#its not easy at all

[lov3islikeastar]

.

[stemmmm]

more people gotta try this shit where bill has not improved and will not change but he's just chilling so its fine probably. its great

[stargirl230]

you’re my hero!

bnha doomed yuri was not on my 2024 bingo card

(no reposts; reblogs appreciated)

[silosbears]

i think alphonse would still experience depersonalization and dysmorphia even after getting his body back

[rputthebottledown]

Look it‘s Nerdanel & Fëanor with cute little toddler Nelyo. Sometimes I just need some fluff in my life

part I

part III

part IV

part V

part VI

[hinamie]

sry i have chronic only draws megumi disorder the doctor said it's terminal :/

[watchingwisteria]

listen there really was just something about how in the book, snow’s 3-page descent from hesitant lover boy to deluded mfer happens entirely in his mind. lucy gray gives him no indication whatsoever that she suspects him, that she’s going to leave or betray him. he’s just sitting quietly in the cabin waiting for her to return when that seed of calculated suspicion, which he has needed to survive the capitol, takes a hold of him and chokes the life out of any goodness left inside him. it really drives home your terror as a reader that “oh my god did he kill her? did she escape? what happened to her? why would he even think that?” in a way that when the movie had to adjust for visualization it lost some of that holy shit this guy has lost it emphasis.

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[soulmvtes]

honestly people were so right about how when the right people come along, the way you love them will come so naturally

[inbabylontheywept]

Memories of Grandpa Dale

I was playing in the barn, but I was also hiding from my grandpa. I was aware that this hurt his feelings, but I didn’t know what else to do. Every year I’d ever visited him before, he’d seemed kind of mad at me, but I’d hoped still that year was the year that we’d finally be friends. I even made a list of things to do together. 

Unfortunately, the list did not fix things¹ so I'd been forced to acknowledge that if he couldn't be happy with me there, and he couldn't be happy with me gone, then perhaps he simply could not be happy. At least, not until someone invented The Secret Third Thing.

(But I was only nine. So. That someone would probably not be me.) 

Fortunately, being happy is a task that I've never needed to delegate - I’m actually quite good at it. I’d been sad in the barn for maybe an hour or so, but eventually that got boring, so I invented a new game where I would chase big clouds of shiny blue flies off the sun-warmed horse-poop and try to shoo them towards a corner of the barn that I knew had a large spiderweb in it. 

I was perfectly aware that this is not ideal for the flies, but I had just read Charlotte’s Web, so my empathy function was very biased towards spiders, who I perceived as patient and compassionate and slightly maternal women. Who just happened to have eight legs.  

(I, like most nine year old boys, would have personally been willing to fight a war for every patient, compassionate, slightly maternal woman I had ever met. If you, personally, have ever hugged a little boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his friends after skinning his knee, know that there is a child in this world that would kill in your name.)

(Now live with that knowledge.) 

I played my game with the flies for a long time. Long enough to get into a rhythm of running and laughing and then panting outside on my back while wallowing in the long green grass.

It was during one of those walks outside to lay in the grass that I noticed my mom. She was sitting on a hay bale, looking baffled. I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was too young and confident to even feel odd. She asked me what I was doing, and I just kind of gestured to the ceiling, and said, You know, just. Feeding spiders.²

She nodded. I was feeding spiders. Of course. 

We sat there a few moments. It was an amicable silence, but I was still faintly relieved when she broke it.  

Your grandpa’s been looking for you, she said. He got some grapes earlier. Wanted to take you to feed the ducks.

I've always really liked feeding ducks³. Visiting them had actually been the next thing on my list. 

I was baffled by the effort. 

He’s mad at me, I pointed out. My mom, to her credit, looked genuinely confused. 

He’s not, she said. 

But he was mad when we picked blackberries, I pointed out. And when we went on that walk down to the prairie. And he snapped at me this morning when I asked if I could have some of his dried mangos. 

The mangos had been my last straw. The weirdest part was that he didn’t even say no, he just (angrily) said of course you can, as if it was an insult to his hospitality that I was asking when just the year before he’d yelled at me because I ate a tin of dried apples. Apparently, I was just supposed to know that those apples were exclusively reserved for The Apocalypse. 

(To be fair, my grandpa has always been very worried about the apocalypse, but mostly in the context of not having enough dried apples for it. There was a period of my life where I thought that The Apocalypse referred to some kind of prophesied biblical event where there would be No More Apples. This thought has stuck with me for a very long time��.)

Well. Yeah. My mom said. He’s mad. But he’s not mad at you. He’s just… Mad. 

I mulled this over. 

What about the mangos? I asked, and she shrugged at that. 

Alright, so that time he was mad at you, but that’s being mad one time in three days. Cut the man some slack, you’ve been asking him for permission before eating anything. 

I just don’t want to eat the wrong thing, I said. I’ve always been very defensive of my rule-following. Both because rules are important, and also because that #10 can of dried apples ripped through me like a shotgun full of razor blades⁵. That “snack” had 400% the recommended daily fiber for an adult man. And I was very definitely not a grown man when I ate it.  

It was a very painful experience is what I am trying to say. 

I know, my mom said. 

I don’t even like apples, I added. Still defensive. 

