#more that people will buy/stream whatever has her name on it

[clarabowmp3]

.

[orphicdreamers-wp]

Girl Of My Dreams — Mat Barzal

Summary: In which Mat Barzal inadvertently falls for the oldest Hughes sibling and her brothers aren’t happy.

Content Warning; Taylor swift 1989 isn’t by Tay(its by reader) Mentions of University of Alabama (reader went there) Trevor Zegras being hopelessly in love with reader. Readers social media face claim is Addison Rae bc idc she’d clear as a WAG for a athlete.

Pairing: Mat Barzal x Hughes! Reader.

Mat would be lying if he said he didn’t sneak glances at the announcers box after meeting you. You had been carrying a plate of food and two margaritas to your booth where your friends sat. Tito had made a joke about you seeming familiar then the pair heard your voice and knew, “Alright now, eat up because y’all are bumming me out.” Mat’s jaw slacked, “He’d known that the Islanders had gotten a new game announcer who was a girl but he wouldn’t have known it was you. You were effortlessly stunning, you had captivated the attention of every straight man in the bar. Mat had approached you as you sat at the bar, “I’m Mat, can I buy you a drink?”

You grinned and spoke, southern accent slipping out, “I’m Y/N, I mean Barzy after the way you played last game? You better buy me a drink. ‘Yknow how many hate comments my broadcast got?” Mat grinned as the bartender approached you, “Another Corona Light and whatever she’s having on me.” You grinned sheepishly, “I’m fucking with you. I’ve heard worse.” Mat grinned, “So now would probably be a shitty time to ask you out?” You smiled at him, “Maybe not.” Mat smiled, “If I may, your not from New York are you? Where are you from?” You grinned, “I grew up in Toronto with my 3 younger brothers and moved to Alabama for college and been in New York for a few months now.” Mat grinned, “Well welcome to New York beautiful.” That was a year and a half ago. You still hadn’t told your brothers who your boyfriend was, just that his name was Mathew. Until your album release came creeping in and you wanted to go public with Mat.

Instagram

ynhughes; my album ‘1997’ is now streaming! thank you for all your support(especially the bf, ‘slut’ and ‘suburban legends’ are 4 us)

barzal97: celebrating you is my favorite pastime. i have never met someone who people gravitate towards more than you. you are by far the most wonderfully amazing woman i know. it is a privilege to say i love you🤎 this past year or so has changed my life. you make living easy and so so much better. i can’t wait to see what the future has in store for you.

trevorzegras: alexa play that should be me💔💔

ynhughes: forever in awe of you mathew barzal. amazed a gal like me is lucky enough to be adored by you🤎

oliviarodrigo; THEY HIT THE PENTAGON!! @conangray

>conangray; told you it was them i saw at radio music hall!

ny_islanders; our roman empire is all the sweet posts for to y/n today🥹🥹

sydneyemartin: brb crying. the purest people in the world. so grateful my girls get to grow up seeing a love this pure that isn’t their parents.

>ynhughes: we adore your girls more than words can express.

_quinnhughes: my biggest inspiration is out here killing it. in awe of you everyday sissy🥹 thank you for being my best friend from day 1

ynhughes: in a puddle of tears quinny. thank you for always being on my side, even when im wrong.

sabrinacarpenter; hockey players making me ugly sob wasn’t on my 2023 bingo card

elhughes; my first babies🥹 extremely emotional over you all today

>_quinnhughes: we love you momma💕

jackhughes: 1997 reasons to love my meanie head sister, i guess her bf’s alright

ynhughes: i love you little brat, come visit me and mat!!

>jackhughes: will do, sissy🫡

trevorzegras: i can’t believe she won’t date me 😞😞

>ynhughes: buck up z, your way too young for me. perfect age for @sabrinacarpenter tho!

lukehughes: the worlds best big sister came out with the best album to date

ynhughes; really feeling the hughes love train today, i need to plan for all of us to be together soon! so y’all can meet Mat!

etnow; this just in; the Hughes brothers have brought tears to my eyes supporting their sister

barzal97: the third picture is actually the most accurate representation of your sister now

>lukehughes; always messing with those darn cats! even if they are on the side of the street.

[thenewestxmen]

I am convinced that Wade had a really hard adjustment when Logan came into his life.

After I called after Logan when we returned to my home universe, I welcomed him into that shitty apartment. The only thing I regret informing Logan of is that it was a one bed apartment with a pull out couch. The second I got home. I introduced Althea to Logan and Logan, Althea. That night as everyone was welcoming Logan, mini Logan, and I back home, I announced we would in fact be moving out. Al already sometimes pays rent, and her disability insurance and checks should cover her. Logan doesn’t have money so he will stay with me, at least until he scrapes up enough money or sobriety to get his own place. That night, Wolverine takes the floor. 

“You can take the bed, I can take the floor unless you’re feeing a little hot.”

“The floor will do fine.” He says in a firm voice. He’s pretty much too tired to argue or call me a bitch. 

As I lay awake, insomnia slapping me across my ugly nutsack of a face, weirdly the only thing I can think of is what Logan said in the Honda Odyssey. The few hours ago, Vanessa had come over, she started to brag about Dermot or whatever his name was. “You couldn’t save a relationship with a god damn stopper!” His voice rang in my ears. “Gimme the dog and talk to the girl.” He had said. What’s the point? Some boring guy at her workplace was able to land her and I couldn’t. Figures, when I met her I literally paid her to tolerate me. I have no clue why she stayed after that. I attempted to flirt, but honestly… I’m not interested. I know, I know. I was willing to go back in time to get her back when she died, I know I blew myself up too. But honestly, what is so great… not to sound rude, but honestly, I’m a world famous merc and literally unable to die, so messed up I got an amazing sense of humor. And she was a stripper and left me when things got a little rough. I chatted with her a bit at the homecoming party, but after that, my eyes wandered… to Logan. Aw shit. The guys is hot. Come one Wade, pull yourself together!

Now I’m laying on the pull out, he’s three feet from me, sleeping and snoring softly. But still even though I’m just now realizing how incredibly handsome he is, how perfect even, it’s not the first time I’ve felt attracted to him. In the void, he held my hand and decided to die with me to help me. But even after he did so, his hurtful words still ring in my ears. My stomach weirdly hurts, like a cold pit dropped down my throat. That when I realize my face feels hot, and burning teas stream down my face. This doesn’t often happen, or at least not usually when I’m insulted. But Logan’s words really hit me hard I guess, and just now, as the words sink in a bit more, they push and force the salty hot tears out of me.

“Hmm… Wade?” I hear from behind me. Logan woke up and heard me… quickly I wipe the tears and turn to face Logan, resting my head back on the pillow. I hope my face isn’t too red and puffy, even through the darkness and lighting my scars make.

“Sleeping soundly peanut?” I say in a sexual voice. Although my dumbass self forget that little Angelbaby has great senses. I can see it on his face. He smells my salty tears.

“Why the fuck are you crying?” Logan says in tired deep voice.

“Im not crying, it’s just the moonlight reflecting off of your sugary tits into my eyes, so they look all shiny.” I say, half assed excuse. Obviously he doesn’t buy it and gets up, walking over to me, and starts laying on the other side of the pull out. 

“What’s wrong bub.” Why the hell do people ask that question when I’m trying not to cry?! I just burst into tears. 

“You… I… I can’t do anything right… you’re stuck we me, in my own universe! In my shitty apartment, stuck with a nutsack faced fucking failure.” I say in gasps for breath. He just pulls me in, holding me for a moment as my chest hurts and strains. Everything’s a wreck, I don’t want this life. I don’t want to live forever, I don’t want to be a merc or car salesman, I don’t want to be depended on. Logan just hushes me.

“It’s alright…” he says. He’s awful at this comfort shit but his deep smooth voice and warm embrace is rather soothing. He allows me to cry, soaking his shirt. I cry until I’m trembling and my jaw and chest hurts. Even when I stop because of the pain, he holds me. Everything is a mess and I want everything to be all better. I’m moving and the Wolverine is depending on me for a place to live and I am a mess and can’t have a good relationship with anyone… the closest thing to one is with my blind elderly roommate who despises me. Logan rocks back and forth, hushing and humming. He will occasionally say, “it’s ok Wade…” or something. My chest starts to stop aching and I just let him hold me, letting my eyelids close. I don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow, and I’m not looking to finding out. Everything’s a mess, and it’s all my mess.

authors note: should I turn this into another fic series? This is going well, I think I could go off this into a series, idk. Sorry I didn’t post this earlier, it took a while to write this bcs I was busy.

[errorryx]

shitty batman fanfiction

So AO3 went down last night, and my friend @armyanimal156 was in the middle of a fanfiction and couldn’t finish it, so I offered to finish it for him. I used my vague understanding of comic book storytelling from my brief Marvel comics phase in 2019, plus the very minimal knowledge i picked up from some of my mutuals' posts, to assemble this nonsense. This is Damian What’s-his-face’s Journey of Self-Discovery, originally typed out stream-of-consciousness into Discord and then edited into a more digestible format.

Please for the love of god understand that this is not my usual writing style and also I'm not in this fandom and don't know shit about fuck. This is just a very long shitpost. ok enjoy

—

Damian, the newest Robin who was raised by assassins, was about to go on a journey to atone for his sins. He used Batman’s credit card to buy himself plane tickets to Eurasia and Africa, because there was a package deal he saw online or whatever. He decided to fly economy because he had self-esteem issues and thought he didn’t deserve first class.

He arrived in Eurasia, which in DC comics universe is the name of a small country in the continent of Syrup. Unfortunately, when he saw who was waiting for him at the airport, he was shocked.

“Mom?” Damian said. “Dad? Other Mom? That one guy?”

That’s right, it was the four assassins that raised him. The comics didn’t mention the other two assassins, Dad and Other Mom, because they weren’t relevant to the other stories being told. He calls his grandpa “that one guy.” This definitely isn’t someone poorly retconning comic canon into the fic after being told new information or anything like that.

“Yes, Damian, it’s us,” said Other Mom (that’s her legal government name). “We need your help. We’re going to assassinate the President of the United States.”

“No way,” Damian said. “I’ve changed. I fight for justice now.”

“Is that so?” that one guy said. “Then you should know that the President of the United States is actually evil and deserves to die.”

Damian wasn’t sure if he could believe that one guy, because he was a supervillain. But he decided to trust him just this once. He went and found the President of the United States, who was on a diplomatic mission to the small Syrupean nation of Eurasia, and shot him point blank on live television, Joker-movie-style.

Thankfully for Damian, that one guy was telling the truth: the president was evil and everyone had been secretly hoping for someone to assassinate him. People celebrated in the streets, and Batman and Tim and Drake and whoever else called and told him he did a good job. Even better, his mom patted him on the back and told Damian she was proud of him, which made him feel somewhat better about his childhood trauma.

Then, the president came back as a zombie who was impervious to bullets and wanted to eat everyone’s brains. Everyone was very upset about this, including all four of his assassin parents, and Batman, and Drake and Josh. Damian decided his best bet was to run away from his problems instead of facing them like a man, so he used his plane ticket to Africa and escaped.

—

The plane landed in Africa, which in DC comics universe is a small island nation in the Specific Ocean. Damian had never been to Africa before, but it was a popular tourist destination for its pristine beaches and overpriced coconut cocktails. However, after arriving on the island, he quickly learned that everything was owned by a mysterious billionaire known as Bruce Wane, Bruce Wayne’s twin brother who has never been mentioned in the comics before because he wasn’t relevant to any of the stories being told.

After some investigating, Damian learned that Bruce Wane was secretly a supervillain who terrorized the island, who went by the name of Badman (like Batman, but bad). Badman had a sidekick named Robbin. When Damian went up against this pair, Robbin pickpocketed him.

“Hey!” Damian complained. “I saw that! Don’t steal my stuff!”

“Damian,” Badman said in a fake deep voice, Dark Knight-movie-style. “If you want your wallet back, you have to join me. You can be Robbin 2.” Robbin looked upset about this, but didn’t say anything.

“No way, bitch,” Damian said (he gets to say swear words because of his childhood trauma). “Batman is way cooler than you.”

Badman took a few steps back and did a triple backflip. “Bet your stupid Batman can’t do that.”

Damian had to admit that Batman could not do that. “Fine, you win. I’ll join you.”

He followed Badman and Robbin to the Badcave (like the Batcave, but bad). Badman began explaining his plan to take over the world by dropping a bunch of badbombs (like batbombs, but bad) on top of the small island nation of Africa and then the rest of the world.

“That’s a really cool plan,” Damian said. “Can I have the password to your computer? I want to play Roblox.” BECAUSE AS IT TURNS OUT THIS KID IS LIKE TWELVE YEARS OLD HOLY SHIT WHY IS HE FIGHTING CRIME. WHY IS HE ASSASSINATING PEOPLE. WHAT THE FUCK MAN???

So Badman gave Damian the password to the badcomputer (like the batcomputer, but bad), which was, of course, “nanananananananabadman” and gave him unsupervised internet access.

Of course, Damian immediately hacked into the mainframe and set off every badbomb in the badwarehouse (like the batwarehouse, but bad). The Badcave exploded and everything was ruined. Then, Damian revealed that when Robbin was busy pickpocketing him, he was actually pickpocketing Robbin at the same time! He opened Robbin’s wallet and looked through his stuff.

As it turned out, Robbin’s ID picture looked the same as Damian’s, because they were secret TWINS and CLONES and TWIN CLONES. Robbin’s real name was Damien with an E. 

Robbin looked very sad, and he asked Damian if there was a way he could learn to be good instead of bad. “I could take you back to Batman,” Damian suggested. “You could be Robin 2. Actually, more like Robin 27 at this point.”

“That sounds great,” Robbin agreed, and they flew back to Gotham City together.

—

“Jesus Christ, not another one,” Alfred said when they got back.

Batman just shrugged and said, “This might as well happen.”

“It’s going to be really confusing around here if there’s two Damians,” Cass (one of them is named Cass right? or Cath? idfk) said. Everyone decided to call Damian with an e “Dame” and Damian with an a “Ian.” This detail was included despite the fact that it never came up again.

They turned on the news, which was conveniently at the beginning of a report about Badman, who had miraculously survived the explosions. He had now teamed up with the zombie president and vowed to destroy Batman and his league of child soldiers.

The zombie president staged a hostile takeover of the American troops, which was easy because the guy who replaced him was a wimpy loser. Soon the entire US Marines were outside Batman’s house, which apparently isn’t the first time this has happened, but this time they had all been turned into zombies. Which also isn’t the first time that’s happened. Writing an original plotline in DC comics is probably impossible.

So began the epic battle between Batman’s orphanage and the zombie marine corps.

