#like mark getting up early to fish with john

[doom-dreaming]

i think what i'm having the most fun with right now re: beach house ideas/plotting is that the gammas are there. buy those kids some cute civvies. show them weird tropical fruits they've never seen before. give them a few hundred credits and set them loose in the boardwalk shops.

[danwhobrowses]

One Piece Chapter 1096 - Initial Thoughts

And we are back

Had a feeling this one would come early though. The Kuma flashback is in swing and we are in a very historically point of intrigue

However it is also 8 weeks since we last saw Nico Robin and it'll likely end up being double digits at this rate

Still, let's not rush this flashback, let's see what it has to offer

Spoilers for the Chapter, Support the Official Release Also

The trend of monkeys on the cover is ended by Chihuahuas beating Zoro at musical chairs XD Still though top 3

We're back into hunger games as the Celestial Dragons explain how all the inhabitants are 'rabbits' all worth points; 1 hit kills get you a bonus but there are also 150 rare kills worth more, and 13 super rare worth 10,000 points, the same amount Garling was deducted

There's also prizes apparently, sickening stuff

Garling looked a bit like Zoro and Shanks there as he talks big game

Mannmeyer family woman might be interesting, face is obscured, same for gas mask dude

The last one looks kinda like that Whitebeard Commander too

Of course, the natives of God Valley are confused and panicked by the situation, and are offered no mercy by the dragons who simply tell them to give them a good chase

At the Navy, Garp is being called for support, but he's not biting

Rare appearance from Fleet Admiral Kong too

Young Garp is lapping it up by the pool, but he thinks he's being called because of what the Navy did to the Rocks pirates

Seems they stole something, a 'crown jewel' they say

Ironic though that Garp is all 'you can't shake the hive' and then over 30 years later showing up to shake the hive

Seems like the intel was supposed to be kept on the down low though

Garp won't protect the Dragons from Rocks, but he's leapt out of his deck chair for Roger

So much Luffy energy when he's relaxing too, though I guess God Valley was when he started getting more serious

The Rocks pirates are already on the move too, having left Fullalead without the rest of their inhabitants

Ivankov narrates something more true than they realise, this will be a big moment made forgotten history

10,000 civilians hunted for sport, and Oda's not holding back despite current events

Urgh and the slaves all have target marks on their back

Ivankov has to drill home that nobody is going to survive, the idea that they'll be let go if they survive 3 weeks is just a way to satisfy the dragons

Garling has been chasing the bigger prizes and has thus broke even already

All in front of an audience in Marejois via Den Den Mushi too

Ivankov's chains are bitten off by a Shark Fishman, who Ivankov praises, I wonder if that was Arlong and Shyarly's father?

Ginny (they're sticking with the G) is a bit of a thief and an wiretapper it seems, leaking information to the world 2 weeks prior to create chaos while they escape

The plan requires the prizes; Devil Fruits, the Paw-Paw Fruit and the Fish Fish Fruit: Model Azure Dragon, which are at the center of the island

She makes a point in saying that Kaido's is classed among the strongest of Devil Fruits, and that the Paw-Paw Fruit is a secondary plan because it can blast things away

Kuma also volunteers to be a decoy, his strength and bulkiness being cited as increasing his chances to survive

His resolve does impress Ivankov and Ginny too

Rocks are heeeeeere!

Alas we don't see Rocks D. Xebec, but we do see all the youthful members of the crew

Whitebeard reprimands Rocks for running ahead, with Buckingham Stussy hanging off his shoulder

Seemed Stussy had competition from a Kuja, so the big surprise here: Elder Nyon (Gloriosa) was a Rocks Pirate member, not Shakky like the theories

Canon Manga Debut for Shiki as well, as Big Mom and Kaido argue with the group, also Captain John is there drinking much like he did as a Zombie

No sign of who Ochoku was though, could be the guy to Whitebeard's left (our right)

Seems Rocks wasn't here for the Celestial Dragons though, the pirates were looking for something, and they're all gonna fight even each other to get it

Ochoku could also be the 2 people underneath Gloriosa in the 3 way panel, helmet dude or the very shaded hat man

But from the other side: the Roger Pirates!

Tacheless Roger with the Straw Hat, and prime Rayleigh and Gaban, but there's also a big dude, a Viking Dude and someone in a snug coat

God look how much Roger looks like Ace, and he's been itching for a fight all year

We see a couple more God's Knights too, there's a woman and a tall dude? I dunno every time I look it looks like he's beheaded, he doesn't have the armour, but we have the woman

The chaos has earned a reprieve for the inhabitants, the farmers look a tiny bit like the Milk girl Moda from Lulusia

The younger marines don't like their chances

Until Garp arrives!

Gotta have a good reputation if Garp reassures you against Rocks AND Roger

Bogard my man is still there, the others I don't recognize though

Even more carnage leads to Kuma and Ivankov getting the fruits they want

But alas, Child Abuse, Big Mom getting that in early to knock away Ivankov and get the Fish Fruit which she will use on Kaido

Through Ivankov's encouragement, Kuma eats the fruit before Linlin can get to him

But as Ivankov rallies that saving at least 1 person will be a victory, more child abuse! This time Saturn comes to deck Kuma

Man headshots marines, Bonney and Sanji but he went for ol' fashioned fisticuffs with Kuma

There has been a lot of touching tha child here, DON'T TOUCHA THA CHILD!

"I don't understand how someone can be born to be more or less important" god what a line that is

Stood before Saturn, Kuma notes that now that he has power, he's gonna save as many as he can, just like Nika

And Saturn doesn't like that, seems that the idolization of Nika is what led to the genocide of the Buccaneers

ACOC lightning hums around God Valley as Roger and Rocks fight, it seems Rocks was trying to get to something while Roger was trying to interact

But Oda, brilliant but awful as he is, decides that's it, no more God Valley content...

Sir we needed more, we didn't even see Rocks, or why Kaido needed the fruit to survive, or Ochoku, or why it's made out that Garp and Roger were teaming up to protect the Celestial Dragons because clearly they were not

But alas, back at the Sorbet kingdom we have the aftermath

Ivankov laments that Morgans only lapped up Garp's heroics, and that he's a WG kissass

Kuma however is praying in a church, lamenting that he could've saved more

Turns out he saved 500 people though, which is a lot given how many big names were there, and that last we saw he was staring down a Gorosei

Ginny has now nicknamed Kuma the chapter's title, Kumachi, which could be written the same way as Perona's bear Kumacy not entirely sure

But Ivankov adds praise to Kuma's efforts, calling his paws the Hands of Liberation

Ivankov doesn't stick around though, heading off to sea to enjoy their freedom

"I'll never forget your face for as long as I live" oof right in the Marineford

Ginny however opts to stay in Sorbet living in a church with Kuma

Make no mistake though, Ginny's the boss, despite being a third his size she has the age factor

Chopping wood like the SBS artwork of young Kuma as they seek to feed themselves on hard work

Ginny also beats up bullies that throw stones at Kuma thinking he's lying about being 9

But Kuma as a gentle soul uses his fruit to remove the pain

Ginny is a glutton, much like her potential children/clone maybe? As Kuma offers her more of his food

They've both spent at least 5 years as a slave (since both became slaves at 4, and Kuma is 9 while Ginny is somehow 13)

But the sensation of finally feeling full makes Ginny tear up with joy, which of course makes Kuma cry too

So sweet, it's all gonna go to shit ain't it?

Well it was definitely an inviting chapter

Though I am a bit sore that we got blueballed a lot with God Valley, so many questions still left unanswered as Oda teases us. The Devil Fruits as prizes make sense though, wonder if there were more, Rocks was after something after all. Wonder if the Ope Ope no Mi was considered a prize? I doubt the Gomu Gomu no Mi was a prize though think the Gorosei would've wanted that under lock and key, maybe Doffy's fruit? or the Yami Yami no Mi? or Marco's fruit? or that Egg on Roger's Ship during the Oden flashback? Did Garling throw his son up as a prize? Answers Oda you're supposed to give Answers! We got a lot of teases though; God's Knights, other Rocks crewmates, Stussy potentially indeed being a thing with Whitebeard but atm it seems more like she was dangling off him (she was listed as a 'freeloader' in MADS, wonder if clone Stussy will have a larger role too in present because she did get sidelined quickly), also seems like Gloriosa was interested was Whitebeard the man she had love sickness for? Also got potential ancestors who were God Valley slaves. Kuma saving 500 is still super impressive too, how did he get away from Saturn? How many generations of that 500 still exist today?

But we do seem to have the blooming of Kuma and maybe a relationship with him and Ginny. It's unclear but I think the Luffy's mom bit is even lower a possibility now, still thinking that Bonney is a clone of Ginny though, wouldn't mind if she was a biological daughter it'd just make the wording of Kuma being the last Buccaneer a bit weird.

It does further fuel the idea that Kuma is gonna show up in Egghead too, but the flashback only further fuels the layer of tragedy that has befell Kuma, man has suffered so much and he continues to lose so much, this flashback has the capacity to break us.

At the least there's no break, but the wait will be long and painful regardless.

[wyrmfedgrave]

Pics: Inspiring HPL.

1. Irvin S. Cobb - American writer, editor, humorist & columnist hailing from Paducah, Kentucky¹.

He was the highest paid staff reporter on the NY World newspaper².

Irvin would write 60+ books & around 300 short stories.

Some of which were adapted into silent movies. And, 2 of his later tales were actually filmed, by the famed John Ford³, during the 1930s!

2. Cobb's "dark side" (horror works) of the otherwise lighthearted comedian & the story in question.

3 & 4. Comedic frontpieces(?) for books by Cobb. The 2nd even boasts an Abraham Lincoln quote!

5. Cover to Cobb's collection of other authors's short horror tales.

6. Inside art from Fishhead's ending...

1913 Addendum -

Intro: Irvin Cobb's infamous short story "Fishhead" is set in the back- wood bayous of the vast Reelfoot Lake⁴.

Plot: The tale concerns the murder of a local outcast freak by "poor whites."

With its surprise Jaws⁵-like ending, this gruesome work reminds readers of an issue of EC comics⁶!

Criticism: Lovecraft lauded Cobb for, "... Carrying on our (own) spectral tradition is the gifted... humorist, I.S. Cobb, whose works... contain some finely (made) weird (tales)."

Of the plot, Howard stated that, "Fish- head" (is) an early achievement, ... banefully effective in its portrayal of (an) unnatural... hybrid idiot & the strange fish of an isolated lake."

Lovecraft further opined, "It is (my firm) belief... that... few short stories of equal merit have been published anywhere (else)..."

Legacy: Cobb's "Fishhead" is seen as a major influence on Lovecraft's own "Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Robert M. Price⁷ noted that, "What (Howard) found revolting was the idea of interracial marriage (&) of different ethnicities mating, (thus) 'polluting' the (white? human?) gene pool."

Fishhead is supposedly "the son of a Negro father & a halfbreed Indian mother." It's never mentioned what her other half was from...

This is the same premise behind HPL's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Except that Lovecraft calls them Deep Ones & has a whole city that's been 'turned'...

More when we get to this story...

Notes:

1. Paducah, as 1 out of 9 U.S. Creative Cities, is a haven for thinkers, artists & creators!

Architectural Digest recognizes this city's historic district as 1 of the most beautiful main streets in America.

There are 20 downtown blocks listed in the National Register of Historic Places!

Weird Shit: Paducah's nickname is "The Atomic City."

This was because it was once the U.S.'s only uranium plant, making atomic bombs for our Defense Department...

2. The NY World newspaper began (in 1860) as a leading voice for the US Democratic Party.

But, once under Joseph Pulitzer, it became a pioneer in "yellow journalism."

Catching readers's attention with sensational (sex, sport & scandal) news stories.

This raised their circulation past the 1 million mark!!

Best known for being among the 1st to publish daily comic strips.

They actually created "Hogan's Alley", "Everyday Movies", "Little Mary Mix- up" & "Joe Jinks!"

Merged with The NY Telegram in 1931.

Revived - online - in 2011 by Columbia U. But, hasn't had any new content since 2016...

3. John Ford was an American movie director who won Oscars for "The Informer", "The Grapes of Wrath", "How Green Was My Valley" & "The Quiet Man."

The best of his many Westerns are "The Searchers", "Stagecoach" & "My Darling Clementine."