I know, my mom said again. She’s very good at saying it. It always feels like she’s agreeing with me, and not just trying to rush me onto The Point. Sometimes, people need to make detours from The Point in order to explain things. Like, hypothetically, why they once ate a very large number of dehydrated apples. My mom is wise, and she has always known this. . 

I just really wanted to eat something sweet, I continued. They don’t keep anything sweet in the whole house. The day before I ate those apples, I licked all the salt off a saltine just so I could eat the cracker plain. And then the cracker tasted just like a cookie. To me. That’s how crazy I was going. 

My mom nodded her head sympathetically. 

My first month of college, she said conspiratorially, I ate about a box of poptarts a day. 

There was another longish pause as both of us considered what led us to this point. 

My parents are crazy, my mom said at long last. It’s a very peaceful statement to her. I'm sure it was stressful when she first realized it, but she's had a long time to make her peace, and she's made it well.  

Will you go with me? I asked. To feed the ducks?  

He’s not mad at you, she said again. Reemphasizing her point. He’s just mad. It’s just how he is. 

But she went with me anyway.

I watched Grandpa Dale closely the whole way to the pond to see if my mom was right. She was. She almost always is.  He was angry while he drove, and he was angry while he parked and he was even angry while he strode purposefully towards the park. When we got there, he took several grapes, and he angrily put them in his hand, and angrily extended the hand towards the ducks, and he looked at me, and for maybe a tenth of a second he looked okay. Not exactly happy, but a little less mad. Then a duck bit the webbing between his pointer finger and his thumb.

He immediately, without hesitation, without even a second thought, hit the duck with a haymaker⁶. For a human, the punch would have been devastating, but the duck had the benefit of having essentially no inertia, so it just kind of moved sideways and looked perplexed. 

You son of a bitch, my grandpa said. This is a funny thing for anyone to say to a duck, but it was especially funny to hear coming from a former Mormon Bishop. 

Quack,⁷ said the duck. 

My mom started laughing. I'd felt a sort of holy terror at the anger my grandpa was exuding in that moment, but the moment she laughed I realized how absurd it was. I was watching a grown man beef with a duck. I was watching a grown man beef with the world. 

I started laughing too. In a better world, maybe my grandpa would've joined. Maybe he would've taken a good hard look in the mirror and questioned why exactly he was so angry. But he didn't. Instead he swore at the duck some more, and he threw his remaining handful of grapes at it overhand, like a baseball, and then the duck ate the grapes out of the water, and my mom actually laughed so hard she started dry heaving a little, and my grandpa had to go sit in the car for a few minutes by himself to regain his composure. 

¹ He managed to pick blackberries angrily

² Unfortunately, I do this kind of response quite a bit.

³ I got my first kiss from my wife because I managed to capture a duck. They're like, a motif for my life. Very lucky to have that.

⁴ I reference it again in this very weird short story.

⁵ I eat a lot of strange things.

⁶ My wife is concerned people will not know what a haymaker is. It is simply the most redneck kind of punch.

⁷ ...What did you expect it to say?

[ryssbelle]

Drew a bunch of Marinettes in a bunch of different artists styles it was a lot of fun!!

Artists who's styles I mimicked: @buggachat @hamsternamedmarinette @ladybeug @sabertoothwalrus and @anna-scribbles all epic artists 🤟😎

[dreamsy990]

drew some of my fav ody designs! wasnt originally meant to be also replicating the styles but thats sort of just how my brain works. except i didnt copy the lineart styles of anyone here so its DEFINITELY a bit uncanny for a couple of these (LOOKING AT YOU QINNY IM SO SORRY) but whatever

the designs featured here (from left to right) belong to: me, @gigizetz, @neal-illustrator, @irunaki, @bigidiotenergytm, @qinnyanimation, and @foopsie-daisy

[rainscenes]

[obsob]

hmm anyway. holds u in my arms

[xmimikyuusx]

thinking about top scars again, but I'm seeing the link here between "you can't make top surgery scars in artwork look exaggerated/"cooler" because that's unrealistic and you're being cringe" really ties into a LOT of transandrophobic/anti-trans masculinity rhetoric that relies on trans men being "cringe" or "lame". Like some people within the community (and even outside of it) excuse their cruelty (in more casual settings such as engaging with media or creating artwork) with the age-old "Well you're cringe and embarrassing, your joy is embarrassing to me so it's okay for me to treat your like you're lesser"

It's not the same as the systemic oppression that trans men face ofc but there's always this lingering cloud around trans masculinity that A: assumes that your existence and joy is childish and embarrassing and B: doesn't permit you to actually HAVE something cool, like stylized top scars in artwork, because then you're trying to be cool which is also cringe.

As a side note; Non-binary people also face this a lot, it was the basis of the argument I had with that other person who insisted that non-binary people don't experience oppression to the same magnitude as binary trans people while he peppered his takes with "Moss only has to worry about people not accepting their pronouns while they dress like a girl" (where this means feminine person who was afab but is not a woman = attention seeker who doesn't deserve respect.) I'm not non-binary though and encourage other ppl who are to speak on their experiences.

Cringe culture needs to die. But it's not as easy leaving people alone who watch whatever show they want to no matter how shitty and childish we think it is. It also means challenging internalized bigotry that we may have deemed okay because everyone else is doing it.

[cryptcoop]

Just as awkward and bony as he remembers