Everything was going well for the good guys, but then Damian got into trouble. It looked like he was about to get seriously injured, until Damien jumped in front of him at the last second to save him, only to get bit by one of the zombies and become infected.

Soon enough all the zombies were defeated, but it didn’t feel like a victory, not when the twinclone kid they met ten minutes ago was dying in front of them.

“Listen, everyone,” Damien said, while slowly turning green (the color of zombies). “I know we just met each other, but the ten seconds of kindness I got from you were better than the entire rest of my incredibly traumatic life. So please, don’t mourn me. Put me out of my misery, and go save the world in my honor.”

Damian nodded and lifted his gun. “I was raised by assassins, in case anyone forgot,” he said. “I can do what needs to be done.” He proceeded to shoot Damien in the head.

But it didn’t do any damage at all, because as previously stated, zombies are impervious to bullets. So Damien finished turning green and stood up. “Please don’t eat our brains!” one of those other batkids said.

“Huh,” Damien said. “I don’t really want to eat anyone’s brains. I think I’m fine, actually.”

As it turned out, the zombie virus didn’t induce the desire to eat brains. The president and the entire US marines were just like that.

So the entire group hunted down Badman and the President and dropped batbombs (like badbombs, but not bad) on top of their heads, and they both exploded into one zombillion pieces.

Everyone lived happily ever after, and Damian now had a twinclone zombie brother and felt a lot better about his childhood trauma.

The end

—

bonus: more discord screenshots from last night for additional context, featuring my other friends @diligently-metastasizing (dyke lego homer) and @avloki-pal (wet ghost cat)

[ventismacchiato]

some more btl headcanons bc why not lol(specifically kpop related *insert that one spongebob "when worlds collide" audio*)

ps this will include plenty of my beloved nugus so if you don't recognize a name that's probably why lol

obviously scara has his stuff already so I won't be listing it so I don't lose the dopamine too early

star is whatever we like

xiao is a diehard dreamcatcher fan, literally has been there since debut and probably has an almost complete set of photocards for everyone. cried when they won their first award. definitely does live reactions to groups music videos/dance practices on stream. other groups I can see him liking are craxy, nmixx and purple kiss, but also k-bands like xdinary heros and purple beck

aether probably isn't too into kpop tbh💀 he supports xiao in his dreamcatcher stanning but that's probably the only group he actually knows members and stuff lol. he definitely watches survival shows tho and spam texts xiao every elimination episode. doesn't keep up with the groups after the show ends. i can definitely see him stanning eunbi post-iz*one, he makes underwater his ringtone. also stans alexa and watched all of american song contest bc she was his pick during produce 48

jean probably listens to popular groups just bc she doesn't have much time to search out for any smaller ones. can see her liking red velvet, feel my rhythm is her favorite song from them. will listen to any group that any of the people in the au tell her about, and from them I can see her listening to iz*one and purple kiss

childe is payola(/j). no but fr tho, whenever his faves release anything ever he is collecting albums and photocards until he has complete collection. he's rich and so will travel to south korea to watch his groups at inkigayo and music bank so he can get broadcast pcs. he's not creepy tho and so he's on "friendly stranger" terms with most of the idols in groups he likes. at this point, it's a game with his fans to find him in the background of any photos of groups he likes leaving/entering a music show. can see him liking a mix of groups, so probably twice, aespa, cherry bullet, and loona

heizou loves any and all groups that have lore. pixy, loona, stray kids, etc. if they have some sort of lore, then you can count on heizou being a fan of them. probably doesn't collect all that much, he usually just buys one version of an album and accepts whatever photocards are in it like a weirdo. definetly does streams going through groups music videos/etc to look for lore and make theories

I can't remember anyone else and so I now present my theories lol

WHEN U SAID I WUDNT RECOGNIZE ANYONE I WAS LIKE DAMN BUT I RECOGNIZED EVERYONE U MENTIONED 😼 i’m just cultured like that

WDYM LOSE DOPAMINE TOO EARLY HELP

also i love this omg. i also don’t think aether wud be too into kpop, he only rlly knows things cus xiao talks about it to him and will attend concerts w him. i can totally see him eating up any survival show (he wud probably watch boys planet)

HEIZOU STANNING FOR LORE OMG adding txt to that list he probably does videos trying to dissect what’s going on

childe going all the way to korea for broadcast pcs HES SO REAL OMG 😭😭 he wud probably win fan calls and be super chill on them and when he’s at shows it turns into a mini meet n greet

kazuha probably listens to whatever heizou tells him he should but also he’s a music major so he probably does covers on the most popular songs he’s probably a keshi or DPR live stan or the rose like more soft songs yk

venti probably crazy about every group he wud be the type to decorate his lightsticks for every show and change his phone pc every other day

[not-goldy]

Umm but Tae cross that line tho. You said you can't support taennie because what Tae doing is unfair to her I.e pushing tkk by namedropping JK while not claiming his gf and indirectly nodding his Fandom to attack her. Which is disrespectful for both Jikook and his relationship with Jennie.

I agree about JM coz personally the only member I take seriously when they speak about love and commitment is Jimin. Because when he says it he means it 101%.

Tae crossed that line with whomst?

Shipping and fan service is a normal part of Kpop and a member name dropping another member is not crossing the line in my opinion.

The part he's not protecting his alleged girlfriend is a very valid point. There's no excuse for that I agree. And yes I can't support that at all because I wouldn't want to be Jennie in that situation.

And showing love to the same people hating on your SO is wrong on every level. I would have deleted my account and only showed up on live if Hybe forced me to. I would make shitty music dissing my fans and drag them to hell if they don't buy or stream it🥲

Stream this song called my fans ain't shit armya.

I'll shave my head bald.

Wear socks for masks in public

And I'll gave a butched tattoo on my forehead.

Like forget the Y. Jx write Armpit on my neck.

Drop she's better than you out of no where.

Ipost and delete "love you armed robbers" and repost with the correct fan name so you know I meant yall.

I'll be such a terrible idol you'll regret stanning me. That's how petty I actually am.

Oooohhhh, you mean Tae's behavior is disrespectful to Jikook because of the way he acts with Jk sometimes?

I mean.... yes and no.

Stay with me alright,

People are allowed to do whatever they want. Just because there's a boundary or wall don't mean it will keep people out. Sometimes people go over walls, burn down and break walls.

When that happens it is up to the individual to take steps and actions to address those breaches and to prevent them from happening again.

Where you try a peaceful settlement and that fails cutting people off completely or keeping your distance becomes the ultimate solution.

Does that ring a bell with any ship dynamics in BTS to you? Ding ding ding

Tae "disrespecting" someone's boundaries is not what's important. It's that person enforcing those boundaries or allowing it that matters.

After all JK is not a child any more and so he shouldn't and wouldn't allow things he's not comfortable with. And in that regard, what may be a hard limit to you may not be a hard limit to him so he might allow it.

It's the same with JM and every body.

I think from Tae saying he wouldn't be willing to do red line tattoos with his members, it's safe to say he does understand some sort of limits or boundaries when it comes to relationships.

His limits may not however be the same as every body's.

For instance while he said he wouldn't do the red line tattoo at all JK didn't mind. He was willing to do it save for a few modifications.

It doesn't mean JK has no sense of boundaries because he is the same individual who said he wouldn't be okay with his SO feeding his friends perilla leaves or whatever.

Those two have different sense of boundaries.

Tae tend to be very liberal, carefree and has a lower social threshold. When he was younger the members used to say he had zero sense of boundaries and we could all see that too most times.

A reminder, he's the same person he stripped young Jk naked in the shower so he could have that male bonding experience and stop his shyness.

Yet he is also the one who wouldn't share his close friends with his band mates and said he likes girls that looked mean (unapproachable) on the outside.

So we know he has some sense of boundaries too. It's just not what you'd expect.

What is a boundary to you might not feel like a boundary to him. I recall him posting TKK photos on his birthday when Jk had gone out of his way to edit himself out of those pics.

The environment a person is raised in has an impact on their understanding of social dynamics and so we all have unique social needs and boundaries.

When it comes to Jungkook, he does put up boundaries where he feels he needs to and allows things he feels he's comfortable with including his one bandmate nibbling on his neck 🙃

He"ll quick punch us in the throat if any one of us tried that shit🤧

And I don't know if Jimin will be down to bump dicks with us- or it's just a jikook thing. Idk idk😩

[katyspersonal]

What is your opinion on our silly tree pope ?

Oh, that FUCKING bitch motherfucker fuck, god I hate him so much, I'd strangle him if his stupid wooden neck was not so thick,

Sorry, I meant to say YAYYYY what a cool compelling character, truly one of the most iconic and interesting ones in Dark Souls trilogy!! Really great battle especially!

Okay in all seriousness now, it isn't even a shitpost and my feelings towards him are a bit unstable. He is a rare case of a villain who is not even morally grey. The guy was born in the place for those neglected, unwanted, discarded or just not feeling like they belonged to the "actual" world and made his liberation from it everyone else's problem!

I do think that in general Dark Souls trilogy benefits from a change that is having a character who is just bad and corrupt power-hungry tyrant, as every other character at least had interests of humanity and/or the world in general in mind! Nuanced characters go harder when there are contrasting ones! But also this is what makes my opinion shift from wanting to bully the bastard to finding him fun or even attractive, depending on the mood.

There are some things I want to address though regarding how I interpret the character! I had another post where I've discussed my interpretation of what kind of creature he is exactly ( x )! In short; I believe he is 25% tree and 75% human, but is Just Like That rather than having been human(ish) before becoming corrupted into a more tree-like form. As for his motivations.. I don't think that he wanted to end the Age of Fire specifically, but rather that he is an opportunistic asshole and will roll with whatever helps him! Helps with what? Well, it ranges from having total control to simply surviving, which I think is what happened between him and Aldrich!

Japanese original makes it a bit more clear that Sulyvahn "eventually" fed Gwyndolin to Aldrich, that gives me feeling as though it was not his original intention, but... Seeing that he did imprison Yorshka and is hiding her from Aldrich, and at first imprisoned Gwyndolin too, I think his motivation was to usurp the power. He is opportunistic asshole that wants control! And what could give more of that than being THE pope of Way of White?

At first, that was accomplished through Gwyndolin, and I have a strong impression that he fed the guy to Aldrich as means of self-defence. I'd say it is even more likely how Sulyvahn looks like quite a mess with his clothes being thorn, so maybe he was fighting against Aldrich before managing to buy himself time, or mercy altogether, by offering him Gwyndolin instead. If he was a huge simp of Aldrich that just wanted the Age of Fire to be done with, I think he should have offered him Yorshka as well for a good measure! The fact that he keeps her a secret from him gives me an impression that he saves her just in case if 1) Age of Deep thing fails and he'll need another person to puppet that Yorshka would work as or 2) Aldrich attempts coming for him another time and he'll need another offering, so he has to 'space out' people he's offering to keep his own ass safe!

+ I also want to add that another possible argument in favour of Sulyvahn presumably wanting to end the Age of Fire is unclear identity of Lothric's secret teacher who was said to be sceptical about the Fire. Likely, that teacher was the one who convinced Lothric to refuse to burn to begin with, too.

Yeah yeah @heraldofcrow shuddup about the misspelling lol

I do think that the secret teacher in question was actually Aldia! And I am gonna cheat this time and share the video that explains it better than I could, but in my defence my arguments would be the same:

(In summary: it would be strange for the pope to come in a "secret" + who else is known as the first scholar AND knew that Fire couldn't do shit? + spells Soul Geyser and Soul Stream are actually the same spell and different names are localisation liberty, whereas this spell is creation of Aldia and in DS3 is found in the Grand Archives!)

Sulyvahn was also a smart and curious sorcerer, but I am not convinced so far that he got some transcendental ideas on how the Age of Fire is a doomed ordeal and Aldrich's vision was more efficient. I get an impression that he just IS one of the corrupt miserable idiots that will hold onto the power even if it is falling apart at the seams and harming everyone for as long as they can, and if he is to "help" Aldrich then either in the interest of self-preservation or in an attempt to control everything through Aldrich. My current headcanon is also that Sulyvahn was the one to burn Aldrich the first time since Aldrich himself would not have interest in being Lord of Cinder with his own idea in mind, so all problems are caused by.... well, Aldrich crawling back up with vengeance..

_________________________

I think I covered the basics about this character! Yeahhhh I know I state that he is 'just bad' as a matter of fact, when it lingers on my reading and interpretation like every goddamn thing in Soulsborne..

I guess my point is that he IS a fun character and good for his role, just not good enough for ME to obsess over or anything like that!

[changetheprophecy]

people need to stop saying taylor’s creativity (releasing album after album) is greedy/a monopoly whatever… she’s an artist… if she wants to create she can no one is forcing anyone to buy her album or make them go number one. her making music doesn’t mean other artists can’t. if y’all want your faves to get more attention you can post about them and share their music and buy their stuff…

artists aren’t amazon they’re not lowballing prices and forcing convenience, they’re not making it so that consuming other artists music is any harder. if you listen to the radio it’s not even predominantly taylor. streaming lizzy mcalpine’s or ed sheeran’s or doja cat’s music costs the same amount as streaming taylor’s. she gets number one because she has more fans that makes her more popular not a MoNoPoLy.

and all this talk of overexposure is so stupid. my mom only knows maybe a tenth of the taylor news and she pays attention because she knows i love her. my friends send me Breaking News tweets a week after the fact bc they know I love her. If you don’t like pop culture right now log off the pop culture sites and stop blaming taylor. start blaming magazines for trying to capitalize on her name. i’ve seen her name in headlines where she’s not even listed in the article.

[dojae-huh]

That's not the first time she opened donations for ilichil's comeback, even during the fact check era she had opened donations

https://x.com/127CENTRAL/status/1695619570160054759

But the donation has not reached the target and finally helped by Indonesian fans because the target of 127fund has been reached

https://x.com/zellaoxo/status/1708295708514951539

In this comeback there is little support, even in 127fund it has not reached 10%, unlike the fact check era h-7 comeback has reached about 90%

https://x.com/127Fund/status/1721545110238982151https://x.com/127Fund/status/1810957386301198381

And I see many solo stans only support their biased projects / solo jobs

Link, Link2, Link3

Wow, 15k is a lot. What where those money spent on? Ads are costly, but not Spotify accs. Hm..

I see the plans, but were the results published last year? Receipts, names of people who received i-tune giftcards and all?

Well. I agree that the NCT-fandom is very divided. Solo-stanning culture is one of the reasons, the other one is the lack of a strong group-oriented platform ran in English. Managing a group fanclub is a big task. Reposting official twits between comebacks is not a real fandom activity/generating of original content that brings fans together. To collect money the collector needs authority. There won't be much trust in NCT 127 Central if fans hear about it once a year (wasn't it the account that asked fans if they want to boycott Golden Age, or smth?). X stops to show posts from the accounts you are subscribed but don't engage with as well. Which results in lower reach.