4. Reelfoot Lake is a real lake best known for its shallowness - about 5½ feet on average.

It's located in western Tennessee &, strangely enough, no swimming is allowed there...

The lake is named after an 1800's Chickasaw warrior with a deformed leg...

Reelfoot Bayou, with its cypress trees, flows out of the lake to join the Obion River - which runs straight to the Mississippi.

5. "Jaws" is, of course, director Steven Spielberg's 1st international master- piece.

And it doesn't need any hype, from me, for you to see it again!

97% on Rotten Tomatoes!!

Enough said...

Make it so!

6. E.C. Comics was an American publisher specializing in horror, crime, dark fantasy & sci-fi comicbooks.

William Gaines printed mature tales of war, adventure, satire, etc...

Noted for its stories high quality, shock endings & progressive social awareness.

Among the themes that EC creators touched upon are: racial equality, anti- war sentiments, nuclear disarmament & even early environmentalism!

Sadly, official censorship forced EC to focus on its "Mad" magazine - which became it's greatest success!!

EC has just been revived, by Oni Press, on this past February of 2024!!

Good times guaranteed...

7. R.M. Price is an American biblical scholar, author & an authority on H.P. Lovecraft.

His works include: "Deconstructing Jesus", "The Reason Driven Life", "The New Lovecraftian Circle", "World War Cthulhu", "The Disciples of Cthulhu", "Arkham Detective Agency", "The Da Vinci Fraud", "The Apartheid State in Crisis" & more great stuff!!

Price was the editor of the greatly lamented Crypt of Cthulhu, Midnight Shambler & Eldritch Tales fanzines.

He even edited a whole series of Mythos anthologies for Chaosium.

Today, Price is editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism!

Busy little tentacle, ain't he...

[forasecondtherewedwon]

seven degrees east - chapter two

Fandom: Masters of the Air Pairings: Gale x Bucky; Nash x Helen; more tbd Rating: T (may change) Chapter: 2 / ? Word Count: 4285

read on tumblr: one

The next morning hit some of them like a hammer. It hit others like falling dominoes of hammer-laden hardware store aisles.

They’d stayed out late, naturally. Though a bartender had eyed them up as the troublemakers they were, they’d gotten the fighting out of their system with just the one, so, in a move they were only moderately regretting in the light of day, they’d been able to sit undisturbed and drink until Crosby—their canary in the coalmine—claimed he was on the verge of ralphing. That was the point at which they always knew to cease. Well, that they knew they would need to cease in another round or two. Three at most.

In the style of a detective in his office past the midnight hour—shoes on the desk, blinds cracked to permit stripes of light from the streetlamp outside—Crosby was a sad, self-loathing drunk. The night before, true to form, he’d laid out his regrets and likely future failures for his friends to pick at like vultures. No one had, largely because no one had been paying him any attention. He was a sadsack who could be counted upon to tap out early. As usual, he’d woken up feeling much more optimistic about life. And then he’d barfed himself hoarse. And then he’d felt pretty good again.

For a night at the bar, Bubbles had two possible character archetypes from which to choose: a weathered, Steinbeckian striving towards greatness; or a Faulkneresque delusion in the face of inevitable doom. Crosby’s own maudlin reflections could sometimes push his friend towards the latter option, but the previous evening’s adventures had kept Bubbles upbeat. He’d done his upchucking before bed, and had thus awoken feeling reasonably refreshed and capable of making his roommate (still Crosby) coffee in the pot that was in such constant use that it almost never got cleaned.

Tortured Nash, whose greatest misfortune was usually that there was absolutely nothing wrong with him, had for once had ample cause to get as drunk as he had the night before. By the time he’d extricated himself from the recounting of the scuffle outside, Helen had vanished. They’d pitied him, his friends. The fact that they’d still made him buy the next round did not negate the genuine sympathy they’d felt hearing that Nash hadn’t gotten Helen’s number. Their schools were a whole half-hour drive apart. It was hopeless. Theirs was a romance fated to go unconsummated, but for a single, shining evening. They were textbook star-crossed lovers. Face pressed to the passenger-side window of Rosie’s car on the drive back to campus, Nash had thought seriously about switching his primary field to Shakespeare.

People who didn’t know Curt well were always surprised to learn he knew when to stop—when to stop drinking, that was. He’d only had the two pours from the pitcher of beer, but he’d also slipped away a couple of times and come back giggling. His friends knew that at least one of these sorties had involved toking on a squashed joint from his wallet (the scent was undeniable), but the other had lasted longer, and the plum-coloured hickey visible on the underside of Curt’s jaw when he showed up to class was pretty damning. The mark left them guessing with whom Curt had chosen to adhere to two Beat culture tenets: drug use and sexual experimentation.

In contrast with Curt’s alcohol-specific restraint, John rarely knew when to stop. Or maybe he did and ignored it. As Gale had noted at the time, the practice of overindulging was very Hemingway of him, as was John’s perennial drunken threat to take up fishing. It was the best he could do, since the UK’s lack of large predators put Hemingway’s other quarry of choice—grizzly bear, lion, etcetera—out of reach. As usual, John’s friends had applied themselves to the redirection of his inebriated enthusiasm for “the hunt,” but failed to catch the long-legged bastard when, back on campus, he’d sprinted for the iconic tower the school used in all its brochures and attempted to scale its stony carapace. (Quietly, unassumingly, and invisibly to John and Gale both, the hunt had resumed after Gale’d wrestled him off the wall, when they’d walked back to the dorms together, falling into slow, perfect step.)

Gale was subdued, and not only because he was trying to keep things in their shared dorm to a volume respectful of John’s embattled, hungover state. It was Monday, and Mondays were when Marge called. Marge was Gale’s girlfriend. Sort of. Before he’d moved overseas to complete his education, they’d had a conversation about it. They’d discussed her coming with him, they’d discussed marriage, but ultimately it’d felt like too big a step too soon, and so they’d agreed to put the relationship on hold. There were calls to check in—coming more frequently from her and with a greater feeling of guilt from him—but Gale had the sense that these had begun to feel increasingly perfunctory to them both. He just didn’t want to be the one to acknowledge that the flourishing thing they’d once had was now rootbound, likely limiting any further growth for either of them. He’d thumbed through his broken-in copy of The Portrait of a Lady the night before, looking for answers on how to reconcile his old world with his new, but Henry James didn’t make anything simple.

Rosie woke feeling fine. He inspected his mustache with pride, then carefully shaved the surrounding stubble and headed to class humming the theme song from The Nanny.

In the seminar room, Professor Harding watched each of them enter, his gaze devoid of sympathy for those in rough shape. Crosby whimpered quietly at the slant of morning light through the tall windows; had Harding raised all the goddamn blinds on purpose? Wordlessly, Bubbles nudged the thermos of coffee back into his friend’s hand.

When Gale and John walked in last, Harding got in John’s way to stop him.

“Happy Monday, Doc,” John offered with a wide grin.

“You weren’t planning on wearing those sunglasses in my classroom, were you, Mr. Egan?”

“Aw, these?” He plucked them from his head, revealing bloodshot eyes. “Nah, I just didn’t want to forget to give them to you.”

Gale stood stiffly at his side, willing John to shut up and follow him to their usual seats at the long wooden table. He watched in silence as, instead of demonstrating self-preservation (why break tradition?), John very deliberately folded the legs of his aviators, then reached out and slipped them into Harding’s shirt pocket.

“Just temporary,” John said, “so don’t get attached.”

Gale watched his best friend and their professor stare each other down—Harding unreadable, John with a cold intensity in his eyes.

“Noted,” Harding said at last. “Take a seat.”

“Can do.”

The group released a collective breath, shoulders dropping, Rosie flicking his eyebrows up at Bubbles to indicate a narrow escape, Bubbles returning the signal with a subtle wiping of faux sweat from his brow. Phew. Another close call with Bucky, their maybe too fearless co-leader.

“Projector today, sir?” Crosby asked weakly, as Harding settled into the seat at the head of the table, skimming his notes.

Crosby dreaded accidentally glancing into the overhead projector’s uncaring beam. The hot, blinding light would probably instantaneously melt whatever remained of his brain into a chunky, horrible soup—the coffee was helping with his hangover, but he really needed to not think the word chunky.

“No, Crosby. No.” Harding sniffed in the way some people had of making a sniff sound dignified rather than a harbinger of hay fever. He looked up at them. “I think we should… talk.”

The words triggered in Gale a sinking feeling that he couldn’t, and then didn’t want to, explain.

Though Harding looked uncomfortable at his own proposed plan of action, he pushed through.

“What I have on my agenda for today’s class—and what all of you have on the syllabus I gave you at the start of this course, if any of you have managed not to lose it—is some lecture from me, summary and close-reading of the ‘House-Warming’ chapter by…” He consulted his notes again. “…Rosenthal. Prepared, Rosenthal?”

His eyes found Rosie, who nodded sharply and had fed-up expressions directed at him by some of his friends for having the nerve to be bright-eyed and prepared when others of them felt like their faces had been replaced with rubber Michael Myers Halloween masks.

“Good,” Harding said (about as effusive as he ever ventured with his praise). “Well, we’re scrapping that. And the lecture. Next class though, Rosenthal. You’re still on deck.”

“Sounds good,” Rosie said.

“Sounds good?” Nash echoed at a whisper. Rosie frowned at him.

Curt’s hand shot up.

“Biddick.” Harding nodded for him to speak.

“So, what’re we gonna talk about?”

“It’s time we tried something new. How are you liking Walden?”

The boys glanced at each other. The entire course, the entire summer, was about Walden, but they hadn’t been asked before. Some professors did that—checked in to see how they felt about a text rather than just what they thought about some theme or detail. Not Harding. John squinted at his professor suspiciously for a minute, wondering if Harding himself might’ve hit the bar the night before. Whether he might have been wasted at that very moment, only astounding at hiding it. There was so much to learn at university with the right instructor.

Bubbles bravely went first.

“Well,” he said, “he’s thorough.”

“You’re suggesting the work is good simply because it was written by a man we consider an important writer?” Harding asked, attempting to extract more.

“Thorough, not Thoreau. Damn accent,” Bubbles muttered at the end.

“My apologies,” Harding offered awkwardly. “So, you appreciate his thoroughness. His commitment to the project, perhaps?”

“He did what he thought needed doing. From what he wrote down, seems like he worked hard at it.”

“Alright. Other responses?”

John didn’t lift his arm from the table, but he lifted his palm, and then a finger from that palm. Harding nodded at him.

“Whitman writes, ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself,’” John recited with an indolent competence.

“‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’” Gale finished under his breath. John reached below the table and squeezed his knee.

“You think Thoreau contradicts himself?” Harding interpreted.

John took his time sliding his hand from Gale’s knee. It trailed a little higher before he lifted it to join his other hand above the table, so he could gesture with both at once: a shrug with his palms upturned.

“One minute he loves to be alone, the next he’s talking about all his buddies who keep showing up. I mean, come on,” John said flatly. “What kinda hermit in the woods did this guy really think he was?”

“A pretty damn good one,” Rosie cut in.

“That’s why he wrote the book braggin’ about it,” Gale tacked on.

“Thoreau’s tone can get self-congratulatory,” Harding allowed. “Is this unwarranted?”

“Yes,” John said emphatically, right as Crosby said, “No.”

“‘No’?” John repeated.

“It was hard! It was hard for him! It would be hard for us, if we were honest with ourselves!” The caffeine was hitting Crosby.

“No,” John said, his own ‘no’ this time.

“No it wouldn’t be hard for us or no you won’t be honest with yourself?”

“No.” John smiled slowly and Crosby shook his head with jittery impatience.

“I got a thought,” Curt volunteered.

“Go ahead,” Harding said.

Curt breathed deeply, sighed, and announced, “Thoreau needs to get laid.”

Rosie permuted his abrupt laughter into an unconvincing cough.

“Please tell me you plan on strengthening your point,” Harding requested in a suffering tone.

“Uh, yeah, I do, sir,” Curt promised quickly. He shuffled forward on his seat. “It’s all his tension, right? He’s, like, super anal about his spending and his fuckin’ bean field. And then he wants to be alone, but he wants his friends to come over and hang and play Air Combat on his fuckin’ PlayStation all the time.”

Rosie sighed loudly.

