#i’m sure there’s something here

[strangersatellites]

i’m not the biggest fan of soulmark au’s but hear me out.

au where your soulmate’s signature shows up on your hip on your sixteenth birthday.

most people are able to either read theirs clearly, or decipher what it says and then set off on a search for their other half.

when steve turns sixteen he’s anxiously awaiting his own when he’s met with the sight of a bat on his hip.

he spends years looking for a connection, something that might give him a clue.

it’s not until several years later when he moves away from home that he sees the bat.

he sees it scrawled across the bottom of a beautiful mural in the city and realizes his soulmate is an artist.

and an anonymous one at that.

[elodieunderglass]

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

[shepscapades]

Your highness… I don’t feel so good

[jiauro]

Heavy is no longer my least played class

[sunshine-zenith]

Maybe it’s because I just spent the last four days watching my sister’s toddlers while mildly sleep deprived, but I gotta say Peri has PEAK “childfree young adult who was the youngest person in their family naively volunteers to watch recalcitrant child assuming they’d automatically be The Cool Adult Relative only to realize they have no idea how to balance being indulgent with being responsible and gets overwhelmed within five minutes” energy

10/10 I have never felt so seen by a cartoon before

[the-meme-monarch]

category 7 looey moment

the doodle page was drawn before all their conversations were found, but their trinket Had been, (and my sibling got the scraps convo before it was put on the wiki) so i was anticipating them being more friendly w razzle & dazzle(complimenting trinkets) and goob(both having dual colors) than they turned out to be <:] but he IS very friendly with poppy and that makes me happy. also shrimpo death threats

none of this is ship art 👍💥💥

[moroniccats]

“Holmes had spent several days in bed, as was his habit from time to time,”

Sherlock Holmes once again being the most relatable mess we’ve seen for the past century.

[fulgurbugs]

Traffy my beloved traffy

[thatadhdfeel]

being diagnosed with something later in life is like. oh. so this is why i was lost. this is why i was hurt. this is why i was hated. this is the piece i knew was missing, but couldn’t name. now that name has been granted. and you sit in the doctor’s office chair. you stare at the insurance code. you wonder what could have been, had you known earlier. you wonder and wonder and wonder.

[justfriendsbestthings]

Baking with Wilmon ✨

[electrozeistyking]

tomorrow

[theotherbuckley]

Just a reminder that people can write whatever they like! If you don’t like it don’t read it! It’s so simple. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s bad. It’s fanFICTION. Which people do for free. If you don’t like it don’t interact. You can ever block or mute them!! But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. As long as they’re tagged correctly they’re giving you the tag you need to decide if you don’t want to read it.

[withthewindinherfootsteps]

something about how both wei wuxian and jin guangyao repeatedly say they ‘didn’t have a choice’ in their actions. in both cases, it’s not literal impossibility, instead determined by their mindsets and personal conduct…. but while for wei wuxian that means he can’t do something immoral, even if it means losing all his social power, for jin guangyao it means he can’t do anything to lose his social power, even if it means doing something immoral. the other option is still there, but it’s never one they’d pick.

something about how they’re trying to walk the same path but in opposite directions: wei wuxian willingly left the nice, broad road in favour of upholding morals and debts, while jin guangyao is trying to claw onto it and stay there by any means necessary. in both cases, being parted from it so easily is only possible because this nice, broad road — full of people whose social power is unconditional, given at birth, independent of their actions — was never truly theirs to begin with. but despite how it is possible to be forced off due to nothing, as we see with wang lingjiao, the positions of both these characters were ultimately due to actions they took.

(about how no matter the similarity of the paths, no matter the narrowness of the choices, the direction you take is still up to you.)

[madbard]

Thinking about how the Long Quiet outsources change. As the embodiment of stagnancy, it was never meant to exist on its own, never meant to exist as sentient being which, by necessity, must adapt and change to survive. And it handles this by creating the Voices, mental embodiments of trauma responses and attitude shifts and altered worldviews and everything else, externalized advisors embodying the changes it cannot personally undergo.

It accepts these Voices as guides because it needs them, but it refuses to be altered itself. Each princess and each story bring with it a physical change that horrifies it, and every time, it resets those changes, kills the new voices and returns to its original state. Theoretically, it stays the same as it always was.

But still. As it continues forth, it can’t help but remember. With each story, memory returns. Against its will, against its very nature, it changes, because it isn’t only stagnancy. There is a splinter of the Shifting Mound in there as well.

Thinking about how the Princesses exist as mere facets of the Shifting Mound, how the Shifting Mound is scattered among them because personhood requires a certain amount of stability and stagnancy that she cannot perform all at once. How the Shifting Mound cannot exist as a single, stable perspective because even the continuity of thought is contrary to the concept of change and destruction and evolution and death, expanding always and infinitely and away.

She pulls herself together from limited experiences and ideas, rejecting the possibility of being any single person.

But still. At the end of each story, she greets the Long Quiet, offers it comfort and company in the way she knows how. The progression of their relationship, though it is by necessity a story of change, is also a tale of repetition and familiarity. The Long Quiet asks the same questions. She gives different answers. But it is ultimately the same conversation, again and again. And she is capable of that because she is not just the Shifting Mound – there is a sliver of the Long Quiet in there as well.