Fans can buy i-tunes and more albums themselves, without a middleman. The same goes for streaming on Spotify. Chinese bars offer additional merch for those who purchase albums with them. Indonesian, Thai clubs are very organised, they easily collect money for charities and support projects for concerts. There needs to be a connection with the organiser, and some return of investment in the form of positive feelings.

Look at Lin. Despite her popularity and dedication to her account, the fundriser for Melon for Doyoung wasn't very successful. Maybe in part because Lin didn't have time, so the campaign wasn't very advertised.

I was a part of organisation comitee of anime-festivals. I know first-hand how difficult it is to make people be involved in something made for them for free, let alone when they need to pay, how ungrateful fans are to orgs' efforts, how forgetful about deadlines, staying in contact, etc.

Making one post with a huge sum as the goal and hoping that everyone will commit rarely works. The crowd needs to be warmed up, hyped, unified. A big campaign is needed for people to regret they are nto part of the fun.

Back to NCTzens being divided. These whining posts that further antagonize solo-fans, constant squabbles, fans looking for the worst in each other, "my bias is great yours is a dozen" is part of what led to this reality. And anyone who participates in producing/distributing these fanwar/shipwar/stanwar inducing twits is to blame as well. You reap what you saw.

I heard today that attention is the main coin in the world. Attention lies in the base of the political life, economy, processes of human mental activity, etc. And people who think they are powerless and are not responsible for the changes and status quo in the world around them forget that it is them who decide to what people (politicians, fans) and to what topics (policies, fan content) they give their attention. Attention is power.

Anyhow! Don't be discouraged by the mood in the part of the fandom you see (which is just a fraction of it). Enjoy the comeback and the content we are given. Buy albums, stream, vote - do whatever you can on whatever scale you have time and money for.

Remember that neos love their group, invested half of their lives into it, that the group is the main source of income and solo opportunities for all of them. Not even Taeyong is bigger than the brand.

Both Haechan and Doyoung talked about how they are afraid of not being able to perform on big stages anymore in the future. And very very few solo-artists k-pop are able to get themselves domes.

[wirewitchviolet]

So I just watched every Child’s Play movie and now I’m going to talk about them.

A few recent conversations with people have lead to me picking up some weird trivia notes about the Child’s Play/X of Chucky movies (and the recent TV series based on them), and as luck would have it, almost all of them are on Tubi right now, the one streaming service that still seems usable, and since they’re honestly on the very short list of ‘80s horror classics I never got around to, why not marathon through all seven and blog about it? Also before I do the whole “continued below the fold” thing can I just note real quick both that the later entries are surprisingly queer, so, on topic for the month, and that every single sequel, spinoff, whatever is written by the author of the original screenplay, and this series is practically the only thing on his IMDB page. You don’t see that sort of writer-controlled franchise basically ever.

Child’s Play (1988) is, of course, an evil doll movie. That’s kind of its own whole subgenre, and honestly does a pretty good job of elevating itself from what that generally entails. The absolute first thing we see on screen is the backstory here, where a police detective is trying to gun down a serial killer, who as just sort of a random thing (at least until later when he goes back to the witch doctor he learned it from to complain) has a magic soul transfer spell he’s apparently really itching to use, what with the having been caught for all the murders and all. He can’t find anyone to body jack, but ends up pinned under a pile of these very My Buddy style jumbo dolls and gives it a shot. I feel like this opening was probably a studio mandate thing, or at least a late addition, because otherwise the movie plays things real close to the chest about the whole thing.

We have this YOUNG (6 year old actor) kid who gets the possessed doll as a late birthday present after his struggling single mom buys it from a shady guy on the street who swiped it from the deadly shootout scene, and he talks about things the doll says to him, but we never actually see the conversations and without the intro you could totally play this up as a misdirect that we’ve got some sort of evil child here. You’d figure we’d be doing the whole thing where the kid is trying to tell everyone the doll is evil and nobody’s listening, but mostly he just gets to be a cute latchkey kid kept somewhat in the dark on this, and before we even really have a decent body count or string of suspicious things, his mother actually just notices she never put the batteries in the thing, so even the standard squeeze me and hear catch phrases talking doll stuff he’s done shouldn’t actually be possible.

She does a whole lot of worrying about how if either she or her latchkey kid explain this, CPS is probably going to get involved, but eventually confides the whole “hey this doll I got my kid might be possessed and responsible for some recent deaths” thing with the detective looking into things, who is just super relieved because he was actually already going down that road and also didn’t want to say anything that absurd, and then things just kinda rush to a conclusion after the aforementioned witch doctor check-in gives us the rest of our lore for these early entries. Turns out if you pop your soul into a plastic doll (or presumably other inanimate object), first off your only option for bouncing out is the first person you told your real name to (which he carelessly did with the kid), and also that inanimate body is eventually going to start gradually becoming human and obeying sensible rules like being full of meat and having basic mortality going on, and also this eventually closes that window to jump out. So OK NOW the kid he’d mostly been ignoring is in danger, they burn the doll, shoot it a lot, the end. Impressive animatronics work.

Child’s Play 2 (1990) is... the more by the numbers experience I was expecting the original to be. We start with the reveal that the protagonists of the first movie and second cop who showed up at the end did in fact go public with their story and it got enough buzz that the doll’s manufacturer went to the trouble to gather up what was left of it, do a full rebuild and restore, and test things out to put any sort of possession rumors to bed, and we also find out that oh, actually that looming concern over the whole first movie actually WAS totally valid, and the kid was dumped into the foster care system (which does not come off in a good light here at all) “while his mother recovers.” That’s the last mention of her we ever get too, so presumably she’s just locked in some psych ward indefinitely or something, which is pretty damn dark.

Quick tangent here- So the doll itself is “a Good Guys doll,” and while at no point in the series do we really go in too deep on this, Good Guys is apparently some sort of Care Bears-like cartoon that aired for a bit before getting the merch out, and part of the gimmick is while the dolls all otherwise have the same appearance and stock dialog, they all have different names (or at least a wide pool of names), and like... this is somehow the one thing I can’t suspend my disbelief over. Like yeah it’s a neat gimmick that you don’t know what your specific doll’s name is until you first put batteries in, but you are leaving so much money on the table not encouraging kids to collect the whole cast. And like, there’s a pre-existing show right? Shouldn’t they all have unique character designs from that alone? Also other Good Guys dolls keep showing up in the sequels, 2 here has one already in the house that Chucky replaces, but aside from a quick gag of having to pause to remember what name to say here, the unique name thing never actually ends up mattering, so it’s weird to introduce it.

But yeah, kid’s in foster care, so NOW we have parents who don’t believe him about the whole killer doll thing and wonder if he’s doing messed up stuff like you’d figure. They’re also taking care of a girl named Kyle who’s super jaded about the whole getting bounced around from home to home thing and talking about being abused in a lot of them and such, and she kinda becomes our co-protagonist here. This one WOULD end up pretty boring except I want to say the last third of the movie is this big extended climax in the doll factory and they just really go all out with weird creativity. Lots of hazardous conveyor belts and molten plastic and machines shoving limbs and eyeballs in. They have a ton of fun with it and it really sticks with you. They also cash in on that “doll eventually becomes more human” thing for some really incongruous gore as Chucky gets just horrifically mutilated and rendered into an indistinct mass. Good stuff.

Child’s Play 3 (1991) is the one entry in the series that’s just kinda more of the same. We’re jumping forward a decade or so with the toy company deciding to finally clean up the again really impressively grotesque aftermath of that second movie’s climax and start making these dolls again. Feels a bit early to be doing the retro ‘80s toy line thing but I guess it’s just a forward thinking movie like that. Anyway some of Chucky’s blood leaks out into the main molten plastic vat as they’re using a crane to remove his remains from the floor so he’s kinda reborn as the first new doll off the line, kills the CEO, and tracks down the kid, who’s just been transferred to military school, because the foster care system still sucks. Bit weird how Kyle’s not addressed at all, after the ending of 2 pretty strongly implied she was just going to go raise the kid off he grid somewhere, but here we are. Generic military school/bullying stuff, 16 year old kid. There is a point where Chucky realizes wait this is technically a new doll he’s possessing and that first person he tells his name to bit presumably got a reset, so he’s trying to possess this other kid (who I don’t buy as young enough to be into this doll, especially when he’s at a military school). We switch settings to this super elaborate haunted house ride at a nearby amusement park for the climax which is kind of fun, but it’s no doll factory... and even the writer doesn’t care much for this one. We are out of steam, trilogy over.

Bride of Chucky (1998) eventually picks things back up and just kinda goes “screw it, we’re capital-C Camp horror-comedy now.” We’re also doing a lot of retconning. Soul transferring now requires this magic amulet, and we’re no longer doing the doll-slowly-becomes-human thing. We ARE doing the doll-is-full-of-meat-and-blood thing though. We’re also saying before the original movie Chucky had a girlfriend (played by Jennifer Tilly, this will be relevant later) who was also a big fan of murder and broadly in on it, and while it took her a bit (or not? I’m figuring 2 took place immediately after 1, but then we skipped forward 10 years for 3, and now this is actually a decade from the original and mentions the dolls having been a thing back in the ‘80s, so the math gets weird here), she found all the Chucky bits after he was tossed into an industrial fan in 3, stitched them together, and casts a spell to revive him.

Long story short they have a very hot and cold relationship going, where at first the plan is hey, let’s restore Chucky’s humanity and go get his crime spree money, but then they have a fight, she locks him in a care, he kills her and magic rituals her into a similar doll, they fight some more, then eventually decide to just find some random couple to body jack and go back to being human. Contrary to the title they don’t actually get married at any point, but do get engaged, and the audience is challenged with the fact that at some point (while, again, both are dolls, but remember they ARE full of meat, so this makes SOME sense) they have sex, she gets pregnant, and the big ending sting after they start squabbling again, ruin the body stealing plan, and get shot for their trouble, she gives birth to this weird doll baby who we see pouncing on someone who approaches the scene later. Also I don’t know if it’s coming across from this summary but there’s very little in the way of slasher stuff here. It’s like, 90% wacky unhealthy relationship banter by volume.

Seed of Chucky (2004) picks up from THAT ending somehow, and after a big ol’ CGI montage of where murder doll babies come from goes into this narration from the perspective of the hideous doll baby from the end of the last one, who has since grown up somewhat and is actually very nice and polite and was actually just giving a big hug to that person in that stinger. Anyway after years of working as a fake ventrilloquist’s dummy, and going off the assumption of being Japanese because apparently having Made in Japan stamped on your wrist is a genetically inheritable trait for living dolls (and extra weird because I’m pretty sure the doll Chucky was possessing at the time was made in the factory from 2 and that was explicitly in Chicago), the spooky doll child who is our protagonist learns they’re making a movie about the events of Bride of Chucky and sees the same wrist stamp on the prop version of Chucky in that. So, off to the set to do a magic ritual and bring the actual sophisticated animatronic movie props used for in-universe versions of these movies to life, harnessing the souls of those dead murder parents and yeah this all works out somehow. And now it’s time to get super meta.

From here we have two plot threads going. The one with the kid, and one where Chucky’s love interest is struck by how amazing the casting it is that they got Jennifer Tilly to play her for this movie, both because she sounds just like her and she looks just like she did before she got turned into a doll, and also because she and several other people in this movie as an odd running gag thought she was really good in the Wachowski’s first movie, Bound. So the bulk of this movie’s actual plot is this evil murder doll plotting to possess her own voice actress and that’s just great. The plan is also to get whoever’s she’s dating as a host for Chucky (initially real world rapper Redman and later her limo driver), and to artificially inseminate her with... the title of the movie to get a human (or, more human anyway?) baby for the kid to possess. Long story short this actually does work out except for Chucky stopping at the last minute and realizing that this is very ridiculous, and being some limo driver dating an actress isn’t as cool as being a famous killer doll, so screw the whole thing. Oh and then gets dismembered by his own child with an axe after a goofy martial arts battle, because it’s kind of a tradition for every movie to end with Chucky’s gruesome dismemberment.

Then the other half of the plot is these two being parents to this child who they each project their own gender onto and who personally never really gave the matter much thought, and they straight up go all Ed Wood fighting over whether to call them Glen or Glenda. The child in question eventually says something along the lines of “I do like being a boy, but I also like being a girl, can I just be both?” which scores some pretty serious points for progressiveness for 2004, but then kind of immediately loses them by kinda playing this up as a split personality thing and getting the tidy (for some value thereof) solution of Jennifer Tilly actually having twins, so hey, just possess both these babies and actually be a boy and a girl. But like, put a pin in that one.

Oh and fun trivia. I suspected this on my own and wikipedia confirms it with quotes. Going full camp for Bride and casting one of the women from Bound basically pushed the whole series over some sort of queer event horizon, which the writer was OK with because hey, he’s openly gay. This movie had to switch studios because the first thought it was “too gay,” and he just kinda doubled down from here on out. Like I don’t think any straight characters, major or minor, get introduced from here on out.

Curse of Chucky (2013) took another decade to come out and went straight to video. Which, you know, reread that last paragraph, and while we are just making everyone gay now, it seems our writer and now also director realized he flew too close to the sun with the high camp duology and we’re back to doing the standard evil doll thing, terrorizing a new family, with the actual real life daughter of Brad Dourif (who plays Chucky and was also Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings movies and the guy with the giant eyebrows in the ‘80s Dune) as the lead, she’s in a wheelchair due to Chucky attacking her mother while she was pregnant back before the whole doll thing happened, and we’ve kinda got a back to finish the job sort of setup, with this whole extended family in a big house getting bumped off and gradually piecing together there’s something up with this doll someone mailed to the main character’s niece.

This is the one entry in the series that didn’t do anything for me. It goes a bit nasty and gory on the kills which previous movies kind of just saved for big awful Chucky deaths oddly enough. It doesn’t have the high camp energy of the previous couple either and I miss it. Someone pointed out to me that it is interesting how it manages a really good fake out and absolutely comes across as a straight up reboot until a good ways in, at which point Chucky takes off some patch-overs hiding the scars from being sewn back together in Bride and giving a bit of a speech that basically amounts to “oh no absolutely everything is still canon actually. There’s just more to my life than stalking the one kid and dealing with my unstable girlfriend.” Also this one ends with a post-credits scene I literally found out existed just now when looking up release dates because Tubi kept jumping right into the next movie as credits started, and it’s kind of important to see for that one to make even a little sense, as Chucky mails himself to the kid from the original movies, and hey he also gets a phone call from his mother, so OK either she did get let out of wherever eventually or he got adopted by someone decent. Nice to learn. Also nice to learn this actor didn’t get messed up from staring in a horror movie when he was just freaking six. Anyway he counter-ambushes Chucky with the big ol’ rifle he has because I mean 3′s still canon.

