#like it doesn't want to be here

[kanerallels]

Hey how do I tell if I need to cut a chapter from my book?

[inkskinned]

it's extremely critical that you see the photo of the perp walk for luigi mangione as being propaganda. i've seen so many people wave it off and instead fawn over his looks. and trust me, i know it ended up being kind of pathetic and weird - but please don't brush it off as a "modelling opportunity" for him. it's a fucking terrifying message the police are sending.

i want to make a few comparisons here, in case you're not from the US or familiar with why the perp walk thing is something to pay attention to. just to set the groundwork for why this is a purposeful, unusual, and cruel act by the nyc police - for why this is not a common occurrence and for why that matters.

the prosecution alleges the show of force is due to the charge of "terrorism." for comparison, in june 2015, tsarnaev was found guilty for the boston marathon bombing, which killed 3 people and injured hundreds. his actions are considered to be an act of domestic terrorism. i have spent the last hour looking through google for pictures of similar to mangione's perp walk - and so far, i have found zero. i also just do not personally remember a moment like that, despite living in boston at the time.

they allege that luigi is a stone-cold killer who carried out a longterm plan, making him particularly dangerous. again for comparison: in nyc, recently cory martin was found guilty of the killing of brandy odom. the murder was planned and premeditated to steal insurance money. and yet no staged perp walk. why didn't her life matter enough for a "show of force"?

but mangione gets paraded by a veritable army of police officers as if he is a rabid animal. for a single citizen who allegedly killed one other single citizen, the "largest perp walk ever" occurs.

so what is the "strong message" that the mayor and the police were trying to send here? the mayor speaks as if mangione is already convicted of terrorism. there is a very thin number of people who feel threatened by the CEO's death. none of us felt like mangione needs to be under massive armed guard.

the message is that you shouldn't resist. they are trying to "make an example" of him - that if you behave badly and kill a single rich person, you'll be treated as if you killed hundreds of people. you will be treated worse than a man who was found guilty of terrorism. you will be considered guilty without trial. the message is that the rich are a protected class, and you cannot touch them without massive punishment. they are trying to prevent a revolution by showing dominance and force against you.

the message is that the police are a puppet of the wealthy and that the law is not equally applied across class disparity. it is "some are more equal than others." it is "one life is more precious than another."

the show of force wasn't for luigi. it was for us. it was a warning. they are trying to remind us who is really in control.

[cozylittleartblog]

Columbo and the Knight (1984)

put me in the universe where Columbo ran through the 1980s and had a crossover episode with Knight Rider. I think they deserved it, and I am not just saying that because they're my two favorite Old Shows. @telebeast wrote a little fanfic blurb about it and I HAD to visualize it into a comic (which is also the longest comic I have finished thus far at five pages...), so writing credit goes to them.

Autism W!

[edlucavalden]

Oh my god.. this post was cooking i had to..

[egophiliac]

queen of diamonds, upright + reversed 💎

I've redone this like eighty times, I have to just be done with it now and stop staring at all my mistakes oh no 🫠

[somerandomcockroach]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Look what we've become.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[lotus-pear]

mourning black and the death of ideals

[grimfantas]

10 years in the future for Nanako-chan

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Eldritch/not-entirely-human Grunkle Stan stories have been eating away at my brain, so I have a silly little concept of Mimic!Stan.

He and his Mystery Shack are both mimics that lure tourists in as a literal "tourist trap" to gather and devour them! Since the house is alive, it raises a few (read: several) child safety concerns that lead to a LOT of rules to be created for Dipper and Mabel to follow when they eventually arrive, such as:

Be careful not to get lost in the winding hallways! The Mystery Shack is bigger on the inside, and you don't want to end up in the wrong areas.

Don't go through randomly appearing doors, they may eat you.

If you think you feel the walls around you breathing and the floor beneath you shifting, no, you don't.

If you think the walls feel a bit damp, you're imagining it.

Watch your fingers around windowsills! You wouldn't want to lose any of them.

Don't linger too long under the doorframes; it may start feeling like they are slowly constricting around you.