“Alright, now,” Harding said, stepping in. “That wasn’t the most orthodox argument, but before anyone rebuts Biddick’s point, let me just say that he has one.”

“Was Thoreau in love?” Nash wondered. Having not done the reading, he’d been trying to keep a low profile in case they swung back around to “House-Warming” after all, but this topic was completely irresistible to him.

“Well… it’s not an unpopular argument that the object of Thoreau’s affection does appear in Walden.”

“I don’t even remember him mentioning a woman except… Emerson’s wife?”

“No, Nash, it’s—”

“Thoreau’s mom?” Curt demanded. His face suggested he was both disgusted and delighted by this bombshell.

“The woodchopper,” Gale guessed.

“The woodchopper,” Harding confirmed. “Very astute, Cleven. Yes, that Thoreau had”—he cleared his throat—“sexual feelings for the woodchopper is a not unpopular theory among scholars.”

“The woodchopper’s a man,” Nash said.

“So, you have been doing some of the readings,” Harding observed wryly. That shut Nash up.

“The woodchopper?” Curt said. “The French guy? Well, I guess…”

He began retreading his own points from earlier—the tension, the struggle between a need to be alone and a need to be with others who were important to him. To this, Curt added a recounting of Thoreau’s (somewhat insulting) admiration for the woodchopper, for the way he lived, for the purity of him, aligned as he was with the natural world Thoreau himself had set out to better appreciate.

Throughout Curt’s monologue, John’s gaze shifted repeatedly to the side of Gale’s face. He saw Gale’s jaw clench. The tension. John wondered if anybody knew how the woodchopper had felt, whether anybody’d bothered to write that down. From one minute to the next, Thoreau became interesting to John for the first time. It would’ve been impossible with the woodchopper, but had Thoreau ever married a woman, or had it mostly been him and the trees, him and his fuckin’ bean field, as Curt had said? John wondered if you ever got used to that solitude, or you only pretended to seem strong and silent. Thoreau was reminding him of Hemingway, and how he separated his male protagonists from the women they loved to permit this manly, weary continuance. It seemed exhausting to John, who was hungover, whose furrowed brow was not evidence of his concentration on the matter of Thoreau and the woodchopper but of his fraught endeavour to recall what he and Gale had said to one another the night before on the walk to their dorm.

Gale, next to John, had been fairly confident in his theory of Thoreau and the woodchopper, or else he wouldn’t have spoken up. It had felt vulnerable, as it always did to offer an interpretation to Harding. He respected the man. He didn’t want to be wrong. And it wasn’t as though, for as long as men had been writing books, they hadn’t been imbuing them with homoeroticism, but bringing it up while seated beside John was different from picking up on subtext while reading, making a calm bullet point in his composition book. He’d only named the woodchopper because it’d seemed too clear not to, and because it might help the others to understand—to understand the book. Gale had named the woodchopper because that was an easy attraction to identify. He could stab his finger down on the page and say, Now, that, gentlemen, is what pining looks like. He found it so much simpler, sometimes, to study people in books. With an actual person, there was a chance of interpreting them incorrectly, and then what would happen? Gale didn’t like all the unknowns. He propped his elbow on the table and rested his cheek on his fist.

“Short essays are due this Friday,” Harding reminded them at the end of class. “If you haven’t met with me about your topic because you’re so confident that you prefer to surprise me… God help you.”

With that, they dispersed.

—

There had been an airfield, Bubbles knew. It had been gone since before the university had bought the land and decided to raise upon it buildings that lied about their age in the opposite direction Bubbles’ mother was always trying to. The airfield was the reason for the large lawn devoid of trees. Younger trees had been planted elsewhere on the property, but this stretch of grass had been left. Except for the one solid oak Crosby was currently leaning his back against. He had found the only tree in sight.

“Croz,” Bubbles greeted, tossing his bag down, then himself, inhaling deeply. The afternoon was growing late, and the ground was warm, the scent of the grass he disturbed as he stretched out on the lawn a pleasant mingling of sweet and bitter.

Crosby looked up over the top of The Lady in the Lake and smiled.

“Hey, buddy.”

“Essay done?”

“A version of it.”

They both knew how Crosby operated: the minute an assignment was given, he went to work on it, burning the midnight oil and refusing to rest until it was complete. This left him plenty of time to second-guess himself and start over from scratch, sometimes multiple times. Crosby claimed he worked best under pressure, and was generally happiest with the last iteration he created. This could only be achieved under conditions of severe eye strain and over-caffeination. His mind was a fine instrument; his body was treated with all the consideration shown to Victorian chimneysweeps before the introduction of child labour laws.

Bubbles fished inside his bag for a pack of gum, folding a stick into his mouth. Eyes back on his page, Crosby stuck out a hand; Bubbles rolled his eyes and gave him a stick too. He jerked his chin at the book.

“What’s this one about?”

“Guns, booze, missing dame.”

“Chandler sure knows his wheelhouse, I’ll give him that,” Bubbles said.

“And the Second World War. He wrote it right after Pearl Harbor.”

Bubbles nodded to acknowledge he’d heard, and they let the quiet linger. Crosby flipped a page. Bubbles gazed across the lawn, wondering if he was only imagining that he could see where the runways had once been. It was all grass now. Warm, scented grass, mushed soft where he lay.

Snapping his gum, Bubbles extracted a few more supplies from his bag: notebook, pen, lucky writing snow globe. Unlike Crosby, he didn’t have a tried-and-true process, but he did have the calm he felt when he shook the little globe and watched the plastic flakes float down. At this hour, the glitter that was also suspended in the liquid sparkled like diamonds. Bubbles stared at the components that came together to imitate snow and let his mind drift with a similar abandon. He thought of real snow and Absalom, Absalom! and how to tell a story and whether, once told, that story was a kind of truth regardless of its factuality. He thought he might write his essay about Walden’s genre, and began jotting down ideas.

Because of the lack of students on campus during the summer—not to mention the lack of trees—John was able to see his friends from a distance: Crosby a shape against the bark and Bubbles sprawled out nearby. John came strolling across the lawn. Judging his friends to be distracted, he changed course at the last minute and approached them from behind the tree. He snuck close, then jumped out next to Crosby.

“The butler did it!” he shouted.

Crosby’s hands flew up, his mystery novel launched from their grasp. Laughing, John swept an arm low and snagged poor Chandler from midair.

“It’s not really that kinda mystery, Bucky,” Crosby said, eyes narrowed with distrust even as John sank down to join them.

“That’s a shame. You ever think of writing your own?”

Crosby looked alarmed.

“Write my own detective novel?”

“Yeah,” John said nonchalantly. He shrugged. “Why not? You’re a natural-born plotter.”

Crosby’s eyes shifted to Bubbles’ face and they exchanged a look; neither was able to tell whether this was a compliment, exactly.

“Thanks?” Crosby said.

John nodded, the motion loose and magnanimous.

“You’re welcome, Croz. So, what’re you two suckers up to? Procrastinating that essay?”

“Working on it,” Bubbles said.

“Working on procrastinating?”

“Working working.”

“Oh,” John said, sounding disappointed. He looked again to Crosby. “What about you?”

“Taking my mind off it before I write another version.” Crosby shut his novel around his index finger and flapped the cover against his knee.

“Eesh. You are a glutton for punishment.”

“Seems like.”

“In the meantime, procrastination is a fine art,” John declared. He retrieved from his own pocket the sunglasses he’d earlier slipped into Professor Harding’s. He laid on his back and put them on with a deep sigh. “And I’m fucking Picasso.”

“I wish the both of you every happiness,” Bubbles mumbled, half distracted as he drew lines across his paper to connect his ideas.

“Perv,” John accused lightly, to cover the flush that rushed across his cheeks.

It wasn’t the joke that made him blush. He wasn’t actually sure what it was, not exactly, just that he wasn’t fucking anyone at the moment. Not regularly. Normally, he was satisfied with this state of affairs to the point of boastfulness; unlike Crosby and Gale, who both had some calibre of long-distance thing going on with chicks back in the States, John was typically free to hook up whenever the chance presented itself. He hadn’t wanted to lately, but he could—they knew he could. It was just…

He wished he could remember his conversation with Gale.

John hadn’t brought anything to work on when he’d come wandering back from the dorms. No books to read, no paper to write on. What he had done was slide his Discman into the fathomless pocket of his jeans and hook the headphones around the back of his neck. He dragged them up over his ears now and pressed play, launching back into (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? partway through “Some Might Say.” He closed his eyes to better focus on the heat of the sun on his face.

He didn’t realize he was almost asleep—lulled by the rolling sonic waves of “Champagne Supernova”—until Gale gave the sole of his shoe a gentle kick, rousing him. Blearily, John sat up, tugging his headphones off.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Gale said back.

John removed his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes, making the world go fuzzy. He noticed that Crosby was gone, and Bubbles was packing up. They probably wouldn’t have left him there. Probably. Then again, he was sometimes grouchy if someone woke him up. Not Gale though. He was never grouchy with Gale.

He lifted a hand in farewell as Bubbles departed, then turned his attention on his best friend.

“What’s up?”

“Nothin’ much.” Gale wandered over to the tree, reaching out and trailing his fingertips across the bark. “Me and Marge broke up.”

John knew it would be childish to point out they hadn’t really been together, so he said nothing for several long seconds. What the hell did he know about relationships? He’d never been part of anything as serious as what Gale and Marge had. Had had. He’d actually expected Gale to propose after defending his dissertation. John had expected a big wedding. He’d expected to be asked to be best man. Gale and Marge weren’t together now, but John had always assumed things would go back to how they had been when Gale (and John—perennially single, perennially unserious, tagging along) had left England. That was how things went: sometimes, you got to be someone else, somewhere else, for a while, but then things mostly went the way they were supposed to go.

When John had been sixteen, with the Rolling Stones on the verge of breaking up, he’d thought he might’ve been the second coming of Mick Jagger. Then somebody’d finally told him he couldn’t sing for shit, and he’d gone back to reading books. It had probably saved him from a lot of harsh criticism (which he could’ve handled the way he’d handled the Brits at the bar) and a cocaine addiction (which, yeah, wouldn’t have been great). John knew it might have been fatalistic, but he did think things tended to work themselves out, for better or worse.

Only… Gale and Marge were no longer together.

“You ok?” John asked.

“Yeah.”

But Gale didn’t look ok, not completely, though it was hard to be certain when he kept looking at his hand on the tree and not at John.

“We weren’t really together anymore anyway,” Gale said, which made John feel bad that he’d been thinking the same thing.

“Don’t say that,” he said softly.

Gale waved him off. John wasn’t sure how to help. Was he supposed to encourage Gale to try to get Marge back? Was he supposed to root for that? Or did he call Marge a bitch and assure Gale that he was better off a free agent, like John himself? Nothing but highs. Another day in the life.

“Quit looking at me like that,” Gale ordered without turning his head.

“Like what?” John asked instead of lying and saying he wasn’t.

But Gale didn’t have an answer.

Eventually, John forced himself up off the lawn and walked Gale to the dining hall to grab dinner. They stepped into their own long shadows over and over again as the sun warmed their backs, like it existed just for that, like it orbited the earth and not the other way around.

[delightfullysubatomic]

An unfinished and not fully accurate timeline of the NMJ Lads 2000-2012 (Tim-centred tbh)

Summer 2000: Alex goes to Edinburgh with 'How To Avoid Huge Ships'

Academic year 2000-2001: Mark in year ? of uni, Alex in his final year of uni year of uni, Tim has just graduated. Tim decides to do a play because he didn't do one in his final year at uni.

Alex was also doing stand up in another strand of Footlights (I think, idk how it works)

2000 (Cambridge, term 1)- Alex writes a panto of Treasure Island, Tim auditions and gets a role. Performances are late Nov-early Dec. Tim also auditioned for Bouncers by John Godber. He got both roles and fortuitously decided to do the panto.

(I don't think Alex and Tim became close yet)

2001 (Cambridge, term 2) - Tim does the Spring Review (sketch show) and starts to write a bit (was Mark in this??)

2001 (Cambridge, term 3) - Tim and Mark audition to be in the Footlights Summer Tour, which is what Emma Thompson, High Laurie et al did. They perform at Edinburgh and are nominated for Best Newcomer. It's directed by [friend who still directs plays w Tom Basden]

I don't know if the Spring and Summer sketch show / team are/were the same as each other but Tim conflates the whole year into one when telling any stories about it. Not sure either if they figured out about Tim not being a student during the Spring or the Summer.