Cult of Chucky (2017) is the last movie in the series... because it’s setting the stage for the TV series. And by “setting the stage for the TV series” I mean it just kinda does the screenwriting equivalent of dumping a whole bin of legos on the floor and leaving it for someone else to clean up. Makes this honestly just a complete mess of a movie (especially coming in without seeing that post-credits scene) but honestly it was probably the right call. Unlike most other things following the trend of adapting an ‘80s horror series to a serialized TV show, we didn’t actually have a big sloppy mess of lore and confusing continuity and unaccounted for characters, so yeah, make a big mess of things and spend a season or two cleaning it up, sure.

Basically the protagonist from Curse ends up institutionalized because... she was kind of the sole survivor of that one and insisting a doll killed everyone, but it’s not really plausible she did it because the house it takes place in isn’t all that wheelchair accessible. So we have this whole cast of other committed people here to be... not great portrayals of mental illness (but I mean, I’ve seen much worse) and give us some victims to run through, and a super awful corrupt hypnosis and sexual assault-y head of the place. And like, the tone of these last two is such that when she learns Chucky is actually there she tries to kill herself and Chucky then discovers this and sews her wrist back up. Not a fan.

Thing is though we’re cutting away now and then to the kid from the original trilogy interrogating the half-exploded and severed head of Chucky as was mailed to him in that post-credits scene, while Chucky is running around the mental hospital, and the eventual explanation for that is he found lessons online on how to possess multiple dolls at once. Also people. And by the end of the thing we’ve got 3 Chucky dolls running around (plus the interrogation head), plus our protagonist is possessed, and for good measure Chucky’s girlfriend still possessing actress Jennifer Tilly is in the mix, and original kid had a... poorly thought out big hero plan that just kinda lead to him being locked in a padded cell. And yeah, as a starting point for a TV series, sure, I’m good with this. Oh and this also had a post-credits scene I missed, where Kyle from 2 shows up to torture the head. Glad she’s still around.

So that’s the whole series, aside from, you know, The Series, which I am quite tempted to watch now if I can get my hands on it, and the ACTUAL reboot with Mark Hamill and Aubrey Plaza where it’s less possessed doll and more evil smart home setup. Although that’s STILL the original writer and I hear it’s actually quite good, just, yeah, access issues here.

Speaking of the series though, that pin I put in the whole Glen/Glenda thing? While I haven’t watched the show what first sent me down this rabbit hole was catching references to Chucky having a queer kid and while I’m pretty sure Seed of Chucky had its heart in the right place with... let’s be blunt, bad execution, having 20 years to learn how to do better apparently the show just freaking quadruples down with it, and both of the twins they possess at the end of that grow up to be nonbinary, are played by a nonbinary actor, do the whole they/them pronoun badge thing, and for good measure Glen has a more femme look than Glenda. And yeah both their parents are actively cool with this, so, you know, that’s just cool.

As is this series on the whole, really? I’m kind of surprised. I don’t like slashers, generally speaking, which these definitely are except the super campy entries in the middle. But they’re pretty clever and fun, and like, Chucky works way better as an actual character than other slasher villains tend to. Some people find Freddy Krueger fun but like... go watch the first movie again. That backstory is too irredeemable for me to watch you do improv while killing kids. Most others are just silent killing machines. Chucky though, despite the whole magically possessing a doll thing, is Just This Guy. Like yeah he kills people with little to know provocation, but he’s got this schlubby put upon working class guy from New Jersey who just kinda got caught up in a weird situation thing going on. Plus I’m easily charmed by good practical effects and damn is that doll rig impressive.

Oh yeah I keep writing these giant posts and then forgetting to plug my Patreon at the end. I know people don’t like plugs but apparently this blog is now how I survive and I’m not doing a super great job of it. The sooner I get back to the point where my rent and utilities are properly covered the sooner I can stop spending most of my time begging and do stuff interesting enough to write about.

[cisthehuman]

Cis Rambles #5--2024: Wow it's in 2 days!

It's been a wild ride both personally and stream wise!

What Went Down in 2023:

Graduated w/ my Masters, and with that paid my way through grad school

Got diagnosed with PCOS and began treatment!

Got a part time job in my field!

Rebranded and started streaming again!

Started the CisLunar Visual Novel

Started a new music youtube!

(Please check it out! I put all of my tunes on there!)

What to look forward to in 2024!

I have major goals/projects I want to accomplish!

Project 1: The CisLunar Visual Novel!

My multimedia project, CisLunar, is one that has been in the works since I first started streaming possibly 2 or 3 years ago. It is only recently that I decided to take streaming seriously so while I've had my account for a while, I feel like I've only gotten in the swing of things earlier in December. Cislunar, a real word, means "between earth and the moon". It was a random word I found out about while I completed a word search on my phone and ever since, a story has been growing. Plus, as I go by Cis, it really fits lol

The crux of the story is about grief--acknowledging it, processing it, and adapting from it. Almost 3 years ago, I suddenly lost my father. I have been riddled with several emotions that I wanted to process and thus this story is born.

The story follows Lunar Sun (she/they), an alien cat woman who lives on Planet GJ504b (the pink planet). She is a radio host by day and a mafia informant by night. While she smiles and laughs, she's been making a dangerous habit, one that leads her to a new up and coming job. Online entertainment is at an all time high with entertainers reaching different people across the galaxy. The trouble is, people would like to keep their anonymity. Thus the now booming job of Mutualistic Parasite is born. Because they have nothing else to lose, Lunar takes the job leading them to Cis the Parasite (she/they). Cis the Parasite is quiet, stoic, and clearly a loner. Lunar believes they can be partners, but doesn't realize they have more in common with the earthling...

Ooooooh So Interesting! So Wonderous! It's So Unfinished LOL

So we have some goals for this year regarding the VisNovel:

Finish the script for the CisLunar Visual Novel!

Finish designing characters for the CisLunar Visual Novel!

Actually learn ren'py programming!

Project 2: Streaming

I started streaming part time on December 6 (I believe lol I'm bad with dates)! It's been so wonderful so far! Thanks to some wonderful artists, things look much shinier and new! Please take a gander at my twitch page (and follow! you know you want to):

I've been having fun playing games and drawing and I can't complain! However, there is one small issue--I don't get many viewers. While it is true that with whatever I make, I don't do things for numbers or follows, it is also true that streaming alone can be quite lonesome (shoutout to calcium for making it when they can and being a trooper in the chat! I genuinely perk up when you pop in because it is not just me anymore LOL).

That being said, I have a couple of goals for streaming this year!

Get 50 followers

Have at least 10 people chatting in chat.

Slowly but surely complete the PC-98 inspiration for my streams (I actually got a head start on this one; already got a new overlay commissioned~)

Learn more things I can do with obs plugins, to help with the PC-98-ification of the streams

Buy a better laptop to stream on (this one is nice and it lagging helps with the old school vibe I'm going for, but I need some better performance!)

And a big far away goal--have a big named vtuber say I'm their fave obscure streamer lolol

Project 3: Music!

Honestly, because of work and at the time how tired I was due to my health, I didn't have enough capacity to put out the big bulk of music I made. I literally have at the least 40 tracks that are just on soundtrap LOL

With that being said, starting in the new year, I plan to finally put this music out there! It needs to be out into the wild! I'm also going to do my best to draw a cover for each album as well (this is where the backlog gets created), but I've allowed myself to be happy with a cool free use image as well lol. With that being said, there are already 5 albums ready to be posted. They just need cover images and they'll be put up!

I'm also close to finishing Vol.3 of Cosmic Canary Radio aka the stream music! Getting close to 50 tracks so it's the biggest one so far. I believe I have 5 tracks left and then I'll be done! Here are some tracks as a preview of what's in Vol.3

(lol not all the bands use caps in their name, that's just a hilarious coincidence for the ones I chose to put here)

For this project, the goals are:

put out finished albums!!!

Put out Vol 3 of Cosmic Canary Radio!

Make a section (or separate tumblr) for the fake bands in this universe!

Project 4: Quasar

This is a very far away project, but I'd like to get much farther on it in hopes of working on it while finishing CisLunar Visual Novel.

Quasar has been in the works for at least 8 years now, but I've finally worked on it in earnest the past two years. It's influenced by shows/movies like Redline, Motorcity, Speedracer (the movie more than the show), etc. It connects with the zeitgeist within CisLunar loosely so unfortunately I need to get CisLunar started before I can start posting some things about it (I might break that rule though).

Goals for this project include:

finish designing characters

finalize how the story will be provided to readers

complete the plot lol

I have some personal goals too, but I won't go into to much depth here. Most of them revolve around my own mental and physical health, and while I said I would be open to a degree about my issues to help convey there is a real life human in reality behind this screen, I'll leave it at I'm gonna learn to live with PCOS and I'm tired of having a mentally sick mind. While this year has been quite positive for me, I also had some major lows that stopped me from doing what I love--creating things.

LOL ALSO--I plan to update this tumblr more! More sketches and designs and me putting my stream schedule on here and stuff! That was a run on sentence but it is to show how much stuff is going to be on here now!

This was an EXTREMELY long post, but I wanted to write out all of my goals. Maybe I'll come back at the end of next year and see how well I did!

Until then, seeeee youuu neext tiiimmeeeeee!

[persephoneflouwers]

This isn’t meant to be in a bad way at all, so I’m really hoping this doesn’t come across that way. I’m just newer to this stan culture. I’ve always just liked singers because I enjoy their music but never really knew nor cared about their personal life til now with Louis and Harry. Since becoming a Larrie, I’ve noticed how their personal life almost overshadows their music at times. Again no disrespect or judgement for that because things hit people differently and everyone has to do what is best for them. I’m just honestly curious if for example you would unstan Louis, would you also stop liking his music because you no longer feel that connection to him? Oh and I really like your analysis of his songs that you created and pinned.

Hi, how are you? Thank you! I’m glad you liked those songs posts. I want to take some time to reply to this ask because I feel there are a few misconceptions in fandom lately since current things are messy or ever.

I find the word ‘stan’ very interesting. I’m not sure many people know where this word comes from and how much (or not) its connotation has changed through the years. I really love etymology, but I will spare you the boring lesson. My point to simplify all this is if you are a stan you are consequently a fan, but if you are fan you can not be a stan, because a stan is a fan who knows too much. You know, like when you follow UAs for that artist/actor/model/band/celebrity, know updates on their friends and family and basically when you know much more than what just a fan would know. You can be a fan without being a stan.

I am not a Lizzo Stan, but I still go to her shows and interact with her. I am not a Lewis Capaldi stan, but I love his songs and voice. I’m not Dua Lipa stan, I’m her girlfriend (for real, for real). And I could name literally any other artist I don’t spend time obsessing over. I still buy their music, I still stream their music, see their content, appreciate them artistically, but I am not a stan.

When it comes to Louis and Harry, the unstan culture makes this sound so dramatic. I promise you it’s okay if you take a step back or several and just are gonna vibe with their music. It’s okay if you don’t know the setlist by heart, if you don’t see their tour content everyday, if you don’t follow their siblings on every social, if you won’t keep up with their latest update or spot or drama or discourse. It’s completely fine to enjoy things the way you like. I know being around people who get overexcited with all the little things (sometimes it takes the bare minimum literally) can create some pressure as if you’re being less of a fan or something. But that’s not my case.

I know where to set boundaries when it comes to them now. I’ve learned it. I learned I can appreciate their content more when I know less and if someday I can’t stan anymore for whatever reason, that won’t mean I can’t just listen to their music or something.

I hope that clears things and I hope this helps those who wants to start engaging with fandom content more lightly.

[hadeschan]

item # K23D25

VERY RARE Nang Kwak Luang Phu Tim, Nua Nga Gae. A hand carving ivory Nang Kwak figurine, a  spirit or household divinity of Thai folklore, a Wealth  Fetching Deity seating on her knees, raising her right arm in a beckoning gesture to bring wealth & prosperity to your  business / shop / house., made by Luang Phu Tim of Wat Lahan Rai, Rayong Province in BE 2518 (CE 1975).

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“The ivory or tusk of an elephant is viewed as a symbol of power, protection, wisdom and good luck with spiritual power.”

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BEST FOR: “Kaa Kaai Dee, Chareon-rung-reuang, Chok-laap, Gae-jon” which means it helps tempt your customers to buy whatever you are selling, and it helps attract new customers and then keep them coming back, and to live a glorious life with success and  career advancement plus safety, and away from poverty. This amulet has a tendency to draw positive energy. Nang Kwak attracts wealth, abundance, prosperity, good luck, good fortune, happiness, purity and positive things to come, success in career, in love, and in relationships. Being away from cycle of poverty, and having multiple streams of income while building wealth. Changing your luck from bad to good. It helps build confidence with positive feedback from people around you. Metta Maha Niyom (it makes people around you love you, be nice to you, and willing to support you for anything), Klawklad Plodpai (it pushes you away from all danger). Ponggan Poot-pee pee-saat Kunsai Mondam Sa-niat jan-rai Sat Meepit (it helps ward off evil spirit, demon, bad ghost, bad omen, bad spell, curse, accursedness, black magic, misfortune, doom, and poisonous animals). And this amulet helps protect you from manipulators, backstabbers, and toxic people. And this amulet helps protect you from manipulators, backstabbers, and toxic people.

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Nang Kwak

Nang Kwak (Thai: นางกวัก) is a spirit or household divinity of Thai folklore. She brings wealth & prosperity. Nang Kwak is a benevolent spirit. She is deemed to bring luck, especially in the form of money, to the household. She is the patron Deity of all Merchants and Salesmen and can be seen in almost every business establishment in Thailand.

Thai people like to have a figurine or cloth poster (called a Pha Yant,or Yantra Cloth) of this goddess in their home or shop, where it is often placed by the shrine. Some people also wear amulets with her figure around the neck, which is a logical development, due to the fact that many people in Thailand must travel around to sell their wares, which makes a portable Nang Kwak amulet the obvious choice for such a person.

Legends

Although Nang Kwak is more a figure of popular folklore than a religious deity, there are Buddhist legends that seek to incorporate her into the Buddhist fold.

One Buddhist legend presents Nang Kwak as Nang Supawadee. About 2500 years ago, before or during the time when Buddhism was beginning to spread, in the small town of Michikasandhanakara, in the Indian province of Sawadtii, there was a married couple, Sujidtaprahma and his wife Sumanta, who had a daughter named Supawadee. They were merchants who sold small amounts of wares on the markets, only earning just enough to maintain their small family from day to day. One day, they were discussing their hopes and dreams for the future, and decided that they should try to expand their business to make more profit and begin to think of being able to save something for their old age.

