#i was gonna put a read more cut but

[chipthekeeper]

ANDOR: 100 days to go. 100 things I love.

it's kind of wild how easy it is to come up with a hundred things to love about this show and still feel like I've left out sooooo much stuff (mostly serious stuff)(and other people's faves)

but here it is, in the order it all popped into my head (aside from the end)

lesbians

2. silly hats

3. weird little freaks

4. window motif!!

5. vel's puppy dog face

6. cinta veeeery nearly laughing at cassian trying to flirt with her

7. skeen's skrunkle face

8. taramyn's mustache

9. "seven years serving you? i deserve worse than that"

10. "everyone has their own rebellion"

11. The Eye

12. the lady who cries watching the eye

13. Bee

14. Brasso

15. Bix

16. Xanwan and Granik

17. all the ferrixians really

18. ghost maarva

19. WORLDBUILDING

20. on location filming

21. and building a real town

22. ludwig hopper

23. cinta being onto corv from moment one

24. cinta stabbing corv

25. SPLUTES

26. squigs

27. monologues

28. weird drama between exes

29. the ep 7 scene between mon and tay

30. NEWMAN

31. unit 5-2D

32. noodles brian

33. everyone hating syril

34. including his mom

35. flob

36. HAND HOLDING

37. the heist explanation scene

38. how blue vel's eyes are in the heist explanation scene

39. cinta and gorn's telepathic eye roll

40. DRAY

41. vel playing uno reverse when perrin tries to make fun of her

42. mon's "i know what you are" look at vel

43. all of episode 5

44. everything nicholas britell was doing

45. diegetic music

46. diegetic music the remix! x2

47. the Paak boys

48. eedy's nosy neighbor

49. Heert

50. space hoodies

51. scary tie fighters

52. scotland i mean aldhani

53. the charm on vel's walking stick (insert cry emoji)

54. melshi

55. sweet baby Nemik

56. clem

57. keef girgo

58. cassian somebody?

59. windi

60. willi

61. STAIRS DROID

62. kleya's strut

63. everything in luthen's shop

64. mon's limo

65. sharing a blanket

66. ponchos

67. dedra being sadistic

68. ham

69. ham making the jump

70. zinska's step of faith

71. dewi and freedi

72. Jezzi

73. THE DRUMS IN PILGRIM

74. "come away from the window"

75. memorable dray milk

76. lil Kerri

77. Time Grappler

78. Time Grappler kicking that guy off the tower

79. divorced dads Saw and Luthen

80. Benthic having to deal with his divorced dads

81. the music from the s1 trailer that makes me want to run through a wall

82. "never more than twelve"

83. "you love me because i show you what you need to see"

84. when cinta looks right at vel before jumping off the dam

85. "CLIIIIIMB"

86. doctor quadpaw

87. mon framing perrin for her crimes

88. "thesis, please"

89. Blevin's one sentence monologue

90. literally everything about the aldhani arc

91. literally everything about the aldhani crew

92. gornboda

93. "tell him our ghosts have strong hands and long memories"

94. brasso smashing the guy with the brick and then screaming

95. pegla's dogs

96. mostly competent bad guys

97. velcinta

98. 12 full length episodes

99. endless shitposting potential

100. the friends we've made along the way <3

i know i've left out so much so feel free to add your own!!

[memento-morri-writes]

ship in a bottle

Excuse the shitty 3am first draft, but I wrote another fucked-up nightmare for Rook... (continued under the cut. tw for death/drowning/corpses)

The water is rising even faster now, and within seconds the deck is awash with sea water.  It reaches his ankles, then his knees. He clings desperately to the broken wheel, but it will not save him. Nothing will save him. As the water reaches his neck he sucks in a breath. The water closes over his head. As it continues to rise, he begins to swim, searching for whatever is trapping him. A few strong strokes, and his outstretched hand meets something smooth. Glass.  He swims forwards, following the curve of the glass, searching for a way out. It slopes downwards, and he dives, following it into a narrow tunnel. At the end is a cork. There’s an indentation in it, as if something heavy has slammed against it. He pushes against it with all his might. His shoulder fits perfectly into the groove, but it will not budge. Exhausted he pauses, floating in the water. He should have needed to breathe by now. Should have drowned by now. But he hasn’t. The thought gives him hope. There must be a way out. Another thought crosses his mind. The rain alone was not enough to fill the bottle at this speed. There must be another opening. With renewed desperation, he swims back down the neck of the bottle and dives deeper, towards the bottom.  A dark shadow passes through the corner of his vision. He looks and sees the Tide Breaker sinking, having finally succumbed to the waves. As it falls past him, fading from his vision, he swims after it.