[inkskinned]

in internet posts it is easy to cut them out of your life. they are hurting you! they aren't listening to you!

they held your hair back. they lent you lipstick. they held your hand at the train station and got you home safe. they rounded on your bully, got loud, said get fucked, spitting-mad in your defense.

they also cut the hair off again. told you that you should really think twice before wearing something like that. took you for granted. took your insecurities and threw them in your face again.

you know logically it should be easy. all the internet advice comments always read it will feel better. like an equation - if a person is rotten, you just remove them. you pull the tooth that's hurting.

but it was never a big flare-up moment. you don't live in a sitcom. they never tried to take your boyfriend or steal from your apartment. they showed up to birthdays and they wrote songs about you and bring you water without you asking. once you found out they carry an emergency inhaler for you, even though you haven't had an asthma attack in years - just in case.

where is the line? people fuck up. sometimes they fuck up badly. sometimes people have raw personalities, like a powerline, and being around them is dangerous. addicting. sometimes they can't help themselves, but you know they're trying. sometimes they are just rough-around-the-edges. sometimes they don't even realize how they sounded when they said that. sometimes it's just - you've both loved each other for so long now, the way this thing hurts goes back to the root.

and that's the fucked up part. you have pushed your fingers against the sweetheart of memory. things these days are electric, tense, harrowing. they didn't used to be. there were a lot of good days in there. sometimes you want to just close your eyes and say can this be over yet? do we still need to be fighting?

doing that would give up any chance you get of getting an apology, but you don't always know that you need an apology, you love them. once they flaked on your birthday party. once they told you to get over it, people are always dying. they also let you crash on their couch for a week after the breakup, handfeeding you when you were so sad you couldn't eat. they are also judgmental about everything, occasionally react to banal statements with an attitude that is weird and fiery. they also love you like a lighthouse sometimes, so strong they cut the storm like lightning.

but the problem is that you might be storm. you might be the thing that needs breaking. what if you are two forces who are desperately, horribly drawn to each other, shaped by the other person's passions, and both good for each other and bad in equal measure.

what if you're both just people, and you're no saint neither.

just cut them off! swallowing the saltwater, you catch yourself in the mirror. you've been shaking more than usual. there's an ache in you that is oblique, loud, impossible to soothe. is this what it looks like? when life is "easier"?

your mouth will always have a hole, is the thing, if you remove the tooth.

[fowlfics]

the laws of tragedies, by @annabelle--cane

[vaguely-concerned]

can you even imagine what a fucking horror show the early game is from spite's perspective, though. not only is this funky forcibly severed little slip of the fade having to deal with the reverse cosmic horror of physical reality as perceived by a spirit and being trapped in it against its will -- existentially confused and disoriented and hurting and nothing makes any kind of sense, at the mercy of human cruelty at its most deliberately sadistic. and then the one source of comfort and compassion and some kind of safety and clarity that lucanis surely must have been to him in the ossuary despite everything just goes and shuts himself in his room inside with a seemingly passive aggressive number of locks between them and no explanation and won't speak to him and they're STILL in the fucking ossuary. rook came and found them and they could be free now (rook is here!) and still lucanis keeps them in the ossuary even though he PROMISED he promised they'd get out of there together!!! what the fuck DO you think at that point? like did he trick me that whole time??? he wasn't like zara before, so why is he doing this to me now? why isn't he saying anything? 'he won't move. I can't reach him'. at least in the ossuary they had a deal, a goal, a hope -- each other. at least he wasn't entirely alone, before.

this poor poor poor little spite spirit really was ferried into the real world like 'hey welcome to reality! as your first introduction to it you're first getting horrifically tortured and then getting to vicariously experience one of THE most distressing and harrowing psychological conditions the human brain can cook up for itself (a fully fledged and deeply entrenched freeze response flaring up with catastrophic severity due to an unbroken ongoing and unlikely to let up any time soon chain of Unfortunately... Recent Events). I think spite is being extremely reasonable and patient about the whole thing, when you put it into perspective. I'm not saying let him eat the self-lighting candles or anything, but he's got some extremely valid points along the way lol. spite is not only child-like, the metaphor work going on is a lot more pleasingly flexible and complex than that, but he is also helplessly existentially dependent on lucanis in a way that, if anything, is a heightened version of the way a child (or child part) has to depend on a parent to navigate the world and survive.

tl;dr: we truly don't give enough sympathy to spite for having to live in the head of lucanis dellamorte. a place even lucanis dellamorte would prefer not to be. to be fair to him I think lucanis would be the first person to agree with this lol

[sweetlullabyebye]

Charles Rowland being so chill about Edwin's fanboys

[petaltexturedskies]

When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added. Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness. Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night, first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars. Let Persephone get used to it slowly. In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting. A replica of earth except there was love here. Doesn't everyone want love?

Louise Glück, from "A Myth of Devotion" in Poems 1962-2012