As a result of this conversation, they decided to try to afford to buy a gwian (cart) in order to use to travel with and sell their wares to other towns and villages. They also then brought wares from the other towns to sell in Sawadtii and Michigaasandhanakara when they returned. Sometimes, Supawadee would ask to tag along for the ride, and help them. One day, as Supawadee was helping her parents to sell wares in a distant town, she was lucky to be able to hear a sermon by Phra Gumarn Gasaba Thaera; she was so convinced and moved by his sermon, that she took refuge in the Triple Gem. When Gasaba Thaera saw her faith and devotion, he collected all his powers of thought and concentration, for he was an Arahant, and bestowed blessings of good fortune and luck in salesmanship on Nang Supawadee and her Family.

Another story tells of Nang Kwak living on a higher plane of existence: Nang Kwak was the daughter of Pu Chao Khao Khiao, meaning ‘Grandfather Lord of the Green Mountain’ (Khao Khiao). Pu Chao Khao Khiao was a Lord of the Chatu Maha Rachika realm (one of the lower levels of Heaven - an Asura realm of giants and pretas). His other name is ‘Pra Panasabodee’, and he is the Lord of the forest and places where wild plants grow. In that time, there was an Asura demon called To Kok Khanak (also known as ‘To Anurak’). To Kok Khanak was a good friend of Pu Chao Khao Khiao, who had been attacked by Phra Ram (the hero of Ramakien, Thai version of the Ramayana), who had thrown a Kok tree at him which pierced his chest and carried him through space to be pinned to the side of Pra Sumen. In addition, Pra Ram cursed him with the following magic spell: ‘Until your descendants weave a Civara monks robe from lotus petals, and offer it to Pra Sri Ariya Maedtrai (Maitreya the future Buddha) your curse will not be lifted.’

After this, Nang Prachant, the daughter of Lord Kok Khanag had to serve her father, spending the days and nights trying to weave a Civara robe from lotus petals, in order to have it ready for offering to Pra Sri Ariya Maedtrai who will descend to become enlightened in a future age. Meanwhile To Kok Khanak had to remain cursed and pinned to Pra Sumen and his daughter was in a dire situation without her father to help run things. Since she had to spend all her time weaving the Civara, she had no time to sell things or make money, nor time to run a shop. When Chao Khao Khiaw heard this, he felt compassion and sent his daughter Nang Kwak to go stay with her. Because of her merit, Nang Kwak caused merchants and rich nobles to flock to Nang Prachant’s home and bestow gifts of gold, silver and money on her. Nang Prachant became wealthy and led a comfortable life.

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*with Certificate of Authenticity issued by DD-PRA

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DIMENSION: 1.50 cm high / 0.40 cm wide / 0.50 cm thick

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item # K23D25

Price: price upon request, pls PM and/or email us hadeschan@gmx.us

100% GENUINE WITH 365 DAYS FULL REFUND WARRANTY

Item location: Hong Kong, SAR

Ships to: Worldwide

Delivery: Estimated 7 days handling time after receipt of cleared payment. Please allow additional time if international delivery is subject to customs processing.

Shipping: FREE Thailandpost International registered mail. International items may be subject to customs processing and additional charges.

Payments: PayPal / Western Union / MoneyGram /maybank2u.com / DBS iBanking / Wechat Pay / Alipay / INSTAREM / PromptPay International

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[lyraeon]

Yes!! Regulars are the best!

There was a lady who would stop by our Sonic every night on her way home from work to buy two bags of our ice. If she wasn't gonna make it before we were closed, we would usually still have them ready for her, because we knew she was coming. It was a $7-ish order and probably one of the bigger hassles to do, but that didn't matter because she was part of our routine, she was a familiar piece of the evening we looked forward to. (also she was genuinely grateful for our help, and with plenty of people yelling at us over their chicken strips taking 6 whole minutes to cook, anyone who said thank you and meant it was our lifeblood).

It is 16 years later and I still remember her face vividly, I remember what general kind of van she drove, and remember explaining her to new employees excitedly. Because in a way, I loved her, and people like her, because they made the job more fun and more human.

My absolute, absolute favorite were the people who were into something seasonal, because getting to share the news that we'd gotten the mint milkshakes or the butterscotch hot chocolate or the lemongrass sauce or the year's Pixar movie with someone was always something to look forward to.

And nowadays as a streamer, I feel the same way. For every one "oh god, not this guy again" there are fifty "oh hi I know you!"s, in terms of the people who aren't there every day but do show up on a regular basis (and every single one of those "not this guy again"s are the ones who're clearly showing up just to let you know they're streaming in a little while, hint hint nudge nudge). Seeing names pop back up is amazing. Seeing a familiar set of emotes, even if they're not mine, either because they're from a friends' or because a viewer just has really good emotes they use, makes me all warm and fuzzy.

And in any case where you become a regular, and you don't want to chat with staff (or the streamer, or other customers, or whatever applies), I promise that sticking to the minimum of what needs to be said is fine too (and in fact, us remembering your order is often us trying to help you not have to go through the ordeal of ordering, or otherwise help speed up your experience!) and that I HAVE had customers tell me straight out that they don't like small talk or they aren't talkative or whatever. And I will gladly respect that!

tldr; regulars are enrichment for extroverts, don't be afraid to be one, especially one who says thank you!

P.S. also I am squealing with glee at all these happy tales!

Starving to death this morning because ive been to the new local cafe twice this week already and if i go a third time ill look desperate.

[suugrbunz]

Hey! 💝anon here.. That was me giving tips earlier.. Been back on Tumblr for just a couple days, clearing out my old account, saying hellos to old online friends. Thank you, so much, for how you inspired my story last year. You motivated me - so much!

The story finished. I adidn’t do a huge amount with Maureen & Lyam’s relationship; they had a few more moments together, bonding & learning to trust & appreciate each other. Their final moment in the story was their first kiss! (I can send a snippet if you’d like?)

I turned 19 last year (so, a bit younger than you I suppose :)) It’s been good, getting offline. It’s given me more time to do other things; learn gardening from an elderly relative, do some singing (on my own lol), spend time with my family, learn about things that interest me.

Anyway. Hope you’re doing okay and taking care of yourself, and you can find ways to make life easier, whatever those ways are. 

I understand about the streaming service thing. My family usually just watch cheap second hand DVDs (charity shop sells 20 DVDs for £1!), and occasionally use the cheaper version of Netflix (with ads). I use Internet Archive (archive.org) for books and films (manly older, lesser known films), it’s free, so that’s a good option. 

And totally, get away from Instagram & TikTok! If you think you’d be happier without it, drop it! People online can be really nasty. I quit looking at Reddit, & basically all comments, last year after I suffered a deep depression (due to peoples’ extremely nasty comments toward a part of lgbt that I identify with) Doing a lot better now. 

IDK, and it’s not my business, but hope something works for you. The best people, the ones worth knowing, are those who appreciate character and kindness over consumerist beauty ideals (I say consumerist cause it’s in my belief that we’re pretty well brainwashed to think “perfect looking” people look good; a way of getting people to keep buying makeup they don’t need and the latest fashions)

Ahh, hope this isn’t too much, I write fast and am only basing this all off a couple posts I saw you made, so I’m real sorry if it’s too much! I’ve got a ton of spare time today so I’m just rambling. 

I can’t be coming back to online socialising like I used to, as it took up so much of my limited spare time last year, so this is a rarity, just to say hello. Hugs 🫂 

💝anon

i literally cried seeing it was you— i was noshing on a gyro, crying alone in the kitchen. I have hereditary depression, so it won't get better. It'll always be there. It's just worse than normal lately. Hoping it'll calm down, I wrote and edited some of my book today.

This is like writing a lovely old pen pal, ah, it's nearly therapeutic. I think of you often. I'm nearing tears as i write this because something about talking to you has felt so homeward bound. I love archive, that's how I watched the clash movie, Rude Boy! I have some unread books I wish to finish, one is kafka and the other is khalil gibran. You should see the khalil gibran book, it has such an ornate cover.

I adopted a cat since we've last spoken, she was beside my neighbours house during a storm. I had been taking out my dog and heard her meowing. When i approached her, she immediately came to me. Oh, her name is Laila, she's a tortoise shell.

I definitely have to agree, we are brainwashed constantly to see aging as a sign of lost beauty. Similarly, we are taught that our bodies are never enough because whatever the trend is— it isn't for a girl with an hourglass body. I told my mother the other night, through lots of tears i have never truly loved myself. I mean, around puberty is when confidence develops, at least in my opinion. I got bullied for my body developing into what it now is. So, you can imagine what eating disorder shit i go through because of it. Only fueled by my mother also having a fucked up perception of body-image as well. I am trying my best to understand that my value is an independent variable from the weight on a scale.

Please send me all the writing you wish to, I remember loving your writing. I started publishing my book, but it's completely different. I had to change everything; it was going nowhere. I couldn't get a plot to stitch together. I was nearly at the point of deleting it. Then, out of the blue, I woke up after some dream and was like— "what if I used tamino as a faceclaim? What if x, y, z?". Soooo, i ended up experimenting with it and i actually followed through on replacing nick (i want to implement him in the new book tbh, i miss him). Ah, i hope you find the time to read the chapters I have published... that is if you want to read them, truly there is no pressure there. Again though; please send me your work.

[colsonlin]

“Cape Cod”: a good old-fashioned short story (a 45-minute read)

“Cape Cod” is an analysis of our society’s tendency to produce narcissism, sociopathy, and casual dehumanization. It felt so good to get all of this off my chest! —Nina

A lot of how we talk about middle school in America is something I take issue with—like, for instance, that it’s somehow not the most formative experience of our lives. (It is.) A lot of people say “college,” but I had already cycled into an idea of who I was going to be as an adult by then—an A student, a talker, a birdwatcher, a take-no-prisoners observer of human social life. I studied sociology at the University of Maryland. At my retail job now—I work at a Nordstrom in Connecticut—I interact with a dying breed: old rich white women who still buy their cashmeres at the mall. At my old retail job in Farmington I was a cashier. At Nordstrom I’m more of a saleswoman—I don’t hand my customers their purchases after I’m done folding their clothes into the bag, I walk around the counter to deliver their parcels to them personally. I work six nights a week until the mall closes at 11 and on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays I drive to my second job at a call center in Southington. I earn enough money to pay for my Hyundai and an apartment above the laundromat, have coffee on the weekends, keep up with my student loans, and map out what the next step will be.

College feels like a million years ago.

Middle school still feels like yesterday.

“Brenda” (not her real name), my supervisor at my old department store in Farmington, was the portrait of managerial incompetence. She was fat and unmarried and all of the associates who weren’t actively helping a customer used to crowd into the stock room whenever she came out of her office, usually to berate one of us for misplacing a store key. We all know a Brenda from middle school. Everything you say is wrong, and everything she says can’t be improved upon. Three of us quit within the first ten months of Brenda’s arrival, and at least one of us later wrote an anonymous email to the district manager about her obvious drinking problem.

My old department store—I don’t want to get into any trouble here so let’s just call them “Not-Quite Sephora”—was in a strip mall. I never knew who to feel more sorry for during the day, myself or the customers who came in. I once explained to my boyfriend that we were kind of like Wal-Mart’s “more youthful older sister”—a high school varsity cheerleader perhaps, but still stuck in the past all the same.

There were ten of us on the first floor—the second floor, “Men’s,” might as well have been a different planet entirely. Brenda acted like she was better than all of us, because she has a master’s degree in “Global Business Administration,” whatever the fuck that was. Brenda didn’t seem to understand that all her master’s degree did was make her look both underqualified and overqualified for her job at the same time. (Her main role, from what I could tell, was assigning holiday bonuses and amplifying customer complaints.)

Not-Quite Sephora has a dying business model, but we were kept artificially alive by a steady stream of suburban glum as the principal anchor of a once-iconic strip mall. The first floor was perpetually understaffed—our Google reviews under Brenda’s mismanagement decayed from 4.2 to 2.8 stars (and this coming from a woman who tends to take “American public opinion” with a grain of salt). The turnover rate among everyone except me, Ashley, and Gabby seemed to be such that a new Chris, Brian, or Andy was being fired every three months. Good riddance, I always thought.

Men don’t understand how to take orders from a woman, and the ones who say they do are liars from the black lagoon.

I understand Brenda.

I really do.

Brenda’s most direct feature was that you couldn’t get a direct answer out of her, ever—it was either caustic sarcasm or happy-peppy self-deprecation. Everything she said was either designed to suppress or to charm. She was intelligent, which was the problem—quick-witted even—she prized competence, prided herself on being everything everywhere all at once (with self-pity), once complained to me in the break room that she was an ex-spelling-bee champion. Appearance-wise, what once made me jolt awake at night was that she tries, she actually tries. Not doing anything to set Brenda off had become something of an obsession of mine by her third month there. I applied to other jobs, but only in non-retail.

Trying to go non-retail—my life in a nutshell.

Brenda took over at a precarious time. Inflation was rising. Covid was either over or about to be over, but either way, brick-and-mortar seemed to be one of its death tolls. Brenda had mousy blond hair, wore black trousers to work, and used to tramp around the store carrying an inventory clipboard whenever she was upset about something. I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to take fashion-merchandising so seriously. Her first day at Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda compared our fitting rooms favorably to the fitting rooms at her old Kohl’s in Florida, now shuttered (“So coming back up here was kind of like coming home for me, y’know?”). Brenda grew up in a trailer park in New Jersey and you can tell.

You can guess what her politics are.

I think what appealed to me most about the Cape Cod trip, if I were to be honest, was the right to tell Brenda that I’d have to take a few days off in mid-September because my boyfriend had invited me on a trip to “the Cape.”

Here was a woman in her late forties or early fifties who had located the profundity of her self-esteem in “competence”—and yet it never finally occurred to her that the only way to be “competent” in your everyday life is to command the trust of those around you. Trust is earned, Brenda, and it’s lost with unreliability. I could never really trust that woman not to not trap me inside a rule without being able to explain to me the reasons—not to not be imperious and self-certain and in self-protection mode at all times—and not to not explode all of her emotional wreckage on me, drenching me in the black mist of her self-absorption. Brenda was always right. Brenda is never to be questioned. (Brenda’s real name is “Karen,” which is why I didn’t want to say it at the time.)

It felt so good to able to tell Brenda that—all of her anxieties about the back-to-school rush aside—I’m going to have to take three days off in mid-September because my boyfriend has invited me on a trip with his three friends to the Cape. (I met my boyfriend a year ago on Opal.) It pained me to be so petty—no, not the reference to Cape Cod, which was just a kiss on the lips, but the reference to having a boyfriend, which was my primary poison. I wore more eyeliner to work, not less, the longer the weeks went by trying to circumnavigate Brenda’s imperialism. I enjoyed looking like a magazine cover while supplicating to her at the makeup counter.