After several minutes of swimming, he begins to see shapes below him, coming closer. Dark silhouettes rise out of the murky water. As he grows closer, a sinking feeling sets into his stomach. The shapes are not natural rocks or stony ruins. They are wrecks, so densely packed that he can’t see the sand beneath them. Hundreds upon hundreds of ships lie at the bottom of the bottle, stretching as far as he can see in every direction.   No. Not hundreds of ships. One ship. Piled up on the ocean floor are countless copies of the Tide Breaker, in various states of disrepair. Some remain almost completely intact, while others have been ripped apart by the waves. Some are covered in seaweed, swaying gently in the waves. Others look recent, hulls clean and firm. For the first time since the water closed over his head, Rook’s lungs begin to strain. His heart is pounding in his chest. He kicks harder, swimming not upwards, but downwards, closer to the wrecks. Something white catches his attention, and he swims towards it. At first it looks like some kind of large shell, balanced on the broken wheel of one of the wrecks. But as he gets closer, its grisly shape reveals itself. A skull, bleached white and picked clean of flesh, is perched jauntily on the helm. Its naked grin seems to be taunting him. More white catches his eyes and he sees bones scattered across the deck.  Movement draws his attention from a nearby wreck, and he glances over. His vision is going dark at the edges from lack of air, and it takes him several seconds to process what he’s seeing. Tangled in the rigging of a nearby wreck is a corpse. His corpse. It twists slowly in the current, spinning around to face him. The eyes are gone and the flesh on his face has begun to fall off. Bite marks are visible where some deep-sea creature has been feeding from him. A scream is building in his throat, his lungs are sending shooting warnings through his body. He needs air. Against his will, his mouth opens, and water rushes in, salty and cold. As his vision fades, the last thing he sees is his own rotting corpse, drifting in the water. It seems to be laughing at him.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[orkowhereheshouldntbe]

[ID in ALT!]

Hey everyone,

As of January 20th, I'll have been running orkowhereheshouldntbe for two years. It's been so much fun, and I've learned so much about photo editing and media. But I don't feel like I can keep up with the daily posts anymore, and I don't want to keep half-assing things in hope the spark comes back. In other words, as the bio warned, the joke's gotten old.

That's not to say this blog is going away - I plan on leaving it up, and I'll still take requests and suggestions. I may even make a post of my own here and there when the mood strikes me. But I think taking the burden of daily posts off my shoulders will help.

I could never have anticipated a one-off inside joke like this becoming such a big part of my life, or taking up so much of my time. I'm proud of myself for managing to keep things going this long, even with the breaks I've had to take. And I'm endlessly grateful for all the love and support I've gotten on my posts. I'll have a special video on Saturday, to commemorate the blog's anniversary, and as a gift for all of you.

This isn't a permanent goodbye. It's just a change from how things have been. <3

[alikandhoney]

Anyone ever think about the fact that Broadway was dying and we begged and scram about accessibly when the audiences they are trying to curate could come together from far and wide if they only normalized proshots of productions, live streams of productions and made ticket prices affordable to younger audience that were hungry for the content and instead they hand over more and more roles to celebrity cast members and put up musicals about shit 80s movies to try and leech off of their fan base to feed this dying bastion of the arts that almost no one wants to think of and anything but a business any more right? Like god I’m in the theatre industry, I’m getting my MFA in theatrical design, I know what the business side of theatre looks like and what you need to do sometimes to keep a theatre a float but I also know what it looks like when people are actually trying to make fucking art and when they’re not. And recently most of what I hear about how productions update their casts or how they shut down or the new works getting put up tells me that hardly anyone is thinking about the art anymore. You’re casting Orville peck in cabaret? Maya hawke is Eurydice ? Shut the fuck up shut the fuck up shut the fuck up!! Every fucking musical is some movie remake thoughtless trash and we all fucking clap and cheer—I’m TIREDDDDDD im fucking TIRED.