2002: Tim and Dinky Donk contribute to an EP of Concrete Cow sketch show on Radio 4

Tim and Mark move to London. IIRC Tim moved back to Cambridge after a bit (maybe after losing his job at Hamley’s?), not sure when he moved back to London - suspect 2003/2004 as he’s still doing stuff in Cambridge at that point.

2002: Mark wins the Telegraph Open Mic Award. Tim's stand up career starts and ends in the space of 10 ok to terrible gigs

2003: Making Fish Laugh - Alex’s first solo show (Tim as assistant). Nominated for Best Newcomer

2003: Alex is on Brain Candy on BBC3 (stand up variety show)

2003: Mark and Tim direct the Footlights tour show(?) Starring some future Inbetweeners

2004: Mark's first 24 hour show (Tim as assistant). Mark gets engaged. Mark also does a show with Rhod Gilbert.

2004: Alex's second show Every Body Talks (Tim as assistant)

2004: Tim performs Luke and Stella at Edinburgh

2004: Mark's first novel is published

2004ish: Tim starts writing poems

2005: Alex gets married

2005: Mark does his first solo show and another 24 hour show

2005: Mark is nominated for Best Newcomer

2005: Alex’s third show When in Rome (Tim as assistant)

At some point Tim lives with Alex (and wife?)

2005-2007 (?): Tim performs in Cowards in Edinburgh (they also did it in London and in early days Alex, Mark and Rick Edwards were involved)

2006: Mark wins the inaugural Edinburgh Panel Prize and Time Out Critics Choice Award. He is nommed for the Barry Award (Melbourne)

2006: Mark starts appearing on Mock the Week and other panel shows

2006-2008 (+Xmas 2009): Tim adapts All Bar Luke for Radio 4

2006-2007 Alex and Dinky Donk try to meet someone from every nationality. I don't know if they get a show out of this!

2006: Mark and Tim are in Time Trumpet

2007: Mark writes 2 pilots. One stars Tom Basden and the summary sounds suspiciously like Tim's life at that time

207: Mark starts his Radio 4 show with Tim and Basden

2007: We Need Answers at Edinburgh

2007: Alex's fourth show Birdwatching at Edinburgh

2007: Tim’s first solo show Slut In The Hut in Edinburgh. It is produced by new comedy company The Invisible Dot, which is Tim’s comedy home until 2016ish.

2007: Herb McGwyer (nominated for Best Short Film BAFTA in 2008)

2007: Tim lives with his brother

2007ish: Cowards on the radio

2008: We Need Answers (2) at Edinburgh

2008: Alex's fifth show Wordwatching at Edinburgh

2009: Tim’s second solo the Slutcracker show in Edinburgh. He wins the Edinburgh Comedy Award.

2009: Mark does The Hotel immersive (hey there recent Taskmaster Ep)

2009: We Need Answers on TV

2009: Birdwatchingwatching by Alex and Tim's first poetry book are published

2009: Cowards on BBC4

2010: Taskmaster in Edinburgh (1)

2010: The Horne Section begins

2010ish: Tim joins the Alan Partridge world

2010: Tim is in Party by Tom Basden on Radio 4

2011: Taskmaster in Edinburgh (2)

2012: Tom start Tim Key's Late Night Poetry Programme

2008-2012(ish): Tim lives in a box room in Limehouse. During this time he wins the Edinburgh Comedy Award and is on TV quite a bit. He said during ep 1 of Taskmaster that he had no space for anything but kept the lintel(?) From his Edinburgh show. In the Taskmaster podcast Josh said Tim implied he was homeless but he would have been referencing the fact that he had a box room’s worth of living space (I included this because Josh thought Tim was lying in the show but i’m pretty sure he wasn’t).

[disappointingyet]

Variety

Director Bette Gordon Stars Sandy McLeod, Luís Guzman, Nan Goldin USA/West Germany/UK 1983 Language English 1hr 40mins Colour 

Weird but absorbing indie noir

What kind of film is this? When it begins with a conversation between Christine (Sandy McLeod) and Nan (Nan Goldin) in a locker room, it feels like this could be an early example of the young-woman-trying-to-do-something-arty-in-NYC-and-struggling microgenre, and that would be fine. Instead, a rather weirder plot is set in play when Christine surprises her friend by saying she would take the one job that Nan knows is available: working the ticket booth at the Variety, a cinema that shows dirty movies.

Christine initially seems pleased with the job, but it seems to have some unsettling effects on her. During conversations in public places with her earnest, somewhat uptight boyfriend Mark (Will Patton), she’ll break into long monologues describing erotic scenarios. 

Then she starts following the besuited middle-aged regular at the Variety who has invited her out. It’s clear he’s involved in dodgy stuff, which might be connected with the corrupt fisherman’s union Mark is doing an investigative report about. Less clear is what Christine is up to, and whether she grasps how much danger she might be in.

Contrasting with the thriller elements are scenes in the bar where Nan works, with groups of women just talking about their lives. 

So what we’ve got is part offbeat noir, part psychological drama and part slice of life. I’m not sure all of that fully gels, and there were occasionally bits where I thought I had missed something but the film works nonetheless. 

I think the thriller elements are surprisingly effective (some other reviews seem to disagree). Like the film as a whole, they gained from being shot in the real world. We get the assorted filth-industry locations of the type so carefully recreated in the David Simon series The Deuce, but these are actual working peep shows etc. We also get the crumbling boardwalk at Asbury Park, a huge fish market and even Yankee Stadium (I was wondering if they had permission to film there or somehow snuck a camera in - not easy to do with the equipment they had in those days.)

There’s an interesting mix of folks involved, some then experiencing their moment, some whose time would come later. Writer Kathy Acker – whose work was daring or notorious, depending on your perspective – gets a script credit. I don’t generally like a sax-driven score, but this one is excellent – it’s by John Lurie, who around the same time was starring in Jim Jarmusch’s breakthrough Stranger Than Paradise, which was shot by Tom DiCillo, who (yes) was one of the cinematographers on Variety.

There are a couple of character actors making early appearances here who are still busy in the 2020s. I’ve already mentioned Will Patton – the other one is Luís Guzmán, who plays Christine’s co-worker at the cinema. I’m here to report that Guzmán arrived in the movies fully formed – to say he’s easily recognisable in Variety is an understatement.

But I’m guessing it’s Goldin’s presence that meant I could see this in a cinema in 2023. Clips from Variety appear in All The Beauty And All The Bloodshed, the recent critically beloved documentary about Goldin’s life and work. She seems to be playing herself: the character is called Nan, she’s a photographer and she works in a bar, as Goldin did at the time. (I'm assuming the bar she worked at and the one in the movie are the same place, but don't know that for sure.)

Variety had a slightly strange origin – Bette Gordon was an underground New York-based  film-maker offered a chance to make a bigger film by a German TV channel (Britain’s recently established Channel 4 contributed too). Gordon came up with idea and asked Acker to write it – but three other people get a credit for the screenplay and I think I can guess which bits are left from Acker’s draft.

It’s very much a snapshot of a moment in early 1980s New York, but it’s also an involving and fascinating movie. I like it a lot.

[sun-undone]

You definitely reminded me of some key points in season 3 that I definitely didn’t consider.

The château being burned down by topper seal the deal of him becoming an enemy. It would be EXTREMELY hard to see topper having a redemption story after that with some corny BS line like “ hey John b no hard feelings with the château, right?”💀💀💀

But just a warning 👀 if you hear Sarah’s voice starting off a epsiode with a reflective monologue of confusion and indecisiveness, then You know what’s coming 😂 let’s see if the pates intentionally screw us over with her character growth.

I agree with Jarah B being the stable couple as the other couples are still fresh and have some more exploring to do with their dynamic. I would love to see a bond created between JJ and Mike maybe closer to the end of season 4 to show Mike he can be the guy for kie and mike should give him a chance just like he was given one before he got accepted into the kooks.. we’ll seeeeee

NOWWWW

MR COUNTRY CLUB HIMSELF

Mark my words if Rafe does not become a Pogue by the end of season 4 he will die sacrificing his life for them with his final words laying in Sarah’s arms saying

“ I finally did something right”

( if I am completely wrong just forget I ever existed 🤣🤣)

LETS BE HONEST Ward created a monster with rafe. But rafe mistakes EAT HIM UP ALIVE which is why he is heavy on drugs. I still remember him crying because Barry didn’t have any coke for him one day and he freaked out. Rafe is a lunatic but not a serial killer. Which is why he went back to save Ward after putting a hit man on him. Rafe wants real acceptance! His problem is he always tries to fix his mistakes last minute.

Rafe isn’t a kook because of the luxury lifestyle. He’s a kook because of power and validation. Unlike topper who is a silver spoon fed kid with no siblings. Just a spoiled single child.

If the JJ and rafe fight happens. I think it’s early in the season. I don’t think they’ll make it a big ordeal. I feel like the Pogue gang will have bigger fish to fry by the end of the season if they’re on a new treasure hunt.

OK, please rip my response to shreds with your thoughts, I’m all ears.

Look at what this stupid little boat show has done to us 🥲

oooooh okay this is such an interesting topic, Rafe is such an interesting character to begin with, so i think his storyline in s4 is the one i'm most curious about. especially since we got nothing from him in the s3 finale for whatever dumb reason.

this is a very complex conversation to have, but to start, i don't think i want a redemption for Rafe! and i think they kind of closed the door on him sacrificing himself for the pogues or Sarah in particular by having Ward do it in season 3. i truly don't know how far they're gonna go with him seeking revenge on the pogues for Ward's death, or what they plan on doing with his character after this season, but whatever it is, i just don't see him turning a new leaf by the end of it. the ending for Rafe i'd most like to see is him going to jail and losing all of his assets and possessions, including Tannyhill, so Pope can snatch it up and make it a museum that tells the true story of Denmark Tanny. but i'm getting ahead of myself, let's talk about the really juicy stuff

do Rafe's actions eat him up anymore? i definitely agree that in the first 2 seasons, he was an absolute wreck trying to hold himself together with coke and by desperately seeking Ward's validation to keep himself occupied. but what about in season 3? he has that scene with Kie in episode 2 where he tries to paint himself as the victim for killing Peterkin, and i think that his denial truly runs that deep at this point. through spinning the story in his own mind, he's convinced himself that he did the right thing so he doesn't have to feel all the complicated emotions that we saw him feeling at the end of season 1 and even into season 2 in the aftermath of the murder. but in terms of Sarah, he does actually get emotional when he explains that he knows it was wrong, which is incredibly interesting to me. he clearly hasn't done the same mental gymnastics in trying to defend himself for that, so i could definitely see him genuinely feeling remorseful, which opens up that same incredibly complex dynamic that he and Sarah have had for a while now. there's a part of him that will always resent her for being Ward's favorite for so long, but now we can see that there is real guilt about trying to kill her. i think that scene really captures the pure instability of Rafe's mental state that still exists in some capacity, mainly in terms of Sarah, which we unfortunately don't see a ton of moving forward in the season since he barely has any scenes with the pogues. in general, he actually seems pretty confident and secure, maybe the best we've ever seen him, in terms of his mental and emotional state. so is the guilt really bothering him that much? the coke doesn't seem to be a coping mechanism for him like it had been before, like he was constantly using for the majority of season 2. but we just didn't see him struggling with his past actions in season 3, it was much more about his present and especially his future.

but for season 4, i'm definitely expecting a return to the more unstable side of Rafe as he plots revenge. who will he target in particular? who does he think is most responsible? will he choose to leave the other pogues out of the crossfire? if he gets the chance to kill Sarah again, would he take it? if he really was remorseful at the beginning of season 3, has that been overtaken by rage by the beginning of season 4? the year and a half time jump makes this much trickier cause maybe he's been trying to keep his mind off of it and do his own thing and resist the urge to get revenge but when he hears about the pogues getting recognition for their findings, it sends him off the deep end again? or has he been stewing the entire time? has the time given his rage the chance to simmer down a bit or has it only boiled over into something worse? now that he has the blessing of his father, which is the only thing he's ever really wanted, what are his motivations? how will he shift his way of thinking now that there's no more Ward to aspire to or to spite, and how will his mental state fare now that he believes that the pogues have taken away any opportunity he might've had to mend his relationship with his father?

there's truly so many things to consider and countless different avenues that his path could take, and i really do not know what is most likely at this point!! Drew hasn't even gotten to set yet so there's absolutely no bts to speculate about either. personally, i love Rafe as a character and i don't wanna see him killed off, and like i said before, although he expresses remorse in 3x02, i'm not sure if it's gonna be enough moving forward. i've always been interested in his character and have never shied away from the fact that Ward absolutely aided in fucking him up for life, BUT i just don't know if Rafe himself thinks he needs redeeming. and i especially don't know if he'll be thinking in that way in the aftermath of Ward's death.

but really, who knows???? i'm voting squarely against a redemption or any kind of sacrifice, but god, i am so so so intrigued to see where the pates take him.

this was really fun to think about and i could probably ramble on for way way way longer, but this is long enough already!!! thanks for sparking up the discussion! ☺️

[whitepolaris]

Pontchartrain Beach

If you take Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans all the way north from Marigny up to the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, you end up at an unexplained site: an abandoned mid-nineteenth century lighthouse that seems too far inland to be doing anyone in a boat any good at all. Beyond it is a wide expanse of grass, and then a seawall with a forbiddingly high gate. If someone can give you a boost to take a peek over the seawall, you'll see another expanse of a grass, a few palm trees, and then finally, the lake itself. It's hard to believe it now, but not so long ago this emptiness contained the "Coney Island of Louisiana," Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park.

