confessor and God. The priest only acts as an intercessor, at least on paper.” 

“But you have to keep it secret, right?” 

“Correct.” 

“Can I…confess something?” 

--

Eccentric Party Night Gone Wrong - Enstars, Five Eccentrics

Shu tentatively nodded along with everyone else, flashing a nervous smile, though the butler seemed to believe Wataru’s story. They were ushered to follow him back down the hall and the rest of them all looked at each other, skeptical that their plan would continue to work once they reached whatever gathering was being held. Wataru glanced over his shoulder to wink at them and began asking questions to the butler about what they had supposedly missed. 

--

I belong to the salt and the sea and the stones (Save them all for me) - Enstars, Kaoru/Kanata

“I don’t believe anyone truly enjoys that dull political talk, but I was thinking more along the lines of… this.” 

Rei had walked ahead of Kaoru and pulled a book from the shelf. The speed and ease of which he found it amazed Kaoru. He clearly came and read that book frequently, which Kaoru was just as guilty of with his mermaid books from his mother’s collection. 

The book had a plain cover with just the title written in a cursive gold font. 

Rei opened it and thumbed through the pages before settling on what looked like a drawing of some sort from Kaoru’s perspective. 

“Do you believe in vampires, little Kaoru?” he asked, turning the book to face him. 

--

old coots giving advice. it's bad advice but it's free - Enstars, Crazy:B

“Mhm. Anyway, do you have any idols that you look up to, HiMERU-han?” 

HiMERU hesitated and took a long sip of his coffee. 

“He would rather not talk about that.” 

Kohaku raised an eyebrow. 

“Maybe another time, Oukawa.” 

--

meru has a panic attack - Enstars, HiMERU, Crazy:B

[He] wasn’t supposed to be feeling this happy. [He] was just filling in a role until Kaname woke up. [He] was just a tool, a puppet, a pawn on the board that was meant to become a queen. [He] shouldn’t allow himself to get this close to the others. 

--

in this sea we call home - Enstars, Kaoru/Kanata

“Kaoru,” Kanata started, still staring at the ocean. “Have I ever told you about my ‘mother’?” 

Kanata’s hand shook in Kaoru’s grasp. 

“No,” he responded, squeezing Kanata’s hand reassuringly. “Do you…want to?” 

“Yes.”

--

tatsuhime violence - Enstars, Fucking Guess

“Go away, Tatsumi Kazehaya.” HiMERU said, just barely above a whisper. His voice was shaky but still full of conviction. 

Instead, Tatsumi leaned his cane against the wall and sat next to HiMERU. He seemed hesitant before speaking. “Kaname-san, if it’s okay for me to call you that now--” 

HiMERU doesn’t even think as he moves his hands to Tatsumi’s throat, straddling the other man. “Keep his name out of your mouth or ‘I’ will remove it for you.”

-------

Tagging uh. @clockworkspider and @girlbossminerva @dariraine (hi this is shay starswallowingsea's writing blog 👋) and anyone else who would like to do this

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

mac i am so sorry to enter ur inbox with more qsmp but oh my god. qcellbit update. so he talked to bagi. his sister. he still doesn't remember her. he still needs time to process everything but she said she's waited fifteen years so she can wait a few more days. i'm crying and sobbing rn. also he doesn't even fucking remember what he did to get thrown in prison, all he knows is that he was killing people to survive one day and another he was behind bars. i'm UNWELL!!! he got called in to talk to cucurucho (the fuckin THING that's kind of the federation mascot and it tortured cellbit with a chainsaw months ago FUCK CUCURUCHO ALL MY HOMIES HATE CUCURUCHO) and he was just. fucking tired. yesterday he messed with the feds quite publicly and cucurucho questioned him about it and he said "i don't care what you do to me, you can torture me, i don't care. i just want my family back, i want a future with them. just give me peace. let me rest." HE SOUNDED SO FUCKING TIRED. I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT HE WAS SAYING UNTIL SOMEONE POSTED A TRANSLATION BUT HE SOUNDED SO SO SAD. AND NOW CELLBIT HIMSELF IS GOING TO TWITCHCON SO QCELLBIT IS TAKING A WEEK LONG DEPRESSION NAP. MAC CAN U HEAR ME. I'M UNWELL. I'M LOSING IT. THIS IS ME RN

anyway. hows ur day. i might go watch some steven universe bc i have been meaning 2 rewatch it (or adventure time!!!! one of the two for sure) take a short break from binge watching hannibal 2 watch a silly funny cartoon :3 also still trying to make my way thru marble hornets again it's just such an insane series 2 rewatch u know but i'm getting there!!! sorry i am just currently lying on the floor in my brain thinking about qsmp i had 2 tell u what happened 2 ur blorbo in law today

NEVER APOLOGIZE TO ME ABOUT PUTTING STUFF IN MY INBOX I LOVE GETTING MAIL I LOVE LEARNING THROUGH OSMOSIS I LOVE LISTENING 2 PPL TALK ATBT THINGS THEY LOVE

that sounss aboslutely DEVASTATING btw. oh my god. so the whole thing is like.. she remembers him but he doesnt remember her ?? GODDDD thats so upsetting. im glad hes getting 2 take a nap even if it is a depression one sigh. oh man oh man i love this.