[sodalitefully]

Duff & Slash vs. The World – a selection of quotes:

"One night Slash and I went out to the Rainbow, a restaurant next to the Roxy on Sunset that was famous as a rock-and-roll hangout. They gave us a booth. This was a new level of deference. A booth! At the Rainbow! As we proceeded to get blasted, a really big, drunk guy wandered over to our table. Though he looked like an overgrown hick, he was in fact the guitar player from a band considered quite big just then — much bigger than Guns. He addressed himself to Slash:

'N*****s shouldn’t wear tattoos,' he said.

What? Was this his idea of a joke or something?

He wasn’t laughing.

I stood up.

'What the fuck did you say to my friend?'

'You heard me. N*****s shouldn’t wear tattoos.'

I slugged the guy. Then I slugged him again. And again. He reminded me of the bullies back in Seattle, the meatheads who beat up punks in packs, who called everyone f*****s. I’m not sure how many times I hit him—I just completely lost it—but he went down. I found out later that three of his ribs had broken."

It's So Easy: And Other Lies, by Duff McKagan (2011)

"D: [Goes into a long incoherent rant about a fight he got into at a club on New Year’s Eve] … and the guy was bigger than I was, but I just went CAH-BOOOM! And… his eyes crossed, like you see in the cartoons, like that? And he went down. And then everybody dragged him back and dragged me back, but they were dragging him past me and I fucking biffed him three more times in the head! They said I broke his jaw…

S: Nasty [Suicide – former Hanoi Rocks guitarist] stuck his arm in through the crowd and got one in there too!

D: So we go through this shit all the time, people trying to fuck with us. I was telling you earlier, if anybody fucks with my homeboy here, Slash, – and it’s happened before, like if a big guy was gonna hit him – I’ve stepped right in front of him.

S: Sure, and I can hide in the crook of his knee…

D: I beat up a guy for him once. And he’d do that for me.

S: But not to sound stupid, because we’re starting to sound stupid…"

Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns N' Roses, by Mick Wall (2016)

"Slash: [Sam Kinison and I] got into a really big fight. It was real violent, and Duff punched him out, the cops were involved, too, and it was a big deal.

Stern: Who won the fight though? Who could beat up who? I bet you could take Sam in two seconds.

Slash: Well, no. He actually – I don’t want to... Duff punched him out. He gave him a black eye. But, before that, he was sitting on me. And I had no way of getting out, because he had my elbows pinned down. I couldn’t get my arms up, you know?

Stern: How did he get you down on the floor?

Slash: He jumped me from the blue and just landed on my chest. I was gonna be dead. He was choking me. I was history. I was, like, sitting there going, 'I’m going out this way? I can't believe I’m gonna go out this way.'

He just showed up at my hotel room one night. I didn’t even – you know, a knock on the door and, like, it’s Sam, and I’m like, 'Okay.'

And so he got on my case about all this stuff, and he called me a dickhead. And I got pissed off and I jumped off the bed, and I didn’t expect him to react the way he did. And I turned my back – you know, I turned around for a second – and he just jumped on me.

He got me by the throat and my arms were underneath his knees. And I was like, 'Oh, this is it. I’m going out.'

Robin: And then Duff came to the rescue.

Slash: Then Duff woke up in the other room.

Stern: Hey, you owe Duff, man. I’ll tell you, that’s kind of funny, too. And leave it to Sam to jump Slash from behind. I mean, that is a low blow. That’s not right.

Slash: I was just this little guy with no clothes on. I mean, cuz I was in bed when he came."

The Howard Stern Show (April 30, 1992) (edited)

Additional details, related quotes, & discussion:

The first quote is from Duff's autobiography, obviously. The "big, drunk guy" in question was Chris Holmes of the band W.A.S.P. Slash's autobio (2007) recounts the incident somewhat differently:

"One time at the Rainbow I got into a fight with Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. Duff overheard Chris saying that n*****s shouldn’t play guitar. He didn’t say it to me, but it was obviously about me. As I remember, Duff told me about it later and the next time I saw Chris I went up to confront him and he took off running. Aside from insulting me, it’s one of the more ridiculous and untrue things a musician, of all people, could ever possibly say."