Pontchartrain Beach opened in 1928 at Zephyr Park, next to the Old Spanish Fort amusement area on the west side of Bayou St. John, but moved to the end of Elysian Fields Avenue in the early 1930s. Before that, the abandoned lighthouse had marked the entrance to a small harbor in a fishing community called Milneburg, which had been built out into the lake on stilts. Milneburg had the distinction of being the terminus of the nation's second-oldest railroad line and the home of the world's first real train station. Smoky Mary, the black-cloud-belching locomotive that first serviced it, was a weak that the departure schedules were determined by the wind direction and sails were often raised to help move it along. Even so, the trains along Elysian Fields until 1935.

By then, the Huey Long administration had ordered the Milneburg harbor filled in and the stilt houses removed-hence the wide expanse of grass. In the era of segregation, Pontchartrain Beach was for "Whites Only," while a few miles along the lake to the east, Lincoln Beach was built some years later for "Colored" residents of the city. When both amusement parks were integrated in the early 1960s, Lincoln Beach closed. Pontchartrain Beach closed in 1983, when the amusement-seeking public was drawn toward the newer, flashier attractions being built for the New Orleans World's Fair in 1984.

Four more than a half a century Pontchartrain Beach had been one of the most popular sources of entertainment in the state. Its signature ride, the Zephyr, was among the largest wooden coasters in the South, while other rides included the Zephyr Junior, Smoky Mary, the Bug, the Ragin' Cajun, the Calypso, a haunted house, Ghost Train, Laff in the Dark, and The Monster. Bumper Cars, Ferris wheels, concession stands-it's hard to look at the emptiness of the site now and visualize all it once was. "The Beach" held live concerts with national acts like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as special areas for dolphin, magic, and high-diving shows and a petting zoo.

If the site where all this took place seems too empty and depressing, you can see a few bits and pieces of the rides at, strangely enough, the Veterans Memorial Park in Kenner, next to Louis Armstrong Airport on William Boulevard between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets. Here are you can find the top of the wooden-trussed "lift hill" from the Zephyr (the first big climb that really gets a roller coaster rolling), a handful of tiki gods recused from the former Bali Hai restaurant (one of the famous eateries at the old amusement park), part of the petting zoo, and some of the abandoned signs-they've all been saved and re-erected as a homage to a time before video and air-conditioning made popular entertainment a solitary, indoor endeavor.

Pontchartrain Beach Memories

Pontchartrain Beach always had a slightly frightening air about it that made it exciting. The Rotor was a centrifuge ride in which people would stick to the walls when the floor dropped out. There were scary clown faces everywhere and creepy-looking "painted children" you had to stand next to, to see if you were tall enough to ride. And there were talking garbage cans with lion and clown faces that would suck trash into their dark round mouths with amazing vacuum force while demanding, "Feed me trash!"

But the most exciting and terrifying part of Pontchartrain Beach was the Zephyr, a wooden roller coaster that got noticeably ricketier with each passing year. An archway over the top of the tall hill had a blinking red light and a sign that said, "DANGER: 20,000 VOLTS. This left a big impression on us as we clanked up the hill to that first drop. Despite that and other warnings, legend had it that someone riding in a front car had once stood up and grabbed the arch, then tried to drop back down into the rear cars but fell to his doom. Past the peak, as gravity took hold of the cars, the ride was incredibly rough and noisy and dark. Totally out of control. The park eventually added tunnels that seemed about to decapitate you as you whipped into them. It was the best roller coaster ever.

One day in the late 1980s, after the park was torn down, I was riding through Kenner with a friend when I noticed something interesting a short distance from the road. We stopped to investigate and discovered a park filled with pieces from the demolished Pontchartrain Beach park. There was one of the hideous YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE children, a car from the Zephyr, and, most wondrously, the top of the tallest peak of the Zephyr! There it was on the ground within touching distance-the wooden trusses, the Zephyr, the arch with the red lights, and the DANGER sign-all things that still live in my mind in the dark and the sky. -Karen

[the-single-element]

Good morning.

Last week, we heard about a huge crowd of Jesus's fans – swollen even further by his apostles' recent stumping – who managed to track him down, delaying a much needed vacation for himself and his inner circle.

We've skipped over the impromptu sermon he gave to them, there in the wilderness. Now, it's time to see the fruits of all this: of the crowd's faith, and of the willingness of Jesus and his disciples to go above and beyond the call of duty in the name of loving care.

Yes, today we hear again about the miracle of the multiplication of loaves. This was a miracle so important to the early Church, that all of the surviving accounts include it as part of their Good News. This year, we'll follow the extended version of the story: the version from John's testimony, told in his characteristically detailed style.

And, as usual, John's details matter. They give us context we might not have had, if we'd simply attributed the whole miracle to Jesus.

Instead, what do we see?

Jesus asks his disciples, his inner circle, what's to be done. They've recently come back from their own ministry; he's encouraging them to learn from what they've seen.

Philip is pessimistic. But Andrew remembers his Torah lessons. He must've had in mind, I think, the miracle of Elisha which we hear about today, where that prophet multiplied a man's firstfruits sacrifice of barley loaves to feed the people of Gilgal during a drought.

So Andrew goes and finds a boy in the crowd who's willing to share his dinner: some barley rolls and a couple fish. He then brings the contribution to Jesus's attention, being sure to mention that they're barley loaves so as to put his finger on the reference, and asks Jesus, in return, what's to be done with the boy's sacrifice.

The rest is famous: Jesus distributes the food, everyone eats their fill, and somehow there's twelve wicker baskets of food left at the end. The leftovers add up to an order of magnitude more than what they originally had!

…there is something very deep going on here. One might almost say it's foundational to how the Kingdom of Heaven works.

Everyone involved: Jesus, his disciples, even the boy who provided the food, were not giving of their excess. Jesus was mourning, his disciples were weary from the road, and the boy was offering up everything he'd packed for his own dinner.

Everyone had started the day thinking that this wouldn't be required of them. That at least when it was over they could rest and eat their fill.

But everyone stepped up anyway. Everyone went that one step further. And the result was a miracle. The logic of this world – which says that everything is scarce and you can't get something from nothing – was completely routed, and instead we saw a world where everyone ate their fill. Where giving of yourself increases your own weal, instead of decreasing it.

It seem the Kingdom exists most strongly – provides its realest, most powerful refuge – at some kind of spiritual rock bottom. At some moment where we feel like we have nothing left, but then the call arises, and we find one last thing remaining to put to the task. Mark and Luke tell us of the widow's mite. The TaNaKh historians tell us of another widow, who Elijah met in Zarephath. And Jesus often told parables on the topic: the Pearl of Great Price, the field with treasure buried in it, the deep root systems that allow a plant to survive the heat of the sun.

And this is not just a metaphor or parable. The bread may have a deeper meaning – the benefit we gain from donating the widow's mite might be spiritual nourishment – but (as bread often is with Jesus) it's also 100% physically literal. Those people were fed. There is something at that nadir which can sustain us in reality, and more than that, can lead to a flourishing that would not otherwise have been possible. And it was partly that promise, I suspect, that sustained the early Church through the three centuries of despair between Jesus's departure and the legalization of Christianity in the Roman empire. Our predecessors survived by building their foundations on that bedrock, having learned, by examples like this, to trust that the jar of wheat won't go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry.

May we, too, have that opportunity. At our lowest points – when we feel most abandoned – may we find the strength to act in love regardless, together, and discover the abundance that showers down upon us when the Kingdom, even for a moment, closes the gap and touches us on Earth.

[colleenhkeefe]

Well, I haven't been here in awhile.

I logged back into this account after...six years? Maybe I hopped in once to change my username, but my last post is from 2017 so.

In the intervening years I got sober, came out as trans, changed jobs, switched my creative focus to writing, and entered my 50s. It's been mostly good.

I'm getting sick of Meta throttling Palestine posts, X being X, and thought maybe I'd re-explore Tumblr. We'll see if I can figure out what I want to use it for. For now I'll post random snippets of things I've been working on.