We worked at a department store.

(“—so that’s my life, okay?”)

I could see it already. I love how Brenda, with her master’s degree in Global Business Studies or whatever the fuck she majored in, has to flinch every time who I really was blinked in front of her. I bet you flinched every time you saw me shrug into your office, Brenda, no matter what you called me into your office for, because I know about the Us Weeklies you stole from the front stands—I told Accounting about them!—I know how responsive you are to young women with movie-star looks who had won the genetic lottery. I smile at you, Brenda, precisely because I know how my angelic dimples make you feel. It makes you feel like you want to protect me.

It makes you feel you need to defend your true queen.

Beauty was my one and only power over Brenda, but I can assure you I only used it sparingly (all it took was sparingly with a woman so obsessed with appearances). We don’t talk about being pretty enough, which is another way of saying we don’t talk about seeing only the appearances enough. Seeing only the appearances was how I, prior to this weekend, once saw Cape Cod. What do you know about Cape Cod anyway? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you mentally google it? I want to leave you now with an image of seagulls.

I matched with my boyfriend last September on Opal.

Now I know what you might be thinking—this whole story basically amounts to one long humblebrag about how I have an account on Opal, lol. No. First of all, I deleted that account six months ago. My boyfriend and I both did, on the same day—that was how we agreed to be serious.

Opal’s cornered the market on young attractive people who like to paraglide to remote destinations—the one and only trick it has up its sleeves is “exclusivity,” which in America is a royal flush. I’ll tell you real quick how I landed an account on Opal. A hedge-fund apparatchik I had gone on two dates with wrote me a recommendation letter after I told him I didn’t think it was going to work out between us, but did he still want to be friends? (And what do friends do?) It was his fault. He was the one who’d bragged to me about having an account on Opal in the first place. He even helped me pick out my profile pictures.

I left the Alma Mater field blank.

Opal’s about what you’d expect—videos of narcissist after narcissist who summer in Thailand. I swiped past all of the alpha males, which took days. Men who were earnest or men who were silly were the only men I could take seriously.

My boyfriend’s in that five percent of men just below the top ten percent that most women don’t know to circle the ocean for. You know the type. He’d be unstoppable if just one or two more things had gone right for him, but as it were, the wrong job, the wrong company, the wrong alma mater, had kept a handsome face trapped beneath a monthly gym membership. You’ll recognize these five-percenters from their personality—pure souls who’d lucked out facially, two sevens on the slot machine, but whose unambiguous victory had been stunted by some existential lemon. Some of them have eating disorders. Some google “male plastic surgery” in the dead of night. In my boyfriend’s case, he’s pansexual. Open-minded women have rejected him, which gives him a chip on his shoulder, and now he thinks he understands what it’s like being a minority. My boyfriend’s the type to care a lot about social issues. I’m not sure he even knows we’re interracial.

His parents have a house in Cape Cod.

His dad’s a federal judge and his mom’s an immigration attorney. Until we met and he started showing me pictures on his phone of his childhood vacation home, I had never really thought a lot about Cape Cod. I only knew it as the brand of a potato chip one step up the class ladder from Lay’s, and as a cultural metonym for white-sand beaches, old stone lighthouses, and the Kennedys. Brenda grew up in a trailer park in New Jersey, but I’m sure she must have learned at her master’s program what Cape Cod was.

Cape Cod was where she wanted to be.

And as it so happens, Brenda?

Cape Cod is me.

I wanted so desperately to tell her but I couldn’t.

I wanted so badly to inform Brenda that I had more important things to worry about than making sure the lipsticks were alphabetized, or that the powders were arranged in alternating shades of rouge and beige: namely, that a splitting image of one of the stars you read about in Us Weekly had a life to live, and she was going to enjoy the fruits of her beauty—fruits that Brenda could only live vicariously through (I tallied six missing issues of Us Weekly over the course of a year; no other magazine had gone unaccounted for during the same period except for a single issue of Better Homes & Gardens, which I found one night crumpled on top of Brenda’s desk).

The way Brenda’s eyes lit up whenever she talked about Mackenzie Davis—I just needed Brenda to recognize my own beauty in the same way! It flipped around, you see, like a head trip—sometimes Brenda bowed to her true queen, and sometimes she said mean things to me. I wasn’t thought of as “intelligent” by Brenda, and I could never tell if it was because of my race or my beauty—the two possibilities flickered around in my head like a dueling candlelight until one night I decided, “It’s both,” and just let it die.

Resentment was brewing between me and Brenda.

Ever since I realized I would have to lie to her about my Cape Cod trip, because September would be the back-to-school rush, and there was no way Brenda was okaying me those vacation days. At Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda’s first rule was: “Just be honest. I want to know everything.”

But do you, Brenda?

Do you want to know how I plan to get out of work during the back-to-school rush, because I’ll be with my boyfriend and his three Yale Law classmates traipsing across Cape Cod? Do you really want to read about a beautiful woman’s life in Us Weekly? (Just steal my diary.) I’ll call in sick. I’ll lie and cough right to your face over the phone, Brenda, and I’m telling you it’s corona. I don’t have to be honest with you about anything because you rule by fear, not trust, and in a world of fear without trust anything goes.

Fear without trust is the animal kingdom.

And Not-Quite Sephora is the animal world.

The night before my last day at Not-Quite Sephora, Brenda humiliated Ashley in the stock room. (Ashley had made the mistake of asking her for paid time off for a wedding in December.) I didn’t overhear it, but I heard about it, which was enough. I have always had a way with words, and I gave Brenda some direct evidence of it by way of a resignation letter I wrote to the district manager—only it wasn’t really a resignation letter, it was more like a record of how Karen McHiggins was a terrible supervisor, sent to Corporate and cc-ed to the entire floor. (What mattered wasn’t that I had cc-ed the entire floor, but that the next morning, every single person on the floor congratulated me.) The group chat I’m in with Ashley and Gabby pops off more than ever now ever since I quit, only I didn’t mean to quit.

I only wanted to take a truthful temperature.

Brenda showed all of her cards when I showed up to my shift the next day. “Nina? My office. Now.”

I made eye contact with Ashley, who was already in her uniform, and we both smiled.

She kind of gave me an eye hug.

I wore nude lipstick that day.

The email I had sent Corporate was subject-lined “Management’s Mismanagement,” and it listed six bullet points about Brenda’s bad behavior (one involved throwing a purse at a mannequin; the last five were instances of emotional abuse). It ended with a paragraph about Brenda’s encounter with Ashley in the stock room (Brenda had called Ashley “unlikable,” “self-absorbed,” “a fucking dipshit”).

I laid out the case like the lawyer I couldn’t afford to be (I had other interests, hobbies, and pursuits in middle school, like not killing myself). Brenda was probably shocked I could write. She was probably shocked I could read, but I wield words as weapons—that’s the only thing you ever have to know about me. (In third grade, I won the spelling bee too.)

How did I dress for work the day after I wrote “Management’s Mismanagement” (and really I should say the morning after, because I sent the email at 4 a.m. and had to wake up three hours to let an exterminator in)?

I looked like a star.

I had even spent the last six months of my life casually coaxing Brenda toward the mixed-race celebrities I wanted her to subliminally see me as. Cape Cod would smile. I’d fit in well there, because in my late forties or early fifties I’d have the sort of personality that everybody at Beach Road would know to be impressed by—I could lift my life up to heights that the bourgeois rabble couldn’t even see. Not a single one of my applications to a white-collar job had ended in a palatable offer. Not-Quite Sephora, founded in Vermont, has a labor-friendly CEO. My benefits were good—I even had vision and dental. “One way or another, I’m bringing up my Cape Cod trip,” was the last clear thought I had before knocking on Brenda’s door.

“Come in,” a harsh voice gruffed.

I opened the door.

“Close that please,” was the first thing I heard Brenda say before she and I even made eye contact.

I closed the door dutifully.

Karen McHiggins was standing next to her desk in red pants and a black blazer. She had tied her hair into pigtails that day for some reason, although her hair was so short that they ended up looking more like ringlets, and her eyes behind her glasses were blue and pixel-like. Brenda made a quick gesture at the floor with her hands, almost like she was trying to say “Enough!”, and then said: “What is going on, Nina—what is going on, because I do not understand you.”

Her voice was hoarse.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her red pants—but your blazer is black?—so I just said, “I—” while panning my gaze to her desk, waiting for her to continue.

Brenda’s desk was a mess.

Just like her thought processes.

“If you have ever had a problem with me, you could have come to me directly. What have I always told you, Nina—” Brenda was now screaming.

Brenda thinks screaming has an effect on me.

She’s right—loud noises do have an effect on me. Elevated decibels have an effect on every animal that evolves through nature. How much do I hate Brenda right now? My eyes are staring into hers—but I don’t see a human.

I see an animal.

The power of volume is that it throbs the ear—and ears desire music. Ears desire harmony. Wild animals make me forget poetry as I bolt into the jungle—how much do I hate the woman screaming into my ears right now? Well, there’s a simple formula for that, and all of us are making it, even if we don’t know that we’re making it. We take how much anxiety we experience from being around a person, and then we multiply it by a factor.

My factor is 1 when that person is equal to me.

My factor is a fraction of 1 when that person is homeless.

My factor is greater than 1 when that person is greater than me.

And for Brenda my factor was 42,137—that’s 1 for every dollar that the winds of Brenda’s turbulence lorded over me, granting me vision and dental.

The ensuing number is a hatred.

How much anxiety was Brenda creating in me? Well, for starters—how much did I distrust Brenda? (And how much did I secretly want Brenda to like me?) All the eyeliner I wore to work every day—it wasn’t for mall patrol, it wasn’t for Ashley, and Lord knows it wasn’t for Gabby.

It was for me.

But maybe a little bit of it was for Brenda.

And how much taller does Brenda tower over me right now?

And how much taller does Brenda tower over me right now? Well, let’s see—I submitted 42 job applications, all non-retail. Interviewed at 11. Final-rounded at 7. Received an offer at two—both in New York, which I couldn’t afford. A young white boy at a social media marketing firm told me during the interview that I was “obviously brilliant” before offering me an internship. By July, Brenda towered over me like a god. I fell asleep at night fantasizing about her supervillain origin story. Brenda complained so much about Americans who weren’t vaccinated that I once asked her if she was a childhood polio survivor. “Where in the world did you get that idea?” Brenda laughed, and I laughed too. “Oh, I was just curious.”“How many times have I told you, Nina…”

My expenses have been going up, thanks to my new boyfriend. (As a matter of fact, I am the type of girl to go Dutch!) Taking over Brenda’s position would mean a four-percent raise. To my surprise, Brenda took off her glasses, put them on top of a crinkled magazine on her desk, and started crying. Like, actually crying.

Two actual teardrops leaked out of her eyes.

Self-pity makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable when the powerless do it, because now I have to do something, and it makes me uncomfortable when the powerful do it, because now I have to eat them. When somebody more powerful than me expresses self-pity, I can’t help it: I want to guillotine them. I want to take away their right to exist, but I want to watch them suffer first. If I were God, I’d invent Hell just for Brenda. It satisfied me that Brenda would most likely die without children or a partner. I want all capitalists in the First World to die without children or a partner, but to have afterlives that go on forever.

It still doesn’t seem enough though.

Brenda’s office has a desk, no windows, and a door that leads to the loading dock. A poster on the wall behind her desk, and I was just noticing this about her office now for the first time, was of a lighthouse in Cape Cod. “—the back-to-school rush—” Brenda was saying, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

The ceiling light was fluorescent, and the walls were built of the same beige bricks that made up my elementary school. I once applied to a master’s program in sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

I got in, too.

I hate it here in America—doesn’t anybody else? Is this really that much better than the Soviet Union?

Sympathy for Brenda?

Brenda who lorded over my vision and dental like a bureaucratic algorithm—my boss Brenda?

I did good work.

I was Brenda’s star employee! (I left that part out because I’m not the bragging type.) The only work I couldn’t charge for was the work I didn’t want to do—navigating around the runes and mysteries of Brenda’s uncharted sensitivities like Leif Erikson. The truth was, I hated Brenda for not being able to see me as a beautiful woman just because I wasn’t a beautiful white woman like the pin-up girls she’d gone to school with in New Jersey. Brenda bleeds white guilt, but she rarely ever let me massage any of it toward my favor, except superficially (and you can guess by now how I feel about superficiality). Brenda’s insincerity dehumanized her to me. We humanize each other first as leaps of faith, and then through trust—and nothing about Brenda’s way of existing suggested she could be trusted by me. Not her white guilt. Not her New Jersey liberalism.

Not even her tears.

In fact the longer Brenda cried, the more intensely I wanted to punish her—the phrase “white bitch tears” comes to mind. I wondered if Brenda sincerely didn’t understand that if I could push a button to keep her trapped inside a hole for the rest of her life, I would, and her tears only made me want to push harder. Still, it gave me a start to see—this woman who could take away my ability to not go into debt like checking “Buy Now” on Amazon—reduced before me into a person now trying to trick me into believing she has a soul.

Don’t the workers of the world understand?

Powerful people don’t have souls.

Brenda having a soul would have meant taking my ideas about the BOPUS orders seriously, and not dismissing them out of hand because how could any good ideas come from Nina, the pretty one, if Brenda’s even not-racist enough to see me as pretty (BOPUS is industry slang for “buy online, pick up in store,” and it’s basically brought Not-Quite Sephora to its knees—that and Brenda’s mismanagement). I could divide my hatred of Brenda by a factor to account for the fact that she was fat and unmarried—but whose fault was that, Krispy Kreme? Do you think I actually like exercising?

Are you ready for some real talk now?

I can tell you about the runner’s high until I’m blue in the face, but I’m not built inside like a runner—I’m built inside like a girl who understands that nothing tastes as good as being pretty feels. I don’t know how American society decayed to this point—my Ph.D. dissertation in sociology at Johns Hopkins would have been about the link between an artificial society and the importance placed on appearances, but I couldn’t afford to go, I had actual work to do in middle school (like not killing myself) so I never bothered thinking very long and hard about anything. “Quitting would mean losing my gym membership,” I suddenly remembered.

A new recognition suddenly dawned over me—no gym membership would mean no Cape Cod. It takes a couple hundred months and a couple thousands steps to get there, but trust me, I’ve worked out the odds.

(I make my brain work for me.)

I looked at the lighthouse poster behind Brenda’s desk and said: “Brenda, it’s just—how you treated Ashley last night in the stock room…”

“You weren’t even there!” was what a clear-headed Brenda would’ve said, but Brenda the Tender said nothing.

“I heard about it from Gabby,” I continued. “You know, we’ve talked about this so many times.”