Aside from the obvious discrepancies in their versions of events (pretty much par the course for rocker autobios... Chris Holmes has shared his own take as well and rest assured it's very different), it's interesting to compare how they described their responses. Slash glosses over the fight entirely, he almost makes it sound like he was going to "confront" Holmes by giving him a lecture on the history of rock music – the last sentence is by far the most emotionally charged.

Duff's account is just shy of a brag, his sense of righteousness is evident.  Fighting is a significant theme in his book, Duff chronicles his journey from scrapping with school bullies, to drunkenly picking fights, to discovering martial arts in sobriety:

"Those beatings were also probably a factor in why later I would see red every time I perceived a wrong done to me or someone close to me and would fight at the drop of a dime. Justifiably or not, I saw myself as the protector, and the street-fighting skills I was forced to learn while getting my ass kicked as a teenager meant that I was not reluctant to perform that role with my fists."

"From then on, I wanted to kill anyone who crossed me at any club or concert. In my mind I was still fighting for righteous reasons—not just to hurt people but to protect, to make bullies stop doing bad things. But it’s pretty clear in retrospect that I was taking out aggression about the situation with the band. I would find offense in the stupidest little things and then I’d just flip and go street."

Slurs aren't a trivial offense, but we can see how Duff's protectiveness has been both a strength and weakness at times. In this scenario, Slash is "someone close," and Duff is eager to assume the role of his protector.

-

The second passage is in excerpt from an unaired interview (1990) transcribed in Mick Wall's biography of GNR, a secondary source. (That is, the more recent biography he wrote about GNR, not the one that supposedly earned him a scathing mention in UYI II's Get In The Ring.)

Anyway, Duff was a little less eloquent in 1990, but the pride he takes in standing up for himself and his friends is consistent.  He mentions a time he defended Slash against an aggressor, and I wonder if the incident with Chris Holmes is the one he's referring to.  Whether it was the same event or a different one, Duff's statements in this interview are certainly in line with the behavior he described in his book.

Slash's sarcastic comment made me laugh – I couldn't say for certain if he meant it in good (or self-deprecating) humor, or if he was getting a little miffed by the way Duff was characterizing him as someone who needs defending. I also included his last line because it seemed to me like he was trying to change the subject – while Duff could have happily gone on, perhaps Slash was conscious of playing into the dumb drunk rocker stereotype, something both of them have a history of struggling against. He’s also conspicuously not jumping at the chance to chime in and tell the world what he’ll do if anyone tries to mess with them.

-

The third excerpt might call for a little more context: Sam Kinison was a comedian and a friend of Slash's who passed away shortly before this interview. Earlier in the interview, Slash described how he was supposed to make a guest appearance in one of his shows, and Kinison didn't take it well when he had to cancel. 

This incident was never talked about much — as far as I know Duff never publicly shared his version of events — but another guest (comedian Andrew Dice Clay) on the Stern show recounted a phone call with Duff about the incident prior to Slash's interview:

"So, he's choking him to death, and the girl that Duff is with wakes Duff up, and she goes, 'I'm not sure, but I think somebody's killing Slash.'"

I wonder if the girl was the same one who was with him in Duff's chat with Howard Stern from around the same time. Slash said it happened in San Francisco, Clay said it happened at the Chateau Marmont in L.A., and Duff didn't specify, but I wouldn't put money on the accuracy of that detail in any of their accounts.

Anyway, this excerpt is a little different than the other two.  It has less to do with Duff's protector complex — instead we can examine the way that Slash talks about a fight, where in the previous examples he tended to dodge the subject.

I edited the excerpt for readability (and I made pretty significant cuts, so click the link above if you want the full picture), but this was an interesting conversation all around.  It's a bit awkward, because while Slash and Stern are ostensibly sharing memories of their mutual friend, Kinison is clearly the antagonist in Slash's story.  Slash didn't really react much to Howard Stern's enthusiastic assertions that Slash could take Kinison in a fair fight, and while he made a point of explaining that he was caught off guard, he seems pretty content to tell the story as it was: he got his ass kicked.

The way Slash talks about himself ("just a little guy with no clothes on"!) leads me to believe that his comment about "[hiding] in the crook of [Duff's] knee" in the Wall interview was meant as a self-deprecating joke.  He seems comfortable characterizing himself as harmless and nonaggressive, perhaps even uncomfortable with the idea of playing up his prowess.