I'll start with a passage from a novel I've been picking up and putting down for the past few years, called Diving into the Ocean. This is actually a passage from a book one of the main characters discovers in the town library.

~~~

Sea Shanties and Ghost Tales: an Anthropological Treatise on Maine Maritime Myth By Charles Demuth, Esq.

Chapter 18: Selkies in Downeast

1888, Rock Harbor

In March of 1888, Lawrence Troy, a Sailor attached to the ship Bright Horizon, was ashore for a fortnight while the ship’s riggings were being mended down at Hawke’s Shipbuilders. Most times the Bright Horizon anchored in the bay, it was just long enough to unload catches and load fresh provisions, but a few times a year, work more in the nature of repairs was deemed necessary, and this was one such occasion.

Now on shorter shore leaves, young Larry would do what most sailors did, which was to wreck himself in one of the many dockside bars that catered to his sort, but during the longer periods ashore, he had a woman north of the village by the name of Mary Bight, whom he would visit.

Mary herself was the wife of a captain named John Bight, whose ship went much further than the local fisher boats or clippers used for messenger service to ports south, like Boston and New Bedford. So Mary was often alone, and young Lawrence could quite easily take the woods way uphill to High Street, where her house sat by the pond, the Widow’s Peak overlooking the village and the bay. Larry would slip in through the servant’s entrance, up the back stair to the Master Bedroom, where Mary waited. We need not detail the particulars; but needless to say that this arrangement suited both Larry and Mary very much, and it went on for some years, even as Mary and Captain Bight brought five children into the world.

Four of the children were ordinary young souls, two girls and two boys - Sarah, Ruth, Paul and Mark, all with reddish-brown hair that recalled the Captain’s once bright red hair, now gone grey.

The fifth and youngest child was a girl named Grace. She had a big head of curly blonde hair, green eyes and a round face that, in a small village like Rock Harbor, made clear for anyone to see her true parentage lay not with the Captain but with the young sailor.

This tale would perhaps be in the mold of so many others, a story of infidelity and its aftermath, if it were not for the sudden disappearance of young Larry and Grace one fine spring day in early March.

For the Troys were an old family in Downeast, long working in the fishing trade, rarely if ever straying from Rock Harbor. An old family but not a reputable one. For as long as anyone could remember, the Troys had a propensity for sudden disappearances and equally sudden and mysterious returns, years later, in the worst of weather, showing up naked ashore without a boat in sight.

The Troys mostly stuck to themselves, and when asked about the oddness of their comings and goings, would keep their silence. About as talkative as stones, some of them.

Young Larry had been the first of the Troys in living memory to woo anyone in town. The Troy spouses typically came and went without so much as an explanation for where they came from and where they were going.

Now March 1888, Grace was then fourteen years old. Larry still came to see Mary oftentimes, but after Grace was born, he began to come in through the front, as the Captain and his wife’s invited guest. There was much speculation in Rock Harbor Village about this arrangement. The Captain was too important and wealthy a figure in town to challenge, but it was clear that the manner of living he had chosen, in accommodating adulterers in his home, was not the correct way of things.

Things can go two ways in a village like Rock Harbor. Either a scandal results in the besmirchment of all concerned, or for reasons only known to themselves, the townsfolk decide, without even really any debate, that the particulars of the unusual situation are just going to be accommodated without further comment, and then the arrangment simply becomes a part of the local landscape - not discussed, and all conversation around the subject swiftly redirected.

The good, honest folk of Rock Harbor had decided in favor of the second option, being the simplest and most expedient. Gossip is quite a natural thing in a small village, but in coastal communities it competes with the naturally taciturn nature of fisher folk, so in truth the thing could have gone either way. Whatever the reasons, Rock Harbor had, since Grace’s birth, pretended not to notice the bright flaxen hair or green eyes that marked her so obviously of Troy blood.

What your faithful narrator tells you now comes from several reliable sources who were present on the morning of March 14th of that year.

That morning was sunny and clear, having been the day after a blizzard hit all of New England, which was later called “The Great White Hurricane”. The winds and surf during the storm had been strong enough to knock over boat houses at the piers, and several boats took damage.

So when Larry Troy and Grace Bight were seen coming down out of the woods to step onto the north road out of the village, Larry still in his fisherman’s gear, and Grace in the tan work apron she used when gardening, there were not a few folk out in the village, repairing shutters and windows, or drawing boats up onto the sand to fix masts, and there were a few work crews puzzling over how to pull the boat houses back together with the parts remaining to them.

All of this is to say that there was an audience.

One reliable witness has told this narrator that the pair looked as if in a spell. They walked with purpose, without speaking, holding hands, bright green eyes only on the road north. Both were barefoot. And Larry was missing his cap.

One could spin a romantic yarn around their departure as the father finally come to claim his daughter. Indeed, some have, and in some tellings of this tale that’s how the story ends. You may have heard the most common telling: that the two stepped into Larry’s little punt and rowed off into the fog, and were seen years later settled in Nova Scotia, out of Bridgewater.

There is also a version that goes something like this: Captain Bight rode on horseback to cut them off north of the village, and killed the both of them. It’s a popular enough tale; being one that taps into folks’ not incorrect belief that with power comes abuse of the common people.

The truth, as told to this narrator, is stranger.

For the odd couple’s behavior was so disturbing that most of the townsfolk present followed them north. In the wintry aftermath of the storm, Larry and Grace walked at an even, slow pace, their bare feet crunching in the wet snow, but they seemed not to notice the cold.

There were quiet, unsettled murmurs as the village folk followed, bundled up in their coats and scarves and mittens, but mostly those present were as quiet as those they trailed behind.

A mile north of the village, Larry and Grace turned into the little cove that sits in front of what is today the Harris house, but back then belonged to the Wyatts. The sky was bright against the rolling sea as they walked down to the shoreline, their bare feet pushing through the snow into the black sand. Grey seals swam about in the cove, as they often did, it being a natural shelter, but when Larry and Grace put their feet into the surf, the seals all seemed to swim closer. The ones on rocky ledges dove in to follow the others.

The father and daughter walked straight into the water. Up to their knees. Up to their waists. Up to their chests. Up to their necks.

They walked straight in until their heads were completely submerged, and then they were gone, with only the circling seals remaining, and the gulls diving and darting above.

Why, you might ask, why didn’t anyone rescue them?

It is, dear reader, a perfectly sensible question, if this were the only time in the history of Rock Harbor that folks have been Called to the sea.

But it isn’t.

And it isn’t the end of the story, either.

On November 14, 1898, after the Portland Gale, a farmhand by the name of Glenn Fontine came south to Rock Harbor on horseback, on his weekly trip to purchase sundries from the general store. On the way he found a woman, wrapped in seaweed and bracken, laying naked on the very same black sand beach where Larry and Grace had disappeared some ten years before.

Glenn found one of the Wyatt boys, and together they carried the woman up into the Wyatt house and laid her out on the guest bed. She was alive, to be certain, but not aware of the world around her. Her skin was pickled all over, with a mottled grey color that over the course of the day began to fade, as if her blood were warming and the skin tinged ever pinker.

The natural and first conclusion, if you hadn’t heard the beginning of this tale, might be that the poor woman was a shipwreck survivor. Those do happen from time to time, though less often than you hear in stories. Once in a long decade you might have survivors from a wreck swim to shore alone; most commonly, though, survivors come in on dinghies and life boats.

You have to take into account that this was after a November double storm, a blizzard and hurricane. The water was frigid. No one survives the sea in those conditions.

Except the woman who washed ashore that cold November day.

It wasn’t until Mrs. Wyatt arrived - she came hurrying home from the village at the news - that a name was put to the young woman. For ten years before, Mrs. Wyatt had seen this woman - who now laid on a bed in her own home - walk into the sea.

The woman was Grace Bight, no doubt, but no longer a girl now. Her hair was long, tangled about her, as if it had never been combed, and there was seaweed wrapped about her head almost like a scarf. The woman’s face was unmistakeable.

Mrs. Wyatt cleaned Grace up as best as she could, dressed her in one of her own nightshirts, and laid her under blankets. She put her oldest daughter on watch to check in on the woman often, and then she borrowed a horse from a neighbor and rode to Machias for a doctor.

Grace slept for three solid days, seemingly needing no food or water or care, though steadily she seemed to come back to health.

On the fourth day, she opened her eyes.

[episodicnostalgia]

Star Trek: The Next Generation, 101 (Sep. 26, 1987) - "Encounter at Farpoint"

And so begins my first official beginning-to-end viewing of TNG.  My introduction to Start Trek was through the movies, and then Voyager, along with reruns of whichever other Trek show  happened to be airing whenever I turned on the TV.  During that time I would semi-regularly watch episodes of TNG, but I seldom sought it out.  The show never drew me in quite the same way as the others, because it always felt a little cheesier, and I was fond of the more “modern” (lol) serialized format commonly found in DS9 and other shows of the late 90’s and early 00’s.  Over the years I’ve meant to go back and properly watch the whole series, and this blog serves as a nice catalyst to justify doing exactly that. With that in mind, let’s get on with it!

Written by: D.C. Fontana & Gene Roddenberry Directed by: Corey Allen

The Breakdown

Captain Picard is on his first mission to check out a nifty new trade station named Farpoint, when he’s confronted an all-powerful being who calls himself Q (of the Q-continuum), and insists that humanity is to be judged for reasons that seem pretty arbitrary and petty, but the show needs stakes so we’re going with it.  Basically Picard has to prove that humans aren’t the brutal savages they once were several hundred years ago, and Q has decided that the Enterprise’s mission to Farpoint should serve as an adequate test.

It turns out the locals at Farpoint are pretty low tech, but this giant space-faring creature (which is capable of manifesting basically any object, and also, somewhat conveniently, making itself look like a station) crash landed on their planet a while back, and has been made to serve as their personal slave-genie.  Everyone figures out what’s going because a) a massive flying saucer arrives and starts blowing shit up, and b) Q pops in to drop a bunch of obvious-to-deduce clues. 

Eventually Picard figures out how to free the captive creature by bathing it with energy from the ship, which allows it transform into a giant-space-jelly-fish (of course).  Now free to leave, the Jelly fish joins their flying saucer friend, who, naturally, also transforms into a giant space-jelly-fish-mate.  The two fly off holding each other’s tendrils, and the crew of the Enterprise are left to ponder how beautiful-and-totally-not-ridiculous this moment is.  Oh and Q agrees to leave the humans alone for now, because they passed the test by not violently slaughtering the anyone, but promises to come back one day with even trickier tests.

The Verdict

On the one hand this ages only slightly better than milk, on the other hand the writing is tonally pretty consistent with the original series, and by that standard ‘encounter at farpoint’ is not unsuccessful. I’ll give high marks for the model work shots of the enterprise, which holds up pretty well when you consider this was released in 1987. But as I’ve indicated, the writing is melodramatic and cheesy, which can be entertaining, but it just goes a little too far here for my tastes. I’m a fan of John de Lancie’s Q, but my familiarity with the character (and the series) lies in the later episodes, and I find that he’s one-dimensional and obvious with his first appearance. I feel similarly about most of the characters, but I’ll cut the cast some slack since the script lays on so much camp that I think virtually any actor would be hard pressed to deliver a 3-dimensional performance; indeed even Patrick Stewart seems unsure of himself.

2 stars (out of 5)

Additional Observations

Comparing it to the DS9 Pilot I see a lot of similar devices being used. The Captain/Commander must convince beings of great power (who aren’t bound by a traditionally linear existence) the merits of their existence, ending with the promise of further encounters. Not a criticism, just something I hadn’t noticed before.

Lots of jerky camera movement (pans, tilts, and zooms alike).

Cameo: The Dr. McCoy cameo is nice, if somewhat obligatory.

HOLY CRAP Picard is an asshole. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes from the early seasons, so it’ll be interesting to see when it was that he became less surly. I wonder if it’s a transition that will be marked by distinct character beats, or if it just kind of happens. - Wesley IS annoying though. I know bullying is wrong, but I laughed when Picard yelled at him to leave the bridge. I’m so sorry Wil Wheaton.

[ferno-does-random-shit]

oh hi

- Names: Ferno/Sky online, i don't wanna give my irl name

- Prns: they/he

- Star sign: capricorn

- Siblings: none

- Pets: 2 cats, 5(?) fish, and a snail

- Fandoms: I'm not much of a fandom person, but the closest are hollow knight, undertale/deltarune, zelda (specifically botw/totk), occasionally sonic, and sometimes star wars. and i used to be obsessed with mega man.

- Fav color: indigo

- Fav song: uhh. I'll divide this into genres.

Classical: Lachrimae Pavan by John Dowland

Jazz Combo: Dat Dere by Bobby Timmons, specifically the Art Blakey recording. either that or Equinox by John Coltrane

Big Band: Road Song by Wes Montgomery

Rock & Roll: uhhhh. Drive my Car by the Beatles. i guess

Classic Rock: Roll With the Changes by REO Speedwagon

Prog Rock: Dance on a Volcano by Genesis

Jazz Fusion: Scorpion by Derek Sherinian

Videogame: Ultimate Final Boss from Spark the Electric Jester