“I know, I know,” Brenda whispered.

“You don’t know how to create a functional work environment sometimes. Groups are held together by trust, not fear.”

I wasn’t quitting.

I was saving everyone at Not-Quite Sephora from Brenda’s bad temper. Brenda’s boss Charles would understand—he’d say, Nina made some good points in this email, but it sounds like you guys have everything worked out, so get back to work—and everyone would move on.

Only Brenda would now be moving into the light.

She would see how her anxieties about Not-Quite Sephora’s declining sales figures were spilling into her paranoias about job security (“And what will I do with all of my competence now that I can’t find a job because I’m old, fat, and ugly?”) and have been spilling into us as sarcasm and curt dismissals ever since her second day on the job. (Her first day was lovely—I was obsessed with Brenda! I even nicknamed her “cool Mom” to Gabby and Ashley.)

How Brenda appeared to me that first day was how Cape Cod once appeared to me too, before this weekend—white-sand beaches, old stone lighthouses, the Kennedys.

Cape Cod had told me a story—and so had Brenda when she first took over Kristi’s post at Not-Quite Sephora (Kristi got pregnant and never came back). Cape Cod’s story was Yale Law, benevolence, intellectualism. Brenda’s story was that she was loud and earthy and understood how to make an entrance—if she’d been honest, she would’ve just said: “I can use my power to make you feel however I want you to feel about yourself. I’m an emotional abuser.”

But the story I heard, because I’m a gullible sweetheart, was “Fun Mom.”

I laughed along amiably to “stressed-out Mom,” bopped along bewilderedly to “not everything is functional upstairs Mom,” and—how do I put this?

I didn’t like the mother who had a master’s degree.

Self-protection was Brenda’s middle name, and nothing I said using the tools of reason or logic could penetrate the fortress of Brenda’s first impressions—that’s the definition of “closed-minded,” by the way (Brenda has a lot to say about closed-minded people—that’s the crazy part).

How we look is the first story we tell each other about who we are. It’s our audiovisual accompaniment to the words that make up the second half of our story—the “spoken half”—and everyone understands that this isn’t fair, everyone understands and then does nothing. Brenda isn’t the only person who learned how to survive in America by going to an American middle school. She’s only lost her temper at me a couple of times, but I’ve been tracking all of them.

I’ve been watching you like a falcon, Brenda.

I’ve been watching you like a true A student.

True A students are out of favor in America for a reason. We’re only mortal, but we’re a little bit supermortal too. Because what I really didn’t like about Brenda was her insincerity—“When have I ever said no to you, Nina?” Brenda was now drying her eyes with a tissue and screaming.

It was a change in the air—a subtle bit of misdirection that she probably thought I was too stupid to catch (I’m not).

I was the powerful one now.

And Brenda McHiggins was now “the victim.”

“You threatened to fire me right after Easter for being late on a BOPUS order,” I treaded carefully.

“Nina, ninety-nine percent of our Google ratings come down to the BOPUS orders—”

“Which is why I said you needed a better system for assigning roles for when people aren’t .”

“Which is why I said you needed a better system for assigning roles for when people aren’t here.”

“But I never threatened to fire you.”

“You told me you’d have my name forwarded to Charles!"

“Exactly!”

“Which is the same as getting fired!”

“That isn’t true, Nina—I would have protected you.”

This statement was so stupid that it almost broke my brain. “Wha—protected me: do you not understand how Charles operates?” Brenda turned her back to me, waved her hand in the air, and said: “I’m not going to go into this with you again” as she looked for her glasses.

“It’s right there,” I said. “On top of Better Homes & Gardens.”

“Oh,” Brenda said without acknowledging me.

Brenda put on her glasses and then sat down into the chair, which made a sound like it was about to snap in half.

This was how she always liked to berate us—from her chair. I had seen that painting of the lighthouse behind Brenda’s desk so many times—it just never occurred to me that it was Cape Cod. Sometimes, I’d overhear Brenda berating Gabby on my way to the restroom and I’d think, “Well, she isn’t wrong—Gabby is kind of stupid—but that’s still not the way you talk to her. You have to incentivize her to trust you first.” (Gabby was the one who first changed Brenda’s nickname from “Fun Mom” to that cunt with a stick up her ass.) Ashley and I burst out laughing. (What else is there to do inside a dying country?)

“Everyone here is so short-tempered with each other because you set the tone. I’ve been too afraid to ask you for three days off in September to go on a trip with my boyfriend for our one-year anniversary because I knew you weren’t going to say yes, so I was just going to take them off as sick days—and that’s not a functional work environment if people are constantly doing things like that all the time, because what you really need to do is go to Charles and ask for more staff.”

“This September—oh, Nina, you got to be kidding me!”

It was the first honest thing I ever heard Brenda say.

I thought about my naïve dream from earlier—how I thought I was going to turn Brenda around.

How I thought I was going to save the store. “The problem is we’re under_staffed_” was what I should’ve said—I get that now, I do, and I don’t know why I couldn’t wear it in my mouth even as it was trying to form in my subconscious. Because other forms were rising in me now too, forms like: “Brenda is a world-class manipulator. She butters you up just to brine you.” (I couldn’t even trust her tears, and if you can’t trust someone’s tears, you can’t trust them to ever find help.) I don’t know how I’d fare if it were just me and Brenda on a deserted island—I could see her killing a cougar for us with her own bare hands, but I could also see her killing me. “I never said that, I just told you I’d have to forward your name to Charles”—Brenda the liar. Brenda who could probably play dead about as well as she could play stupid—any falcon worth its weight in bird could see through it.

“I’ve been having issues with my boyfriend,” I suddenly blurted out.

Where had I learned this from?

Middle school.

“The anniversary trip means a lot to him, and I can’t even say yes or say no—it just hangs there over us, because he knows about the back-to-school rush. And he’s not even someone I—even feel fully comfortable with in some ways. But I’m also scared to lose him, I’m scared every time I come into work on Tuesday because I don’t know how you’re going to change my hours. Everything we do revolves around my not having enough time—I’d have issues building a perfect relationship with him if we had the rest of our lives to ourselves on a deserted island, but every weekend until closing? He works a normal job! He’s tired all the time too, but he makes time to see me and I can’t—I can’t come to you about anything.”

I didn’t cry.

But I did smile in my head:

“Wanna play victim, bitch?”

I could see Cape Cod now—I could see its lighthouse drawing my boyfriend and I closer and closer, I could see us dancing now to The Strokes at midnight like we were back in middle school because I didn’t want this to be the rest of my life, I don’t want retail, I don’t want resumes and cover letters and I don’t want to meet any more Brendas—what I want is for the Brendas of the world to collapse at my feet, but all I can see are the Brendas of the world closing in on me until death and so I need a release, I need to go back to middle school (I was popular in middle school, I can admit that now, I had bee-stung lips, and a bee-stinger too)—I need The Strokes (haven’t you ever made out with a boy in a hot tub while stroking your nails across his abs, parting the hair where his lower back begins?)—“Is this it? … Is this it?”—(my boyfriend and I swimming in the stars of our liberation, and I’ll give him all the vision and dental that he likes)—prey: always just a one-click order away (and we’ll eat lobster, because lobsters hold harms forever)—I the warm body and he the warm arms, holding me in his lanky-panky forever (and if Connor ever got a gym membership I would die—I don’t need a perfect 10, I can settle for an 8.9)—my captors: do they know? Do they understanding I’m not living my one true life? Wearing Ray-Bans while gazing out at the Atlantic from a yacht, because Comfort is my one true God—I’m ready, Mr. DeMille, for my one true closeup to begin. How am I still in Brenda’s office? I’m twenty-seven years old—how am I twenty-seven years old and still smoldering in Brenda’s office? In middle school I listened to The Strokes while everyone else listened to pop hip-hop—another Universe has been calling to me all my life. And all it would take was just a few more thousand steps to get there.

I’ve been running every day since I was thirteen. I don’t even eat my desserts correctly—I just spit and chew.

Ashley and Gabby remind me of who I was back in middle school. I had power over everyone back then except Abercrombie Couture (not her real name). Abercrombie was the class favorite—it’s hard to explain, but among the very-outgoing girls, Abercrombie was Frivolity Personified. And when only the people who needed to see it could see it, Abercrombie was the cruelest human you’ve ever met—she’d ignore you so subtly you’d drive yourself crazy for days asking the other girls if she was mad at you. Back then I had already begun telling myself I was too cool to care—but I still have nightmares about Abercrombie sometimes, about the way she’d say hi to everybody else at the party except me. “I just can’t deal with your emotional up and downs anymore, Brenda! Like I’m sorry—I’ve defended you to Ashley and Gabby so many times! I’m sick of having these conversations with them.”

Abercrombie, I later realized during college, must have been unsettled by how candidly I could talk about her behind her back. That was my little power over her, and I’d like to think I wielded it gracefully. (Abercrombie was dethroned by a lurid sex scandal involving a used condom in eighth grade, and I’d like to believe I led our class to a more open and inclusive place after her dismissal.)

“Three days—where you trying to go, Wuhan?”

“No. The Cod.”

“The what?”

“The Cod.”

“Where’s that?”

“In Massachusetts.”

“You mean Cape Cod?”

That was how quickly I realized I had fumbled the ball—that was the speed at which I realized I had fumbled the fuck-you—the one thing I needed to do correctly and I had fumbled the ball trying to cross the finish line. “It’s the Cape, not the Cod sweetie,” Brenda was already huffing to me by the time I realized my mistake, with a smile on her face. She’ll deny it to this day, and in absolute candor I can’t really say it was a “physical” smile—I don’t remember what it looked like, I don’t remember if Brenda actually huffed or if she even moved her mouth all that much at all, it was more in the eyes, but that bitch smiled.

I grew up in Nevada.

My boyfriend graduated from Yale Law and with him I can see a way out of my life—and I really don’t understand why that’s such a terrible thing to say. And I’m about to lose him—it’s in between the lines, but I can just feel it, I have him wrapped around my little finger because that’s the only way I’d ever have any man who loomed so tall over me, with him it’d be Cape Cod until the end of my days and nobody would ever laugh at me for calling it the Cod again—I’ll just rename it.

My hatred of Brenda in that moment was rivaled only by my childhood hatred of Abercrombie Couture.

But I knew I had to proceed gingerly.

I began to feel like Leif Erikson again—what other uncharted sensitivities do you have, Brenda?

Do white people really have white guilt?

Verbalizing the subconscious is like navigating by stars—Pequod knows where it’s trying to go, it just needs the conscious mind to plot out the steps to get there first—only I couldn’t verbalize any of this, all I could do was feel the mind for throbs like the twitches of a rat’s tail inside the forest below—and I was throbbing for a release, I was throbbing all my middle-school embarrassments, I was throbbing Cape Cod. A woman who understood nothing but appearances stood in front of me, utterly preoccupied with her own self-preservation—neither wise, open-minded, nor beautiful—but who could mean the difference between me and my income, between me and my livelihood, between me and my boyfriend breaking up (which would mean the difference between me and Cape Cod)—and I couldn’t even get anyone on the second floor to take her magazine theft seriously. How do I even begin to tabulate all her subtle knife-wounds to the psyche?

My favorite song by The Strokes?

“Hard to Explain.”

“You can correct the way I say things all you’d like, but it doesn’t change the fact that I live in fear of you—okay? I go home every night and cry. You bully Ashley and Gabby every day but I’m not Ashley or Gabby—okay? You have not created an emotionally safe environment in the workplace and it’s affecting my life—okay? I’m sorry you take yourself so seriously, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with your fear that all the girls who thought you’d never amount to anything in middle school might be right, but if you have to terrorize other people just to feel better about yourself, that’s not how I roll—okay? That’s not me. The way you talk to Ashley, Gabby, Mike, Chris—it’s un-ac-cep-ta-ble, Brenda.”

And this is where my ship was trying to go:

“I don’t think you belong in your position. So that’s what I told Charles.”

I’d set fire to Cape Cod if I could.

I’d set fire to my boyfriend’s lake house, I’d set fire to Brenda’s Us Weeklies, and I’d certainly set fire to the poster of the lighthouse with seagulls behind Brenda’s desk.

“I don’t work here anymore. Not until you apologize to Ashley,” I added quickly.

My speech was now outpacing my life decisions.

“And I’m not going to be manipulated by you anymore, okay? Because you know how hard I work, you know how much I give to this store every day but Wannabe-Nordstrom isn’t my life, okay? I am not living the life I want to live every single day—so that’s my life, okay?”

Were ordinary people in the Soviet Union this unhappy? Has anyone ever bothered to ask them?

The only thing I ever knew how to do around Brenda was say whatever I needed to say to make her feel comfortable.

Like seagulls exploding out of a cove, that was the only thing Brenda ever seemed to value: her personal comfort. I don’t remember how Brenda looked in that moment. She kept darting her eyes between Better Homes & Gardens and the floor, and her glasses were foggy. I gazed at Brenda with a falcon’s stare and said:

“Think of last night as my last straw.”

It’d be worth it, you know.

It’d be worth it to suspend my gym membership for a few months to see Brenda have to swallow the fruits of her own disorder. I hadn’t coaxed Brenda into reacting the way she did to Ashley’s request—I had only coaxed Ashley into talking to her, and that was a sincere act of friendship: “You have to stand up for yourself with people like that, Ashley.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Brenda and you are like best friends.”

“We are not.”

“You have her wrapped around your little finger, Nina.”

“No I don’t,” I said, and then I hit Ashley’s face with a big fat pillow until feathers fell out, which of course never happened because Ashley and I don’t have open and honest conversations about anything. All Ashley said was “You’re probably right,” and I could sense in Ashley’s eyes that she was perceptive enough to understand I was probably wrong—but even I couldn’t pick that up, at least not consciously, so in a way, Ashley doomed herself by failing to correct me.

I was Brenda’s star employee and everybody knew it.

I’ve been an A student all my life.

I’m the picture of good anger management.

Management hates it when you quit. That’s the one thing you can still lord over them, even during a recession (and July 2022 in America was anything but)—replacing an employee costs time, and time is money. Every store manager knows that—even Brenda (her management woes don’t source back to her inability to optimize).

And then Brenda said something so stupid that for a second I almost thought she was parodying Gabby.

“I thought you and I could speak openly to each other.”

Brenda.

Girl.

Just because you tell me about the medications you take for your back problems doesn’t mean we’re friends.

Was this really happening right now?

“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” I told Brenda. “I did speak openly in the email.”

Was Brenda really buying into Ashley’s delusion that management and workers can be just friends?

Or was she just calculating that I—because I’m pretty—was stupid enough to buy into it too?