Slash doesn't mention too many altercations in his book, but he does describe one friendly brawl with Nikki Sixx:

“[...] but I do remember doing what I always liked to do when I was drunk—wrestle some guy who was much bigger than me. In this case it was Nikki, whom I tackled, bar stool and all, out of nowhere. Nikki is pretty tall, and at that time he was pretty heavy, too, so he ended up turning it around: he slammed me on my back and sat on me.”

He goes on to explain how he passed out and woke up to find that he'd "dislocated four vertebrae in his back" and, to add insult to injury, he got teabagged by Tommy Lee.

Obviously we're working with a small sample size here, but like with Duff, we're starting to get a consistent picture.  Slash's tales of getting into fights are distinctly lacking a certain rock-n-roll bravado. His accounts aren't very serous, he comes across as terrible in a physical fight and he doesn't seem to care.

All of this isn't necessarily to say that Slash didn't get in fights – just because he doesn't like talking about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.  But he's also made it pretty clear that he doesn't consider himself a violent person.

“I hate violence. At our shows, people hit each other and throw things, and I don’t know why. I love the energy of it, but everyone needs to be considerate of those around them, and that usually doesn’t happen.”

I don't have a source for that quote, so take it with a grain of salt if you choose.  Either way, you get the picture.  Slash is an image-conscious guy, yes, but he's not overly into fighting (or arguing, or yelling... but that's another set of quotes) and he doesn't try to pretend to be.  It's not an image he's actively trying to project (perhaps one he's trying to avoid?) — but in some ways it's one he was labeled with anyway, thanks to GNR's reputation.

-

Clearly I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I'm going to put a pin in it here because honestly, I think it would be pretty presumptuous to try to make too strong of a claim about the personalities of two real people that I don’t know based on just a handful of quotes (from questionably reliable narrators...). All I’m trying to do here is show a pattern, and to point out the contrast between the respective ways that Slash and Duff view/talk about physical conflict.

When Duff talks about fighting, it's important to him: he fought to deal with his emotions, he fought to protect the people he cares about, and he fought to get sober. When Slash talks about fighting, he laughs, makes a self-deprecating comment, and brushes it off. Duff wants to project that he’s more than capable of defending himself and others, Slash prefers to distance himself from the topic. It's interesting to see this juxtaposition in their relationship, and the way it translates into Duff acting protective of Slash.

-

Alright, thanks to those of you who stuck with me this far, lol. Feel free to let me know your thoughts, and of course keep in mind that this is just my take on the subject!

[lenievi]

Les Misérables (2000); episode 3

[orcelito]

ok i am actually so very angry and there's literally nothing i can do to fix it. life keeps going on. she might even be happy. and fuck dude, i'll make sure im happy too, i was a fully developed person before she was in my life and i'll continue to be one without her. but God Damn, the fact that she can just do something so blatantly awful and unfair to me and then run off without any actual repercussions is just so fucking rankling to me.

like perhaps she feels guilty. she said she did when it was all going down. but it was just something she "needed to do". so obviously she didn't feel guilty enough or she wouldnt have done it like that lmaoooo

i really did deserve to have a good solid yell at her. but unfortunately, by the time i did see her in person i just wanted her out of my fucking life. so. no yelling was done, unfortunately.

[neixins]

mid-year reading wrap-up

most of what i’ve read so far this year’s been…aggressively fine, which is just not that fun or interesting to talk about tbh. however, there have been some delightfully high highs and atrociously low lows that i do wanna talk about!

but first, some stats for any mathematically-minded curious imps in the audience

average rating: 3.15 (i know i'm stingy with my ratings but yikes!)

number of books read: 27 -> 11 novellas, 10 novels, 5 short stories, and 1 nonfiction

i’ve also picked up 26 different manga series and oneshots. some i’ve read start to finish, some i’ve only read a few volumes of (and i plan to continue most).

highlights

mammoths at the gates by nghi vo: it’s no secret that i adore the singing hills cycle and this installment was a poignant tale of grief and memory and change, and it was just as brilliant as the rest of the series.

from far away, vol. 1-14 by hikawa kyoko: a wonderful, gentle story about the power of love, compassion, and community, featuring well-written protagonists who are full of love for each other and the world around them.