Fav Lyrics: Masters of War by Bob Dylan. really, any of Dylan's early stuff. it goes so hard.

The only pop or hip hop song I've ever genuinely liked is Industry Baby. props to lil nas for showing me how hard hip hop goes

Anyway.

- Fav Author: I don't read nearly as much as I used to, but I've always been a fan of, in fiction: Erin Hunter, and nonfiction: Mark Rosenfelder

- Hobbies: Music composition is the biggest, but I also conlang obsessively as well as playing drums, piano, and ukulele. i am also kinda not terrible at traditional art.

- Fav fanfic type: anything fluffy and sweet, really. I don't read much fanfic, but when I do, I go out of my way to avoid anything even vaguely resembling angst.

- Fav holiday: Halloween, by far.

- Partners: none, romantic or otherwise.

- Fun facts:

I'm a former band kid.

I have no idea what gender i am. nothing. As for orientation, I'm pretty sure I'm acespec, but I got nothing else. I've been questioning both since at least 2020 and it's getting really tiring tbh

I'm a furry but I'm entirely uninterested in getting a suit

I've kinda made it my job to be my friends' shoulder to cry on.

I have a friend that I know would be a lot worse off if I had never met him, and knowing that helps keep me going tbh

I dated a guy exactly once. The only date we went on was a chrismas lights show. We never really broke up, we just fizzled out went back to being friends. Apparently this is Not how things usually go.

My parents named me after a US president.

My mom is famous on here.

I talked my way into playing in a bar on bourbon st within hours of landing in new orleans for the first time. i don't how the fuck it happened, but i did.

i have anxiety that i very recently realized is not seasonal. fun

that's all i can think of rn

no tags, im bad at remembering or sth

I got bored so here's a little get-to-know-you tag game I think could be fun :3

Name(s)

Pronouns

Star sign

# of siblings & fun facts about them (if you have any)

# of pets & their names

Fandoms

Favorite color

Favorite song

Favorite author (of anything readable-- books, fanfics, zines, webtoons, whatever!)

Hobbies

Favorite fic type

Favorite holiday

Do you have any partner(s)? (romantic, qpp, anything!)

Fun facts about you / anything extra you wanna share!

────────

Name(s): Loki (highly preferred), Elye

Pronouns : they/them mostly, he/she okay too

Star sign: Pisces

# of siblings: I've got 2! An older sister and a younger sibling. The fun fact about them is that they're also both queer; in fact, my mom is too. The only non-queer person in my immediate family is my dad.

# of pets: 4 cats! Phoebe & Frankie are our girls, Lenny and Murray are our boys :3

Fandoms: MCU (kind of), BSD, OFMD, Ranboo (does his fanbase count as a fandom?)

Fav. color: Don't have one

Fav. song: Aurora Borealis by Lemon Demon

Fav. author: Alice Oseman

Hobbies: singing, acting, drawing, writing, procrastinating

Fav. fic type: Fluff, definitely. I am a sucker for well written coffee-shop and flower-shop aus, too. Smut's fine, but only if it's romantic. I can't do angst if there's no comfort.

Fav. Holiday: Hanukkah or Halloween! I love autumn and winter

Partners?: Yes! I have a girlfriend (queerplatonic) who I love very much, and a boyfriend (romantic) who I love very much :]

Fun facts:

- Even though I'm a cat person, I really, really want a dog.

- I actually used to play sports. Because I don't do gendered leagues anymore, I don't play, but I've been looking for mixed/gender-neutral/queer sports teams. Baseball and basketball specifically!

- I started questioning my identity in 2019; I'm no closer to finding a label now than I was then. The difference is, now I don't want a label. I just am. :]

tags: @neonganymede @cha0ticlesbian @x-chiara @exceleo @brinnybee @autistic-katara @gandalfthemorallygrey @ohboyanotherlokiblog @roachandrenfri @ourflagmeanslokius @exceleo @edettethegreat @swiftlyspidey

[daincrediblegg]

OKAY BUT

A FAUX BUZZFEED UNSOLVED ON CROCKETT SOUNDS FREAKING AWESOME????

DOESN'T IT JUST????? I mean god FUCK I can see it so clearly:

Like... "The Curious Case of Crockett Island" would be such a gas. Start off with a lil exposition on the Island about how it's a small community of a little over 100 people, and that the population was so small because of an oil spill that basically killed the fishing industry there a few years earlier. Over the course of a month however all but 2 of 127 residents were found dead on the island. There's probably precious little information about it in the aftermath but what is available is this (listed chronologically for the rough timeline of things):

Bill (aka Bowl)'s mom knows he went missing on the island and I don't think she was herself an islander- and that Hassan filed missing persons reports for both him and Joe Collie (not for Riley though he was just starting it before the blackout) before the big mass- so there's missing persons involved

Probably a flyer about Leesa's miracle got off island, but it's likely that whoever has it kept it under wraps- or they're building a conspiracy theory around it that Ryan would believe but that Shane wouldn't (this includes multiple "sightings" of an odd creature with leathery skin and wings and glowing yellow eyes- mothman-esque cryptid shit)

The whole island was burned to the ground on easter sunday- the fire started in the early morning and burned through part of the day until rescue crews arrived (likely that people would rush over from the mainland in the morning bc a lot of smoke like that is probably hard to miss), and fire department would probably be able to tell that it was started by molotovs in several of the houses. The only body that would've been found completely undamaged is Sheriff Hassan's (being that he was on the beach at time of death), although it's likely that they would've found Erin and Sarah's remains relatively intact too

Leesa and Warren would've been catalogued as the sole survivors of the incident but would probably not tell the cops anything about the vampire shit when they pick them up- so their story will probably seem believable (i.e. the island caught fire so we just booked it on the canoe) but won't be able to explain shit like: scorch marks on the sand from where Bev burned up isolated from the rest of the fires- and the fact that the ashes there are likely going to be tested and find evidence of human remains and scraps of clothing. Also in the church they'd probably find all those bottles of poison emptied and that will be a heavy point of contention.

The ONLY islander who remains unaccounted for is Riley Flynn (being that he was in Erin's little row boat when he died- which was on a beach so it's likely that would've caught and his ashes were swept out to sea)

6) possible the cops found out about Bev's money laundering scheme posthumously.

So with that fun reverse engineering in mind, the isolated theories they have left are these:

Cult shit that resulted in the whole island setting themselves on fire. (the strongest theory)- to which Shane once again breaks out the "too much church!" joke. They pin it on Bev Keane because she had motive to get rid of everyone if they found out about her money laundry- "but like hOW DO YOU CONVINCE A WHOLE TOWN????" "Too much church!"

Riley the convicted criminal set the island on fire. (Nobody is buying it but it's a theory that's out there because of Cop bias- Ryan and Shane wouldn't buy that as a motive bc he was catalogued as having gone to his AA meetings and following the terms of his parole to the letter).

Ryan would of course JUMP on the idea of some supernatural cryptid being at fault for all of this somehow- but it wouldn't necessarily explain everybody being set on fire- and there's not enough evidence to corelate the two (unfortunately for him bc he's right).

Goofs and Jokes include:

DNA evidence proved at last that Sarah Gunning was John Pruitt's illigitimate child- since her DNA along with Mildred AND John's would be found in the same spot- and Shane goes absolutely ape shit about it. He is very invested in the idea of a hot priest saga.

Shitting on Bev Keane for laundering church money. "Such Karen behavior" "She's very Sus". At this point Shane is astounded by how many fucking angles this thing has. Holy Moly.

Shane probably meets the winged cryptid theory with something like "it's an albatross move on"- "Now hold on." "Have you seen how big those things can get? They're huge!" "Person sized?" "Yes!"

Being very upset finding out Sheriff Hassan died bc they've been following his whole shit from the beginning. Immediately blame Bev.

Suspect that she was also taking advantage of the old priest assuming the cult theory is true (and they're right!) and they feel bad for him. Shane immitates ol' peepaw pruitt being clueless about cult shit happening at Bev's behest.

[samscompliment]

let’s discuss deans bi agenda actually bc ive decided he was in love the whole time. i’m sorry mr winchester for previously thinking you were stupid enough not to know but anyway heres my timeline

so initially i think that dean’s suspicious of himself early on, but it’s the eighties and he’s only ever around sam and john and theres all the OTHER fucked up stuff john put on him to deal with so he IS going to be avoiding that thought forever probably. except then he meets lee and falls for him and thinks oh. of course i would be. lots of self hating irony and so on

by s1-3 dean is out to himself and doing a couple of clandestine hookups so he probably worked through some stuff during stanford era. a lil rebellious streak like im not what my dad wants me to be but he ditched me so i am going to be WORSE and do it on PURPOSE. ash and victor and cassie and lisa etc

s4-7 he meets cas but cas is an ANGEL and there are definitely feelings of intimidation mixed in there with Whatever The Fuck Else he’s feeling so he simply decides not to think too hard about it. also its the apocalypse and hes stressed and then cas is dead so it doesn’t matter

s8 is the first turning point bc purgatory is removed from society so there’s no right or wrong. i think benny is the first relationship dean has with a man where he isn’t also hating himself for it, and so then when aaron hits on him dean thinks— well, maybe. maybe i could come out. and he doesnt but even then i think dean still sees cas as this, like, separate category in his head. bc deans feelings for him are so MESSY!! they’re wrapped up in love and betrayal and need and awe and fright. i don’t think he has an oh moment so much as i think he comes to a quiet understanding that he loves him and needs him (hello 8x17)

obviously the mark happens in s9 and that’s just a HUGE can of worms and so dean stops analysing his feelings for cas bc he has bigger fish to fry. is just sort of purposefully like well i’m not looking at that maybe if i dont think about it it will go away. it just sort of quietens down to this background noise that isn’t as obvious as lust and just simmers away beneath the surface

s11 my beloved im a “dean has the oh moment in 11x11” as per this post bc it’s literally... i see it i perceive it it’s an inherent truth to my supernatural. this is deans “oh fuck cas is the love of my life im in love with him im STILL in love with him and im not gonna love anyone else. cas is it for me. fuck” moment plus also the realisation that he actually wants it and he wants cas to love him back

of course cas is possessed by lucifer at this point so that’s a snag. i also like this reading bc then i watch them say goodbye when they think deans going to die facing amara with the soul bomb and i get soooo sad. terrible to think that he just figured this out and he wanted to act on it but now he can’t bc he’s going to die. there’s no point telling cas so he just hugs him instead and lets his face fall where cas cant see. delicious

once mary comes back there’s like a billion and one things going on hence why nothing ever gets done about it and then cas dies and jack kills mary and it is a literal fucking nightmare for a guy who just wants to tell his buddy he loves him

i have also recently decided that i like them both knowing they’re hovering on the edge of something in s14/15 but making a mutual decision not to act on it for various reasons. except then of course dean decides to tell him in purgatory bc WHY NOT and cas doesn’t let him say it but he DOES acknowledge it and they have this very soft unspoken understanding between them in the following eps. dare i say hopeful even. which is unfortunate given how this ends but i just think. god. like at the end of the day it just comes down to the fact that there’s love in deans eyes but it was there the whole time. he loved him from the start. and then they killed him closeted at forty

[ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm]

water, water

after a major outage in his neighborhood, harry potter sits in front of an old painting and thinks about water.

i hate being cold or wet. i will go to any lengths to avoid it, including, on occasion, drinking water. i wanted to write about harry's relationship with drinking water and the various tributaries of things that may have resulted in it being skewed or painful. the painting in this fic exists - it's called flowing to the river by john everertt millais. how did that guy get up there?

also on a03

Harry didn't drink water often. If he did, it had to be from his little filtered pitcher, or bottled, when dining out - but never, ever straight from the tap, never conjured. No one really noticed, not in the many (oh dear) years since it started. The act of drinking water, in social settings, usually required offering or asking, and neither happened often enough to cause concern for any one of his friends. It wasn't like he was actively doing any damage - he drank plenty of tea, and little cups of sweet juice Arthur pressed in winter, and Luna's strange infusions that cycled with the moon. His kidneys were fine, please and thank you, not that he'd checked recently, but that's just the sort of thing you can see for yourself thrice daily. Long story short, it was just a little thing, it didn't impact him or the world around him, and there wasn't anything to further discuss.

Then life swerved as it does and dozens of Thames Water pipes froze and burst the night before boxing day, right by Grimmauld place. And Harry was fine, if a little miffed, to stand naked on the cold tile of the shower with no water coming out, and was a bit irked to see that the watering cans held barely enough to sate the babbling ferns in the hall, so he used the last of his BRITA on the orchids and that was that. He went about his day, catching up on unopened cards and contemplating Netflix choices. But by the time the dreaded early winter night descended, the television stayed off, the cards lay strewn about the study, and the evening found Harry sat on the floor by the fourth floor landing, staring at a painting of a stream.

Back when he was in the cupboard, water was sparse and hard to come by. He could steal sips right from the tap when he did the dishes, ducking his head under the stream while pretending to clean out the sink strainer. He had a cracked china cup that sat under his cot, but it was often too dirty to drink out of - it was where he spat his toothpaste out, since only Sundays were shower nights, in the bathroom with the sink. In school he would slip off to the toilets during class and gulp as much as he could, standing over the sink to catch his breath in intervals, bleach wafting sharp and cloying from the tiled walls. He could never taste it properly, as though it passed his throat but not his tongue. He wished for the taste, knew it had to be there, but he was too greedy, too breathless with it. Like wanting heaven and standing at the gate. They once made them read a book about an old man lost at sea, left to eat raw fish in the storm. He described fresh dolphin flesh as sweet, and the word made the whole class gag. But Harry thought he understood, despite the distance, the faith that something would be sweet, despite what was between your teeth right now. But anyway, he got by, and if grey marks skid across his skin when he ran his nails over it in the dim light of his candle, well - no one could see it but him.