my day was! good i think! i have not had a day to reat since my whole job shadow debacle last week so im kimd of running on fumes BUT . i have off work tmw so im gonna get a haircut and feel all good about everything. and maybe work on some art bc im now caught up to my pre prepped invertober images and i have a couple other time sensitive things like that. ougah. we keep truckin. ive got a huge backlog of youtube videos to watch from last week + beginning of this week i cannot Wait to get thru those and also watch more adventure time !! bc i have offically gotten to Stakes (a marcelone centric mini series) and it is one of my favorite eras ever. i love you vampire lore!!!

[whysamwhy123]

22. Do you know how your fic will end before you start writing?

Generally, yeah. I'm a pretty firm planner/outliner - I need to know where I'm going before I start putting pen to paper, so to speak. Most of my fics, I know how they're gonna end when I start 'em. And while I have yet to venture into multi-chapter fics, (not for lack of wanting to, believe me, I have Ideas) I would only do so if I knew for sure how I wanted it to end.

That isn't to say I'm not willing to be flexible though, if the writing process takes me down a different path. A good example of that is Voice in the Dark, Part Two - that fic originally had a very different ending, but when I started writing the second conversation between Hook and Evilhausen, it ended up going in a completely different (and much hornier) direction that took me by surprise and facilitated changing the ending. And even then, that ending had a couple different iterations before I settled on what was posted in the end. To this day, I still wonder how different the reception might have been if I'd gone with one of the other endings.

[existentialcrisis-24-7]

Going through an old sketchbook I had lost and oh my god I had so much good winx art and comics and shit and my old art style for traditional art was stunning where did I go wrong

Anyway idk if I ever actually posted these but I found them and they’re cute and I’m posting them now

Some old (like 2 year old??) but cute doodles of Bloom, Andy and Selina as children to enjoy

[waywardsalt]

ok since tears of the kingdom is coming out like. insanely soon i figured i’ll just dump how i’ve been feeling abt it here. i wont tag for them and i dont intend to share any but because i have been actively seeking out spoilers i will vaguely reference them here so… idk really long musings on this game and my feelings abt it

(im just writing this out mostly for myself since i really kind of just. want to really figure out how i feel about this)

i… am not excited for totk?

i’ve figured out a bit ago that my severely waning interest in botw and general anxiety and discontent surrounding totk is just that… these games arent for me. i dont enjoy open world games with half a million things for you to do like it’s basically a sandbox. i struggle to really enjoy singleplayer minecraft. the space stage in spore gives me genuine anxiety, both when i played it as a kid and again when i reached it as an adult.

botw and totk are not games for me, and that’s cool. i’ve figured that out.

so why am i getting so damn anxious about this new game?

i am getting totk- not entirely of my own volition, i live with someone who is very genuinely excited for it, so it’s pre-ordered digitally on our switch. i am going to play it and complete it at least once.

the gameplay and world of botw never really got to me, and even what snippets of gameplay i see for totk dont really entice me. it just makes me anxious to think about the sheer amount of new stuff i’ll be dropped in the middle of and how i really dont care about this version of link or zelda or anyone else in botw’s hyrule

and some of the story spoiler stuff and general direction this game is going in has me just worried that the zelda series is moving away from what it used to be into an entirely new direction, that being a direction that it seems like i wont enjoy as much as everyone else seems to

so then i guess my main worry outside of totk is that i just end up struggling to really feel connected to the rest of the community about this? being a contrarian is fun until everyone is enjoying something you for some reason can’t get yourself to

i dont have a lot of hope in the story of totk to harken back to… ANYTHING of worth that past games have built up and made to be so important and interesting. hype is a dangerous thing for a not-yet-released game, and while i think the insane amount of speculation and theories and hype around totk will cause a lot of people to be disappointed with the final story, i dunno if i really wouldve liked it even if the story actually piqued my interest

maybe totk’s gameplay will really hook me. maybe i’ll enjoy the massive open world and gmod-ass gimmicks. but what ive seen of the story makes me less interested and the snippets of gameplay i see just make me remember how bored i now am with botw

at the end of the day this is just a video game with tags on this site i can blacklist and videos i can ignore and lore i can brush aside because at this point loz canon is a suggestion more than anything

i just cant shake the discomfort of once again being an outlier as everyone i see loses their mind about this new game while i just feel overwhelmed by it. i have played botw for a long time and have long since worn it out. i played age of calamity to completion and have not touched it or cared for it beyond the music since. i am not excited about totk and i feel like i am in the wrong due to my opinion

[dracolunae]

I hate growing up with German television sometimes because it makes it so much harder to find obscure animated shows and movies from your childhood

Bonus points for frequently having extremely vivid and elaborate dreams that make it even harder to tell what part of your memory was real or a dream