on the fox roads by nghi vo: this novelette is free to read on reactor mag (aka tor) so i’m not gonna say anything else except that nghi vo never, ever misses. go read it now!!

seven little sons of the dragon by kui ryoko: i don’t need to tell any of u how talented of a writer and artist kui is but this collection was truly one hit after another

two rogues make a right by cat sebastian: i’ve read only two cat sebastian books so far but she’s quickly become my go-to romance author. she just Delivers romances that will make u giggle and kick your feet! this one is about a guy who whisks his best friend away to the countryside after his chronic illness gets worse and they slowly realize that they’re in love <3

a little light mischief by cat sebastian: an absolutely delightful little novella about a lady’s companion who’s been disowned by her family and the pretty ex-thief maid who’s being very distracting!!

i decided not to include any manga series i’m still reading on the list but frequent visitors to neixins dot tumblr dot edu know how much i adore yona of the dawn, even when it’s trying its hardest to murder me. but u’ve probably heard me ramble about it enough already (and if u haven’t: my tag). and since i’m doing honorable mentions, i’d be remiss not to mention dungeon meshi (read vol 1-5 so far) and natsume’s book of friends (read vol 2).

and another honorable mention goes to the empress of salt and fortune by nghi vo which i’ve reread multiple times in the past few years and it never fails to dazzle me. this time around i listened to the audiobook (narrated by cindy kay, one of my favorite narrators).

boo tomato tomato

nothing but blackened teeth by cassandra khaw: this was more of a disappointment than a book i hated so i feel bad lumping it in with the rest of these but i did buy a physical copy at full price so it gets a mention. this novella’s biggest flaw was that it kept saying that the characters were part of a toxic codependent friend group but they just felt like strangers who didn’t like each other, which made it seem like they were staying in the creepy haunted house just because the plot needed them to, rather than for the reasons they claimed. khaw’s prose is quite unique though so i’m excited to check out the salt grows heavy despite not liking this one.

the woods all black by lee mandelo: i wanted to love this so badly because the themes were so up my alley and i love slowburn horror with an explosive final act. but unfortunately, it was so so bad

love on the other side by nagabe: literally half of this collection included relationships between adults and children (which definitely weren’t platonic/familial like the blurb led me to believe….) and the vileness of those stories was enough to drown out anything good in the rest of the collection. i actually also read two other nagabe works (before this one; if i’d read this first i wouldn’t have bothered). monotone blue would’ve been fine if there hadn’t been an assault scene that got brushed off way too quickly…and the wize wize beasts of the wizarding wizdoms was a mixed bag; some of the stories were just as terrible as love on the other side but “marley & collette” was very sweet, not gonna lie…..

i’ve also had many, many dnf’s which i don’t log, but i simply must give a shoutout (derogatory) to romancing the duke by tessa dare which i had high hopes for and which instead made me read this godawful sequence of words with my own two gay eyes (during pride month no less!): "He was just so near. And so tall. And so commanding. So male. Everything female in her was rallying to the challenge." thanks i hate it……

in conclusion, my hopes for the second half of the year can be boiled down to: save me nghi vo and cat sebastian save meee

[giantkillerjack]

Your stance on the Dunmeshi queerbait stuff is a bit selfish. Wanting this one manga to go exactly the way you want is a dangerous path - the way you phrase it is so entitled, making it clear it's not about consuming media about lesbians, but making one specific work suit exactly what you want. So many yuri mangas are written by sapphic women. It's a shame your stance is how it is.

And bastardizing the term queerbaiting does no good, either. Neither does the japanese manga market. You should research more before making such hurtful posts.

Hope you have a great day anyway.

[Anon is referring to this post, I believe.]

I mean, one of us certainly IS acting very entitled and weird about the media they like, and it ain't me. Like, I think you just have associated this piece of media with your own identity in an unhealthy way that makes you react to criticism of it with intense defensiveness. You don't own Dungeon Meshi. You aren't Marcille. Dungeon Meshi is NOT a yuri manga; it's a beautiful manga with either sapphic queerbait or a woefully underdeveloped queer relationship at its center.

Maybe if you had an argument besides "it does no good" to criticize it, but you don't. So.