There were very few landscapes amongst the paintings at Grimmauld. They were all mostly portraits, a few still life pieces of cindery fruits and overfull pitchers. He'd never noticed, before he moved in, never got to ask Sirius about it, but it occurred to him that it was likely an act of protection, against the hope of other places beyond the townhouse walls. But there was the lemon tree in the kitchen, the painting of a castle on a hill, and this. The river.

It was dim in the way of summer mornings, a soft yellow light emerging from behind a house in the woods. The water seemed to flow steadily in three prongs through the brush. In the middle - an ait, bright with overgrown grass and a sprawling shrub and right in the middle of it all, a man dressed all in white. It wasn't enchanted, but it seemed to move nevertheless - the logs and the reeds by the edge always seeming, for all their painted stillness, as though they were just about to slip through the frame. And Harry was just sitting and watching it.

His head felt a little fuzzy, if he really thought about it. He steeled his sit-bones, let his hands sink to his sides and into the plush carpet. Tried not to think about mites.

Of all the things that bothered Harry in the weeks after Fawkes pulled them out of the chamber, it was that the basilisk had been inside the pipes. He remembered expiring on the floor next to Ginny, trying to keep his eyes kind, his voice steady. He remembered the big, stone face of Salazar Slytherin gaping at him from the rock above, the water and blood that soaked his trousers. And still somehow, the last stupid thought that flickered through his mind as he thumbed at his wound was: it'd been in the pipes. It'd slithered through their water. Its skin had only just shed. The wave of nausea that rolled through him was quickly quelled by Fawkes' tears, which healed not only the wound but, as Harry later discovered, several little issues that Harry never gave much thought. Cuts from chocolate wrappers, a slightly curving spine. But the thought remained, somehow more insistent and compelling than the dangers he'd faced at school thus far: the snake had been in the water. The water wasn't safe. Hogwarts wasn't safe. Having to speak to the dry, embossed tap to gain entry seemed like a perversion. Somehow this drove the point home more than trolls in dungeons, vengeful spectres, the things in the Forest. So he ordered a stick of charcoal off an ad in the prophet, and drank only from the bottle by his bed. And then all was well.

The air in Grimmauld place was dry and warm. Harry's spit felt viscous on his tongue, the roof of his mouth distant and dry. In the painting, the man in white was looking at something in his hands, not at the river. Why not at the river? Why not at the house?

Somehow all of Harry's growth spurts hit him during late summers at the Burrow, when the heat and sun pushed against your hair, your eardrums. Sometimes he would faint from standing - "all the blood's just learning new places to go, dear," Molly would tut, spelling little gusts of wind at the back of his neck that led him back from unconsciousness until its vignette receded from his sight. Sometimes he would retch yellow bile onto the doorstep, never quite making it to the loo on time. It soured his mouth, it dried him out - but. But. Arthur cleaned the Burrow's fixtures with vinegar alone, some fanatic muggle hangup, and Harry just - couldn't. He couldn't drink the water that came out of mesh he knew had been unscrewed and dipped in little pungent cups, left overnight on various shelves and tables. Could pour it, in braver moments, sometimes even let it pass his lips - but could never swallow. The smell lingered in his nostrils long after he'd gone to bed, in Ron's orange room, breath stilted under covers, trying to to burn it out, oversaturate his senses. On his last mission abroad with the Aurors, they shipped them off to Norway, to a ski lodge in the Lyngen Alps. He remembered standing on the terrace at midday, watching a crowd of young people dressed in all white by the lake. A slim, short man was holding up a blonde teenage girl just over the surface of the water, reciting something to the rapt attention of the gathered teens. With one last word, he dunked her in the water. When she emerged, her head cradled, coughing and crying, everybody cheered. He hadn’t felt any different when Ron pulled him out of the lake, came back for him, broke them through the ice. He never felt more like himself. Saved and given life - did salvation count if it the life given was the same one from before? He wondered if the baptised ever opened their mouth under the water. There was too much of it, down there, too much of it to taste.

He started at what must have been firecrackers, then the sound of laughter from out back where the bins and gardens were. His breath was slow and loud. The inside of his nostrils seemed blocked, somehow, tightened, like a mouth set to whistle.

In 6th year, finally, they learned Aguamenti, and Harry's heart soared with relief. It was like learning to read a new language in a foreign land, giving way to things and places previously inaccessible. Harry thrived in class that week, all thoughts of pensive drops and blonde hair pushed aside as he cast jet after jet of cool, perfect water, aimed at cups, and flowerbeds, and straight into his mouth, with the curtains on his bed drawn tight. It was like heaven, like he always wanted. It tasted different depending on his moods, on the room he was in, but it was never less than perfect. He remembered riding the trains that summer, the ragged woman who mumbled to herself over her bags, whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. Surely, he thought, this is the closest someone could ever feel to being God.

He didn't feel, in contrast, godly when he cut Draco open all those months later. Violence was dry and blunt and human, no matter the weather, no matter the place.

Harry's eyes were heavy in his head. He hadn't blinked in a while, but he didn't want to close them. He felt like the white-clad man in the painting would go off if he did. His fingers felt swollen, their cuticles tight, and he leaned harder on them to snuff out the feeling.

"Water, water."

That was the last thing Dumbledore really said to him, the last thing no one heard, just for him, away from sentient castle walls and trojan horses, too low for the ears of the living dead. And the fucking shell wouldn't fill, wouldn't hold a drop. And the lake was filled with corpses. Dumbledore died thirsty and no one knew but him. The thing that made him feel holy didn't mark him in its glory and abundance, but in its refusal to perform. When he went round Ron and Hermione's, he always praised their snack cupboard, raided it with the kids. "Why don't you just keep some at home,"Ron would grouse, but they didn't understand. it wasn't that he didn't deserve it, it was that once you had something you liked, it only stayed until it didn't. Sweetness never grew, only dulled, with time. In all things, except - well. No matter. Now he was alone.

He was alone with the man in the painting. He would have cried if there was anything to make tears from, but he just let his eyelids shut over his burning tightline, and swallowed congealed spit. When he closed his eyes, the man in the painting was gone too. It was just Harry and his little desert floor. He was alone -

- and then he wasn't.

A body, pressing against his. The unmistakeable, impossibly silky spill of hair.

Draco, soft and warm from the floo. He'd once been cold, surely, when Harry left him to bleed into the grout. But here, now, long and insistent fingers ran along his neck, the backs of his ears. A flat chest pressed against his shoulders and pulled him backwards gently. Tipped Harry's clouded head onto a bony clavicle, let him inhale citrus and vanilla in small huffing breaths. The indelible sweetness, the thing that never choked.

"Harry," whispered that dear, deep, precise voice. "Darling."

Draco leaned away slightly, right arm cradling Harry to him, gentle in the sway of low blood pressure. Harry let his gaze track silvery eyes with some other thirst. Draco's left arm moved to the floor, then up, and then cool, ridged plastic pressed against Harry's lips. The mouth of a bottle. Grey irises danced hemmed in by the happy little lines on the corner of Draco's eyes, as though the colour could splash and pour right trough them. Harry's let his lips part slightly against the plastic by his mouth. The water in the painting was still there, when he looked, still following its path.

"Drink."

----

[gothamcitycentral]

I know nobody asked but I want to talk about my ideas for Scarecrow-centric episodes in my Reboot series au or whatever cause it’s Scarecrow week.

His first appearance, S1E11, starts with a young Johnathan Crane fishing around a drawer, notably scratched up. His grandmother comes from behind and pulls him back, shamming him for slacking off from work and pushes him outside to attend to their crops alone. He just asks for bandages but his grandmother only says that prayer will heal his wounds fast enough.

Then Bruce finds reports of Gotham citizens being found on the streets, having hallucinations, muttering, whispering, or screaming about almost anything as if they were terrified. People mentioned spiders, drowning, an odd amount of clowns, amping other things.

Soon, the entire City is gassed with green hued fog, though there’s one man immune, a new villain calling himself the Scarecrow. Bruce dons a gas mask and the hunt is on to find a cure.

The episode is repeatedly interrupted by flashbacks of Scarecrow. Being bullied as a child, being called a scarecrow. Putting an early version of his Scarecrow costume. Getting fired from his professor job. Putting on his gas mask and experimenting on the first victims found.

A mind game filled, fight scene later, where Scarecrow reveals to Batman that his grandmother had trained Crows to attack him, and that he had to overcome his nightmares to become the master of fear, Bruce captures Crane and sends him to Arkham.

He first reappears in S2E8, directly after Poison Ivy’s second episode. The episode starts with Bridget Pike (Firefly) annoying Johnathan from across the hall in Arkham, sort of teasing and messing with him. Then the mass breakout happens and they both manage to retrieve their equipment and escape.

However, Johnathan doesn’t have any of his fear toxin, leaving him with only his scythe (and he isn’t exactly known for his physical strength). He has to suck up his pride and ask Bridget to help him back to his lab. She laughs, but agrees to help.

Basically Firefly sends the entire time cracking lame jokes and bothering John. He keeps on saying he’s annoyed by her, yet he still sticks with her.

Then Batman shows up, and by the end, Bruce is about to apprehend Scarecrow, only for Bridget to fire on him from the back, giving her and John the chance to the get away.

Scarecrow asks why she didn’t just leave him and not risk herself. Firefly chuckles and says because they’re friends and holds out her hand for a fist-bump.

John shakes it.

It ends with Bridget dropping off Scarecrow at his lair and telling him she’ll see him around. John is welcomed home by his crows.

S2E13 starts with Bane being held in Arkham. He overhears the doctors’ discussing him. His venom is causing severe genetic damage, if he continues using it the damage will be incurable. He realizes he needs help from someone with superior chemical knowledge than him. Then, from outside his cell, he sees a guard remove “Johnathan Crane” from a name slot of an empty cell.

Bane shows up at Scarecrow’s lab, saying he needs his help. Johnathan asks how he found him, despite that there’s six different crows outside.

Bane closes the gap between them and says he has an opportunity that’ll be both mutually beneficial and it would be best if he corporated

Scarecrow, internally: Well mark me down as interested and horny.

Then it shows Scarecrow reattaching Bane’s tube equipment. He explains that the serum will no longer cause any long lasting brain or genetic damage, though he can’t do anything about the deceased intelligent while the venom is in use.

Bane thanks him, asks if they’ll work together another time, and winks. Scarecrow grins and says there’s no reason to cut the meeting short. He pulls out a vile of glowing green serum. He says that he managed to combine his fear toxin with Bane’s venom. Not only will it cause hallucinations and the additional effects of his fear toxin, but it would also mutate their bodies like Bane’s, basically forcing heart failure.

They try to mass release it by setting up a weather ballon to release it over Gotham on the pier. But, as usual, their plan is found out by Batman. Fight scene later and Bruce uses a compound developed by Francine Langstrom to both deactivate Bane’s venom and neutralize the fear venom.

Then in S3E12, Scarecrow, Bane, and Firefly are in Crane’s lab. He explains that he made an advanced form of Bane’s venom that will make Bane even stronger with less drawbacks. He takes it and while at first it seems to work it quickly worsens. It’s kinda hard to describe but it’s pretty clear that Bane is in about to die condition. Bridget saves him by burning off his tubes so Scarecrow can apply the ‘anti-venom’.

After this Johnathan kinda goes into panic mode. After suffering years of abuse from his grandmother under the guise of love greatly effected John’s emotional relationships. He’s constantly associating ‘love’ with being hurt, making it difficult to ever open himself up to anyone. I guess a degree in psychology can only help you do much when you only pay attention to fear. But he never thought he would act as the abuser (he isn’t of course. It was just an accident). He screams for them to get out of his lab, much to their confusion. When they refuse, he rushes out to the street. He yells for them to stop following him, but Bane does get him to tell them what’s wrong.

He explains the whenever he cares about someone, someone gets hurt. That it it’d be better for them to never see him again. They’re, at first, flabbergasted, but then tell John that he’s their friend. That he isn’t hurting them, that he doesn’t have to be useful to be their friend. That they enjoy spending time with him because they like HIM.

And Scarecrow, poor, affection starved, Scarecrow just- breaks down. He starts crying, trying to get out a thank you. They give him a half hug and Bane lets him mumble his feelings into his shoulder. They Firefly, the mad lad she is, perks up and says, as Scarecrow not-so-subtly slips his hand into Bane’s, they should, for fun, rob a bank, maybe grab some civilians for John to experiment on.

Bridget jumps off the building while Bane picks up Scarecrow bridal style, for the sole reasoning that John isn’t as fast as them, and follows.

Then they probably get busted by the Bats before the end of the episode but that isn’t what we’re here to talk about is it.