#i still miss someone

[jt1674]

[esters-notepad]

I didn't have time to write yesterday, which means I've lost my lead time. This story for the fifth day of @chrumblr-whumblr is actually written today, on the fifth of May. Prompt: forced to obey. Inspired by the Johnny Cash song I Still Miss Someone.

She had the same blue eyes as Daisy. That's the first thing I noticed. Her hair was the same light brown colour as Daisy's, as well, but while Daisy wore hers in a simple bob, this unknown woman's hair was shingled and curled to perfection. Her skirt was a little shorter, her dress a little slimmer, her neckline a little deeper. Not quite immodest, but certainly suggestive. Her cigarette holder, long and slender like a young ash-tree, was made of ivory. She met my eyes and blew a seductive cloud of smoke in my direction.

"Hello, handsome."

Her voice was deep and velvety, but she lisped ever so slightly on the s, adding a touch of childish innocence to the image of a worldly woman she projected. My face felt hot in a way I hadn't felt since my school days. Still, she looked at me, expecting a response.

"What brings you to our little town, Miss...?"

"Farr. Lucy Farr."

"I'm Adam Morrison. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Farr."

She looked at me through long, black eyelashes. I cleared my throat and sipped at my lemonade.

"Have you lived here long, Mr. Morrison?"

"I grew up here."

"Really? You surprise me." She drew another breath on her cigarette. "You have the air of a man who's seen the world."

"In a way, I have. I was in Europe for the Great War."

"How fascinating!"

So I told her several anecdotes. She listened attentively and made clever comments of her own. Sometime during our conversation, I realized that there was something odd about her tongue. She noticed me noticing, but instead of hiding it, she opened her mouth and showed me. The tip was split like a snake's tongue. She was born that way, she said. I complimented her on speaking so well despite her defect. She laughed and blew a smoke ring at me.

Old Wright at the piano announced a ladies' dance. Miss Farr smiled a predatory smile and threw back the rest of her drink.

"Dance with me, Mr. Morrison!"

She danced like an ocean wave, like a summer breeze over the prairie, like a lover's caress. When she leaned into my arms and turned her face towards mine, I only hesitated for a moment. Then I kissed her. She kissed back, hungrily, and her split tongue embraced mine. I had never kissed with tongues before. She tasted like fire. There must have been something prohibited in that drink she'd been drinking. I hadn't thought Thompson's would serve such things.

The dance ended. We returned to our seats at the bar.

"You're mine now, Mr. Morrison," Miss Farr said. "Every man whom I kiss is mine."

I laughed uneasily, thinking that it had to be some kind of joke. She looked earnestly at me until my laughter died down.

"Do you see the woman sitting by herself in that booth?" she said. "Dance the next dance with her. And the one after that. Then, follow her home and kiss her goodnight. Kiss her just like you kissed me."

"But... that's Dora Smith. That's Jimmy Baker's fiancee!"

"Oh yes, I know. They've had a little lover's tiff. Nothing serious. If we leave them alone, they will mend things tomorrow, get married as planned, and live happily ever after. But if you dance with her tonight and kiss her, your old pal Jimmy will hear about it and break off the engagement. Wouldn't that be fun?"

I stared at her, feeling nauseous.

"Go, Mr. Morrison. Show Miss Smith a good time tonight. I command you."

Despite myself, I got up from my stool. I tried to leave. I tried to head for the door. Instead, I found myself standing by Dora Smith's booth.

"Pardon me," I heard myself saying. "But would you do me the honour of dancing with me?"

[mermaidinthecity]

Well, I wonder if he's sorry for ending what we had begun. Well there's someone, someone for me somewhere. Baby, well I still miss someone. And I never got over those blue eyes. I see them, everywhere. And I miss those arms that held me, ooh baby, when all the love was there. And I never got over those blue eyes. I see them, everywhere. And I miss those arms that held me, baby, when all the love was there. Baby, when all the love was there. Baby, when all the love was there.

I Still Miss Someone (Blue Eyes) by Stevie Nicks

[kelpermoosee]

Me and the forces beyond my control

[leosdooley]

MY MEMORY LOVES YOU.

jonathan carroll // margarita karapanou // jean-paul sartre // fatima aamer bilal // x // we are the dirt // x // the wedding date // haruki murakami // richard siken // x // angel a.g. // beau taplin // ryan o’connell // akhira // sylvia plath

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Never underestimate the healing power of a good meal!

(For @nibbelraz!)

[tiniest-hands-in-all-the-land]

Carry me home

[lazylittledragon]

ok someone please correct me if i'm wrong but am i weird for thinking those 'audiobooks don't count as reading' posts are ableist as fuck????

[cattnipt]

SEES go somewhere look how happy they are

[bookinit02]

i really do think there’s a huge disconnect on here w/ people who have never used tiktok as to what it actually is and who actually uses it. the number of people i’ve seen call it a “teen dancing app” is actually insane. it has not been a teen dancing app since i was in high school, around 2016 - 2020. the main communities i saw on a daily basis were 1) black history/anti-racism educators, 2) high school & college teachers sharing in-classroom strategies and frustrations with the education system, 3) local/state political leaders giving real-time updates on behind-the-scenes government decisions, & 4) community activism & leadership. like tiktok is an adult platform. almost every person i interacted with was my age or older. and yes it completely depends on your fyp and how you interact with the app, yes there’s still teenagers and dance videos and literally anything else you can think of. but these communities of adults aren’t insubstantial at all, they have literally millions of interactions on a daily basis. there’s about a million other types of communities that i could name just off the top of my head, because the range of users was SO diverse and thriving. it’s a long-distance community tool, just like any other social media—and honestly much better than any other social media, because it relies primarily on the kindness of strangers. i saw at least 5-10 videos today of queer people in rural areas panicking because they don’t have any access to queer community on any other platform or in real life. and before i end this i do want to say i think tiktok is coming back, i think this is a highly orchestrated political move, etc., but i do know it won’t ever be exactly the same. people are panicking about free speech violations because tiktok was a place where people fucking SPEAK. i have never seen mass mobilization and communication in this same way for as long as i’ve been alive. it is the people’s app, not just a silly teenage thing. if you’re not on tiktok and never have been, please stop talking about it like you know anything at all😭

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[mermaidinthecity]

Outside my door the rain is falling. A cold, wild wind will come. Well there's someone for me, somewhere. But I still miss that one. No, I never got over those blue eyes. I see them, everywhere. And I miss those arms that held me. Baby, when all the love was there.

I Still Miss Someone (Blue Eyes) by Stevie Nicks

[tarmac-rat]

"I can't believe CDPR made one of the romance options a COP" River is a cop for literally two thirds of a mission that is dedicated to uncovering the depths of police corruption in Night City, gets immediately booted from the force BECAUSE he tried to stand up to said police corruption, spends the rest of the game pursuing detective work outside the law, and in the base game mentions he's going to start work as a private eye so he doesn't have to return to the force in order to keep protecting people.

The only instance where the "River is a Cop" joke is funny is using it in the context of Johnny being pissy about it, which should probably tell you how low hanging that particular fruit probably is.

[licorishh]

no way she's alive ?? yea those mental health breaks because social media makes people suck are wild huh

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Birthday to Fallen London; My favourite British people beefing it with bats simulator.

[shadowhaert]

missing someone bad for you

trista mateer / trista mateer / sue zhao / u.k / u.k / clementine von radics / trista mateer