And the Shifting Mound is only able to reform itself because the Long Quiet makes different decisions each time, bringing her fresh perspectives – because despite being the manifestation of stagnancy, there is a piece of the Shifting Mound to motivate it. And the Long Quiet is only able to try and remain stagnant because the Shifting Mound is able to wipe its memory and reset it – because despite being the manifestation of change, there is a whisper of the Long Quiet to stabilize her.

They weren’t meant to be separated. They weren’t meant to be sentient. As separate beings, they fail. As separate beings, they greet each other with violence and hunger and desperation – the fury of their essential conflict warring with their frantic desire to be reunited, to never have been torn apart. Two people who never wanted to be people. Two people who want to be the same thing and try again and again to join themselves together through bloodshed and love.

Movements synchronized, moving as one. As if they were still the same being because, in a sense, they are.

There is a reason they always appear to be dancing.

[jewelsli]

Not that I don’t love when Bruce’s kids outperform him and give him heart attacks, but I think it’s funnier when the kids think they are better fighters/spies/infiltrators/etc. then him but he’s just so proud so he lets them think that they are.

I think that Babs would be a really good hacker, the best in the family, but Tim, who thinks that he is the next best(and is still scarily good) has no idea that Bruce only let him think that he broke his record of hacking into secret organizations.

Dick is amazing at acrobatics, and centers his fighting style around it much more. He even won gold in the Olympics for gymnastics! Bruce doesn’t want to tell him that he trained under several gymnasts, contortionists, even ballerinas!!! and has the acrobatic fighting style mastered, so he (within reason) let’s his kid win on most occasions, he doesn’t need to fake loosing on trapeze though(I am still giving the kids SOME things they are better at…)

Cass knows that nobody can lie to her, she can spot everyone’s tells and knows most people better then they know themselves. Bruce is, however, extremely paranoid and also has a kryptonian he works with regularly. He lies so well that he can convince himself he’s telling the truth(which is literally the point in case of advanced lie detectors), and so what if he lets some of his tells be more obvious around his baby, he’s so proud of her for picking up such small things! And while Bruce is AMAZING at reading people, he can’t beat Cass, it is however much closer matched then the others think.

Let’s be honest, Bruce is banned from the kitchen and isn’t good at cooking… or so everyone thinks. While he’s not as good as Alfred or even Jason he could whip up something Gordon Ramsey would be proud of if he actually tried to.

Damian in the best fighter with swords, this is undisputed. Bruce just hopes none of his kids find his crate of custom katanas in the attic, if they do then he’ll say they are for Damian.

Tim is an amazing investigator, so good in fact, that Bruce has trusted him on his hardest cases. Everyone assumes this is because Tim is a better detective then Bruce, but he just loves seeing how proud his kid gets when he gets a breakthrough.

Batman doesn’t kill, Red hood does, everyone in their right minds knows that’s a lie. Before Robin came along, leaders of drug operations or terrorists would disappear into the night, never to be seen again. The only people who don’t seem to know this are the Bats children themselves. Sometimes you can still hear a cut off scream in the dark before the news announces a missing person that everyone just knew was doing something horrible, criminals are more wary on nights that the Bats brood are in. And people running trafficking rings pray that it’s the Hood when a knock sounds, the bat doesn’t give those people the mercy of death.

All of the bat kids know more languages then Bruce, and they keep learning more to throw him off, for a family of detectives they really should have thought about the fact that Bruce traveled the entire world, he knows ancient languages and the words that world in other galaxies use, if he could speak Martian then he would have learned it by now, he still does know that part that he’s able to learn.

Idk I just need more of Bruce being skilled at SO many things while his kids are like “oh yeah Bruce? He’s good but I could defeat him easily” and Bruce just so proud of his babies when they do ANYTHING.

Bonus:

Tim made a plan to neutralize Superman at some point, it wasn’t as good as Bruce’s but he replaced it so fast. When he later uses it to take down mind controlled or something Supes Red Robin is watching.

Nobody notices that Batman whispers something to Superman before he goes deathly pale and acts like the plan is working so well he immediately gets defeated. As for what Batman said to him? It was basically ‘Clark(they aren’t supposed to know identities here btw) my kid made this plan and I swear to every mortal and immortal force that if you don’t take the fall right now you will regret it for the rest of your life” and Batman was usually scary but this was like, God will cower before him terrifying and it scared evil Superman so much he went along with it.

Res Robin was smiling so brightly that later Clark honestly couldn’t be mad at the Bat.

Edit: I forgot to add this but unbeknownst to EVERYONE (including Alfred somehow) Bruce can and will stay awake longer then Tim and his drinks are somehow worse in terms of caffeination. The difference is that on the fourteenth day with no sleep everyone thinks it’s only been three even though he is Vividly hallucinating. The ability to hide his lack of sleep for the first week and a half leads them to believe he’s actually the worst at staying up since on what they think is his fourth day of no sleep (it’s his seventeenth) he’s talking to an apparently very vivid hallucination of Alfred the Cat in a suit and a Tiger named Tawny(he had met the tiger earlier that week) and having a civilized conversation with them

[ricky-mortis]

Curtwen Week Day 5: Disguise