“Actually, no—the way you engage with others doesn’t seem intended to provide a pathway for sincere and open conversations. You have a ‘No Assholes’ policy that seems intended to make other people suppress their true feelings around you at all times, because anybody who contradicts you is automatically an asshole.”

I didn’t say that.

I just said: “It can be intimidating to speak to you sometimes.”

Even when you try to laugh with me about your muscle relaxants, I laugh back, but what I really want to say is “Brenda, a certain percentage of the population is going to have back problems, and you have given me no particular reason to care about yours.” I think again now about if Brenda and I were stuck on a deserted island. I’d probably have to save her life from the elements from time to time, and that’d build trust between us. “What we’d need to do is charter a plane somewhere, and have the plane crash. That’s the only way to resuscitate this relationship.”

“How many times have I told you, Nina, you can come to me about anything…” and before I could even respond, Brenda began comparing our dynamics to a mother-daughter relationship and I was one second away from saying, “Bitch, that’s your problem,” but I caught myself and said calmly:

“Brenda, that’s the problem.”

Brenda looked at me earnestly.

“Just, that right there—the word you used. I don’t think you really understand other people’s boundaries? I tell you obligatory anecdotes from my personal life because you specifically ask to hear them, not because I want to volunteer them—again, that’s how afraid I am of you, Brenda, because I don’t even feel like I have the right to tell you that my dating history is, actually, now that I think about it, none of your business. And then you lecture me about how I talk to my boyfriend? Again, because you asked to hear the details, and you actually make it so that now I’m thinking about my boyfriend at work instead of focusing on my job, which you then get mad at me for? I don’t think you really understand, Brenda, how your friendliness comes off when it’s mixed with so much—neediness, I don’t know, this need to control everything all the time—to make everything perfect.”

The first time I ever met Brenda, we got along so well that after our shift we went to a Red Lobster on the other side of the strip mall, where she bought me three milkshakes. I told her about growing up with my mom in a trailer park in Nevada and she told me about growing up with her mom in a trailer park in New Jersey—we laughed a lot that night. I don’t even remember what we laughed about, but we were both talkers, Brenda and I, we were both tellers, and we were both showers. I could tell after my first milkshake that Brenda must have floated in the margins of the sub-popular crowd in middle school, and she all but confirmed it on the second (she just had one of those I’ve seen it all energies).

“So how does it feel being back in the Northeast?”

“Honestly?” Brenda said, grabbing a French fry. “I’m ready.”

You couldn’t hear the ocean from where we were sitting, but you could hear a highway.

I understand Brenda.

I really do.

Sometimes at night, while I fantasized about quitting a company whose Corporate was famous for giving their employees vision and dental (and anyway, what else would I do besides marketing or retail? In what other way might I be called upon to serve the good people of America?), I’d climax with an image of Brenda sitting alone at home on a Thursday night (that was Brenda’s day off), crocheting to Fleetwood Mac, with a cat rubbing up against her ankle. The only mystery was how many paintings of beaches dotted her apartment.

I know Brenda doesn’t talk to her mother anymore (“Neither do I!” was probably one of our first laughs), and I’d fantasize about how much she probably secretly admired me—because I was pretty—because I could always talk my way into classes and parties she could only stare through the curtains of (I once helped Brenda create an account on Plenty of Fish), and now it was too late for her because she was already in her late forties or early fifties—and I?

I was bound for Cape Cod.

“What are the locals there like,” all summer long I used to wonder. I work at a Nordstrom now.

And I no longer wonder.

“Oh, sweetie—it’s called the Cape, not the Cod.”

Wasn’t that how she had said it?

Even in her most helpless moment, she was still so condescending—she was still just so frivolously condescending—I mean think about the stakes here, girl, you’re about to lose your star employee right before the back-to-school rush—was the poison dart worth it?

Was the poison tip worth it, Brenda?

“I don’t think it’s healthy for me to work here anymore,” I suddenly blurted out. “You’re not a good influence on me.”

“What can I say to make you stay just through September?”

It was so quick and direct that it snapped me instantly out of my sympathy spell.

Brenda.

There’s the Brenda I knew—Brenda, you’re back!

And you’re still holding onto threads in the air.

This store will dissipate, Brenda. Your job will dissipate, and then you’ll have to go right back out there again and sell your competence at another round on the roulette wheel. (Just don’t end up at another store that sells beauty supplies, Brenda—I don’t think you quite understand what they’re really telling the world.) “I don’t think there’s anything you can say, Brenda. I know how hard the last few months have been for you, and I thought very long and hard about doing this to you. But I have to prioritize my own mental health.”

“You know Charles is only giving me a year.”

Brenda said this with a vulnerability I had never heard from her before.

Her voice was like a child’s.

Guilt—it’s impossible to summon it for a person you’ve already dehumanized. Cockroaches die every day.

My subconscious was churning again—I would have a child with my boyfriend someday, and I would protect her from people like you, Karen McHiggins. “Brenda, you have the mental age of a child,” was what I really wanted to say to her. “When I fuck up at work, who do you think I go to? Nobody—do you understand that, Brenda, because adults take responsibility for their shit.”

But I would have to sugarcoat it, because someone with the mental age of an Abercrombie would be unable to understand that the powerful can’t be friends with the powerless, no matter how hard they tried—and someone with the mental age of an Abercrombie would also need everything sugarcoated for them.

“Brenda, I don’t know how to break this to you but there isn’t going to be any back-to-school rush! It’s not 2019 anymore—Covid killed retail. We don’t know whether we want to be bargain basement or high-end and the middle class is dead, everyone wants either a bargain or an experience! What did they teach you in that master’s program?”

Only I couldn’t say that either, because Brenda would somehow spin it into me losing my cool, which is the one thing I never do—I’ve been one thing and one thing only all my life, and that’s an A student.

“You’ve given your life to a dinosaur, Brenda—move on. Department stores are dead—this isn’t the ’80s anymore. Your image of America—it’s a façade, and I can prove it. It’s that picture of the lighthouse you keep behind your desk that you pilfered from returned merchandise, and I can prove that too. We’re like explorers in an uncharted land. Things are going to fall apart for us in ways we have no templates for, just like they did for all of the generations before us—only they weren’t as trapped inside the façade of returned merchandise as we are! Settled mores are changing. This century could still look like anything—it’s all up for grabs, and more and more people are just beginning to wake up to this new dawn. Maybe what you really need to do is start a YouTube channel. You have the voice for it, you have the charisma, and you have the storytelling abilities—we could all profit from hearing from your perspective, only nobody will because you’re not young, thin, or beautiful, but hey—it’s worth a shot! You’ll have a better chance there at the lighthouse than you do in retail.”

Only I didn’t say any of this either, because I knew Brenda couldn’t hear a word I was saying. Brenda was dead between the eyes—her soul died in middle school, and she’s been dragging the corpses of would-be lives ever since.

“You’re not a particularly smart or competent person, Brenda, and what’s happening right now speaks for itself. You didn’t just get unlucky, Brenda.”

Brenda once whistled to me when she saw me change into a sundress as I was leaving my afternoon shift—“Whose heart are you breaking tonight, Nina?”

“None of your business!” was what I wanted to tell her, but I wanted to let Brenda live vicariously through me—it was the only gentleness I could ever offer her.

“You know Charles is only giving me the year,” Brenda had said, and she was staring into the void now. I could feel her back pain. She had given her whole entire life to Not-Quite-Sephora, six days a week, and on most nights on my way to the restroom I could hear “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac playing from a small Bluetooth speaker. I looked at Brenda and said: “I have no idea what you want from me. It’s not my job to make you look any better than you are at your job. And I don’t know what your agreement with Charlie has to do with anything—in fact, I had lunch with him the other day.”

Brenda lifted her eyes.

“What?” she said stupidly.

“Oh, I’m sorry—I was trying to get a vacation approved. No, Brenda. I needed to talk to him about a few things.”

“What things?”

And then, before I could offer an answer, “What are you trying to say, Nina? Just spit it out!”

“You have a problem, okay? I’ve seen the way you’ve unraveled in the last few months—Gabby and Ashley are afraid of you, Chris is about to quit, literally nobody can handle your emotional volatility anymore. Everybody’s so short-tempered with each other all the time and coming to me for help, and it’s not my job to help them—that’s your job! You’ve created a situation where nobody can even talk to you. We just smile at you out of fear. You don’t command anybody’s respect—you know that, right? So we basically have to operate without a supervisor—you understand that, don’t you?”

It feels good to eat.

I no longer have a gym membership anymore. Instead, I jog every Tuesday and Friday at the public park.

“So yeah—so I guess I just thought it was about time Charlie heard all of this. He’s actually very reasonable if you talk to him in a reasonable way. He said he’d look into opening one or two more positions for us to cover the weekends. But you probably won’t be there to oversee it.”

Not-Quite Sephora was founded as a regional competitor to J.C. Penney in 1991. It never expanded beyond the Northeast, Minnesota, and California, and it’s about to die—it’s only a matter of time. Unless if maybe Corporate in Burlington saw the light and hired someone like me and actually listened to her ideas for turning all of their stores into “experiences,” which is what I’ve been trying to tell Brenda every time she questioned one of my lipstick arrangements. A lot of what I miss about middle school is the taste-test of freedoms I enjoy every day now as an adult: you build a friendship with the highest person who’ll take you in.

That’s how you climb a hierarchy.

Brenda looked at me like a wounded animal.

There really isn’t ambiguity, is there, about which one of us would survive if it were just you and me on a deserted island. A new recognition was forming inside of Brenda, and I didn’t want to be there to watch it settle in—you can’t treat people like you treated Ashley the other night in the stock room, this isn’t the ’80s anymore. Of course, Brenda was too obtuse to work out that I was only bluffing. The truth was, I had talked to Charlie briefly on the second floor, but he just told me to “put it all in an email,” and I knew he was never going to speak to Brenda long enough to ever contradict anything I had just said—Charlie’s not exactly the open type. Besides, Charlie did agree to look into hiring more part-timers, the way Charlie ever agrees to anything—by pretending it was his idea all along. “It’s the unreliability of when customers come in, that’s the problem,” Charlie had explained to me. (“Yes, that’s true. Unreliability is always the problem,” I told Charlie.)

You can’t rely on other people’s testimony when you ask them about Abercrombie Couture.

You have to come to me.

I’ve seen sides of Abercrombie that nobody else has.

“So what’s the dating scene like out here?” Brenda had asked me that first night at Red Lobster, while popping a French fry. I remember trying not to look at Brenda like she was serious. “It’s just men!” I remember laughing to Brenda in front of two tall glasses of milkshake. “It’s just a bunch of men—that’s the only way I know how to put it!”

And then Brenda in her black blazer and black pants laughed too.

Like we were girlfriends.

“I would’ve given you those vacation days, Nina,” Brenda finally said in a whisper. “If I had just understood that you knew what you were doing when you took them—what you were doing to the store—I would’ve given them to you.”

A new sincerity is trying to grow in the air all around us—I can hear its infant-screams, can’t you? (Couldn’t Brenda?) “Oh my God, Brenda. This is about so much more than whether or not I can go on one trip to Cape Cod.”

“That is all this is about to you, Nina, and don’t you pretend otherwise—”

“No, it isn’t.”

“—because you have a fancy boyfriend now.”

“Leave Connor out of this.”

I don’t really know where my life’s going to go after Cape Cod. Colson’s mental health—it causes collateral damage to people (Colson was one of Connor’s three friends that had stayed with us at the lake house). I don’t really think he understands that his actions have consequences on other people. He thinks I’m one of the popular kids who terrorized him in middle school, but the truth is—I’m just a little bit higher or lower on the pecking order than he is. All of us are—all of us down here. I can’t really bring myself to fully hate him for what he did, but then I remember what his life is and I do—I hate him by several orders of magnitude more than I ever hated Brenda. And what Colson and Brenda both have in common, of course, is their dripping self-pity: they’re both absolutely lacquered in it (what is it about competitive social environments that produces so much self-pity anyway, dripping like honey?). I didn’t have too much compassion for Colson when he asked me to feed some of his honey back to him with my fingers. “Money,” I wanted to tell him.

“How much money you have is an easy way to tabulate what your self-pity is worth to me.”

But to be honest, I couldn’t even lift a finger to care.

Cape Cod was only four days ago, but it’s already just another memory now—that’s how all of our weekends are bound to end. Several hundred more of these and then it’s lights out. Connor and I listened to the first season of Serial on the way up, and as we walked through Martha’s Vineyard later that afternoon, we saw fifty migrants from South America file onto a bus bound for a military installation.

There were cameras and cake everywhere.

We’re all participants in this gladiatorial contest to see who ends up in Cape Cod as the sun sets over our lives.

Colson recently wrote a book called A Stick of Dynamite in the American Elite.

I wish him luck.

I have plans for him, you know.

No matter what his next chess move is—I have a plan to stop him. I left Brenda alone in her office that day. I never learned where she went after she was dismissed from Not-Quite Sephora, all I remember is Ashley and Gabby coming over to hug me as I grabbed my purse from the break room, and they both quit two days later. It was because there’s something in my soul that doesn’t like to see other people are in pain—even people without souls like Brenda (Colson doesn’t count because he’s not really a human in my eyes, he’s more like a bad anecdote you shake off)—that I found myself hugging Brenda right before I said goodbye, holding her as she kept saying to me that I’d been like a daughter to her: “Brenda—Brenda, listen to me. My boyfriend has an ex-boyfriend whose stepmom also has a drinking problem, okay? Brenda—are you listening to me? They live in Westport…”

Cape Cod will die.

It’s only a matter of time before it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. I sail America’s values like Leif Erikson now—other people have built their homes and comforts here, but I don’t mind. I wonder sometimes what Abercrombie Couture anesthetizes her listlessness to these days—HBO? Unsubtle affairs with younger men? “How long before mundane dehumanization bears fruit?” I smile to myself every day at Nordstrom, as I walk around the counter to deliver my customer’s parcels to them personally.

I see Abercrombie sometimes in the eyes of the women I help at Nordstrom. They’re all moms, and if that’s the final meaning of our lives—then yes, I agree.

Let’s all be moms.

You don’t know the Hell I’ll reign over America’s guilty class in the twenty-first century, but you will soon: I will mother the destruction of America’s guilded gilts into existence. I broke up with Connor this morning. Something about his reaction to Colson’s breakdown in Cape Cod just didn’t sit well with me—he couldn’t see through Colson’s insincerity, and that makes me think he might not have what it takes in this life to go where I’m trying to go. At my new job at the mall, I nibble on old memories like a woman who hasn’t eaten now in years. The last person I ate was my narcissistic mother in Nevada—she ruined my childhood—she was the Leif Erikson of my formative years—but then again?

So was my middle school.

College feels like a million years ago. My sorority sisters are all married with kids now. Mothers will do anything to protect their young.

#MeToo.

2022