Smh, it's a "dangerous path" - I'm screenshotting that bc I know it'll make my wife laugh. Like, friendo, wanting a piece of media to be better isn't dangerous. But calling someone selfish and hurtful for criticizing media while offering no clarifications as to who I've hurt or how (any fellow sapphics bleeding out in here? Or is it just me with my bonkers-heavy period??)... it's overstepping a social boundary in a bizarre way.

Like, I'm sorry that I'm better at media analysis than you (not actually sorry - I am being petty! :D), but I actually have studied queerbaiting!! I am willing to bet I have done more research than you! (Are you from twitter? You have that vibe. - Again, pettiness.)

... and I spend every day with my wife (the best writer I know; I'm so honored to share stories with her), talking of nothing but our shared special interest all day - i.e. media analysis. (I honestly don't know what neurotypical couples talk about lol)

And I've done enough research to know that one of the side effects of queerbaiting is that fans are often in denial about it and then get REAL MAD when someone points it out. I was there for the Sherlock/Supernatural fandom. Shit was crazy. (Not saying Super-who-lock bc my man Russell Davies was like MAKE THOSE BOYS SMOOCH! 😎)

Also like, my apologies to Ryoko Kui - I really do love Dungeon Meshi - but like, I'm just better at writing and illustrating queer rep than she is. I make real gay protagonists who do gay shit and are gay, and I will never queerbait my audience. Womp womp.

Also, honestly, even if I turn out to be wrong about the queerbaiting by the end of the series, this message was still rude and entitled and weird. We have a lot of issues facing our queer community that endanger real people; someone calling a story queerbaiting mistakenly is not one of them.

[a-wild-things-rambles]

hometown hypocrisy

and the bloods beating down in the city tonight and no-one will ever sympathize with our plight try to get up, but we just fall down trying to escape this damn hometown

and we got fires burning in our souls and the scars to prove it, what do you know but the rains putting us out drowning our sparks and our shouts

and the fogs setting in rain against my skin and the sky's beating me down wandering my hometown and the roads gotten twisted the old life's gone, i missed it guess it is true, you can never go home again

and the bloods beating down in the city tonight and no-one will ever sympathize with our plight try to get up, but we just fall down trying to escape this damn hometown

and blood seeping through our clothes violence begets violence, don't ya know but these fists are my hometown pride gritted teeth and bloodshot eyes

and the fogs setting in rain against my skin and the sky's beating me down wandering my hometown and the roads gotten twisted the old life's gone, i missed it guess it is true, you can never go home again

'and the bloods beating down' is the 2nd chorus/prechorus [look i changed the structure but im not editing my analysis i dont want it to get longer]

'and the fogs setting in' is the [main]chorus [planned to use a diffrent tone to musicaly distinguish it from teh verses and pre/2nd chorus][is in italics]

and 'we got fires' is teh 1st verse and 'blood seeping thru our clothes' is the second

NOTE: should be spoken or sung for optimal beat with contractions, but for readability has been mostly uncontracted. also idk how to spell what do you know contracted right.

the chorus is much later in the singers life than the pre chorus & the two verses, the hypocrisy is that the singer wants to both escape and go back to his hometown.

the younger singer always uses plural, to symbolize community, until 'these fists are my hometown pride' almost at the end. he refutes the cycle of violence by owning his violence as part of himself- his link to his hometown.

in addition, he has become the active perpetrator of violence, [previous references were 'we all fall down' [something else to him] and 'we got the scars to prove it' which is implied to be violence perpetrated unknowingly to each other because of 'fires burning in our souls'- when they get close, they hurt each other unintentionally] he now links his sense of self to violence, and thus when he loses his ability to do violence, he loses his self, and his link to his hometown, becoming the older singer

but by doing this he also will inevitably refute his hometown, by linking it intrinsically to violence, becoming the older singer who sings the chorus when he can no longer have that link to his self or his hometown because he can no longer do violence [his inability shown by him being 'beaten down' by the rain/oppressive atmosphere], i did want to expand on this, writing more verses to show the fall and how he ended up as the chorus person but it didnt work. heres the scrapped third verse

but soon those fists turned weak what do you know? you aint at your peak stress and violence aint good for your heart and you find that your bodys now falling apart

it can also be seen as by growing up to become a perpetrator and someone with power, he is now distant from his people and community, the solidarity is formed from their shared victimhood so when he steps out of that/rejects it, he loses the community [also becoming part of the violent cycle means getting rejected] [also the chorus says 'twisted road' we dont know what happened to make him fall, thats up to the readers interpretation] [transmasc journey of realizing your masculinity then becoming ostracised][or disability]

"guess its true, you can never go home again" is the only exception to the rhyming scheme, and it gives it emphasis, it was more noticeable before the chorus was squished together [previously each half line was its own line until 'guess its true'] fuck it it can take up space on yalls dashboards its getting split again

'bloodshot eyes' can be interpreted many different ways, from crying to injury to rage, each suggesting different meanings and affecting the text in diffrent ways

[blorboresidue]

since I don't sell much through my Actual Website I'm thinking of switching to a cheaper platform and just like using pa*ypal invoices or something when someone wants to buy from me directly...idk I make almost 90% of my sales thru et*sy so even tho they are Evil I wanna keep my shop active there bc it's essentially free marketing vs me having to promote my website. and since I don't have the time or energy to get serious about my website anymore I think I need to find a solution where I'm not flushing money down the toilet

[villalunae]

"the us is not a christian nation" says who. george washington?? thomas jefferson??? bilbo baggins?? u mean the bitches who u say we shouldnt care abt just cuz they wrote the constitution back in ye old swagless white boy days and their opinions dont matter to us anymore. u mean those bitches. and ur gonna believe their little dumb bitch asses when they say "the us is not a christian nation" Boy Do You Know What Bias Looks Like Cause Im Boutta Woop You With It

[neverendingford]

.

[unreadpoppy]

the thing about being the only neurodivergent person in your friend group is that whenever you have to make a group decision, if you have to go against the group because of acessibility, you're going to loose.

My friends and I are going to watch a movie this month and everyone wants to watch it dubbed and I'd rather with subtitles. Why? 1) because people can be very loud and if someone is talking next to me and there's no subtitles, I will miss part of the movie and won't understand what's happening. 2) I think I might have some of that audio processing stuff cause I swear when I watch stuff dubbed it takes me so long to understand what's going on without a subtitle, I will miss important plot points or characters names and it won't be a good experience and since dubbed movies don't come with subtitles, I just get lost. 3) When the sounds get too much to me, at least I can focus on the writing to follow along

But because my friends don't like watching things subtitled, I lost in the vote and when my friend said the cinema we chose only had dubbed I reacted with a crying sticker and someone very aggresively was like "girl if you want to watch it subtitled go watch alone cause no one here wants to" and then I had to fucking explain that man, I'm going to go watch it dubbed cause i'm not gonna make anyone watch it subtitled.

'cause unlike neurotypicals, I'm used to having to be unconfortable for their fucking sake.

And it's like, if I try to explain, it's always like well you can handle it y'know, my needs get dismissed as nothing because why would everyone else bend and break for me when I can just "take it"? Like if dubbed movies just came with subtitles, my life would be so. much. easier. It's why I'm okay with watching stuff dubbed AT HOME, cause I can put the subtitles anyways.

I'm lucky enough that I managed to convince people to not sit all the way in the back (they wanted to sit in the last motherfucking seats, which are closer to the sound machines which means that everything is way worse for me and also, even with glasses, my eyesight is still gonna be worse all the way in the back when compared to like, the middle row).

[saccharine-pink-lemonade]

deleted snippet from ch5 of the last night fic

And it’s just all the more reason that Jason should have come back, should have given him relief, but-

He hadn’t.

That was never the intention. It was never supposed to go like this. He was supposed to crash on Stephanie’s couch, for a while, and then he’d--

Dick looks at him, too. Stares long and hard. Jason thinks, maybe, he looks like he doesn’t quite believe Jay is real. Regret tastes bitter in his mouth, itches against the back of his throat. Its uncomfortable, and aches something awful, like a jammed finger. 

“Morning,” Jason repeats, and hates how his voice drifts in and out on the vowels, like he almost whispered it. His palms start to itch, dully.

Crystal sighs, quietly. Jason’s lungs fill with more guilt -- that he’s put her and Steph in such an impossible situation. Because there were ten million other fucking choices he could have made, but he managed to make all the worst ones.

deleted bc i didnt like the way they sounded in this order -- i reworded & reordered them slightly so that they'd fit nicer in the chapter