#rambles from the void

[glitter-glue-from-the-void]

Wait. Does... Does Sam still see the skulls of loved ones just smiling back at him when he looks at their face? Because that would be pretty fucked up if he did.

[simcoesleftear]

I swear i'm going insane

[danerdybluebanana]

CHAT I FINALLY CUT MY BANGS BY MYSELF AND THEY ACTUALLY DONT LOOK HALF BAD LETS FUCKIN GOOOOO

[ayyyyysexual]

"Hey void did you change your pfp to another-" yes i changed my pfp to another blonde anime girl who has ridiculous amounts of romantic tension with her girl best friend™️

And none of you can stop me

[purple-raspberries]

Funny thing happened on my way to work today: I was walking with some non-prescription sunglasses on and I hear someone yelling and I turn, and I think they’re waving at me from across the street, so I wave. They move on as it seems I was, indeed, the recipient.

I have no idea who it was. I am near-sighted, but far-sighted enough to not walk into oncoming traffic. So, whoever you are, if I know you or not, dear person, I wish you a good day

[hidden-dreamland]

peace is stored in the SOAD discography

[always-a-king-or-queen]

The ache will go away, eventually. 

That was what the Professor told them, the day they got back. When they tumbled from the wardrobe in a heap of tangled limbs, and found that the world had been torn from under their feet with all the kindness of a serpent. 

They picked themselves off of the floorboards with smiles plastered on child faces, and sat with the Professor in his study drinking cup after cup of tea. 

But the smiles were fake. The tea was like ash on their tongues. And when they went to bed that night, none of them could sleep in beds that were too foreign, in bodies that had not been their own for years. Instead they grouped into one room and sat on the floor and whispered, late into the night. 

When morning came, Mrs. Macready discovered the four of them asleep in Peter and Edmund’s bedroom, tangled in a heap of pillows and blankets with their arms looped across one another. They woke a few moments after her entry and seemed confused, lost even, staring around the room with pale faces, eyes raking over each framed painting on the wall and across every bit of furniture as if it was foreign to them. “Come to breakfast,” Mrs. Macready said as she turned to go, but inside she wondered. 

For the children’s faces had held the same sadness that she saw sometimes in the Professor’s. A yearning, a shock, a numbness, as if their very hearts had been ripped from their chests.

At breakfast Lucy sat huddled between her brothers, wrapped in a shawl that was much too big for her as she warmed her hands around a mug of hot chocolate. Edmund fidgeted in his seat and kept reaching up to his hair as if to feel for something that was no longer there. Susan pushed her food idly around on her plate with her fork and hummed a strange melody under her breath. And Peter folded his hands beneath his chin and stared at the wall with eyes that seemed much too old for his face. 

It chilled Mrs. Macready to see their silence, their strangeness, when only yesterday they had been running all over the house, pounding through the halls, shouting and laughing in the bedrooms. It was as if something, something terrible and mysterious and lengthy, had occurred yesterday, but surely that could not be. 

She remarked upon it to the Professor, but he only smiled sadly at her and shook his head. “They’ll be all right,” he said, but she wasn’t so sure. 

They seemed so lost. 

Lucy disappeared into one of the rooms later that day, a room that Mrs. Macready knew was bare save for an old wardrobe of the professor’s. She couldn’t imagine what the child would want to go in there for, but children were strange and perhaps she was just playing some game. When Lucy came out again a few minutes later, sobbing and stumbling back down the hall with her hair askew, Mrs. Macready tried to console her, but Lucy found no comfort in her arms. “It wasn’t there,” she kept saying, inconsolable, and wouldn’t stop crying until her siblings came and gathered her in their arms and said in soothing voices, “Perhaps we’ll go back someday, Lu.” 

Go back where, Mrs. Macready wondered? She stepped into the room Lucy had been in later on in the evening and looked around, but there was nothing but dust and an empty space where coats used to hang in the wardrobe. The children must have taken them recently and forgotten to return them, not that it really mattered. They were so old and musty and the Professor had probably forgotten them long ago. But what could have made the child cry so? Try as she might, Mrs. Macready could find no answer, and she left the room dissatisfied and covered in dust. 

Lucy and Edmund and Peter and Susan took tea in the Professor’s room again that night, and the next, and the next, and the next. They slept in Peter and Edmund’s room, then Susan and Lucy’s, then Peter and Edmund’s again and so on, swapping every night till Mrs. Macready wondered how they could possibly get any sleep. The floor couldn’t be comfortable, but it was where she found them, morning after morning. 

Each morning they looked sadder than before, and breakfast was silent. Each afternoon Lucy went into the room with the wardrobe, carrying a little lion figurine Edmund had carved her, and came out crying a little while later. And then one day she didn’t, and went wandering in the woods and fields around the Professor’s house instead. She came back with grassy fingers and a scratch on one cheek and a crown of flowers on her head, but she seemed content. Happy, even. Mrs. Macready heard her singing to herself in a language she’d never heard before as Lucy skipped past her in the hall, leaving flower petals on the floor in her wake. Mrs. Macready couldn’t bring herself to tell the child to pick them up, and instead just left them where they were. 

More days and nights went by. One day it was Peter who went into the room with the wardrobe, bringing with him an old cloak of the Professor’s, and he was gone for quite a while. Thirty or forty minutes, Mrs. Macready would guess. When he came out, his shoulders were straighter and his chin lifted higher, but tears were dried upon his cheeks and his eyes were frightening. Noble and fierce, like the eyes of a king. The cloak still hung about his shoulders and made him seem almost like an adult. 

Peter never went into the wardrobe room again, but Susan did, a few weeks later. She took a dried flower crown inside with her and sat in there at least an hour, and when she came out her hair was so elaborately braided that Mrs. Macready wondered where on earth she had learned it. The flower crown was perched atop her head as she went back down the hall, and she walked so gracefully that she seemed to be floating on the air itself. In spite of her red eyes, she smiled, and seemed content to wander the mansion afterwards, reading or sketching or making delicate jewelry out of little pebbles and dried flowers Lucy brought her from the woods. 

More weeks went by. The children still took tea in the Professor’s study on occasion, but not as often as before. Lucy now went on her daily walks outdoors, and sometimes Peter or Susan, or both of them at once, accompanied her. Edmund stayed upstairs for the most part, reading or writing, keeping quiet and looking paler and sadder by the day. 

Finally he, too, went into the wardrobe room. 

He stayed for hours, hours upon hours. He took nothing in save for a wooden sword he had carved from a stick Lucy brought him from outside, and he didn’t come out again. The shadows lengthened across the hall and the sun sank lower in the sky and finally Mrs. Macready made herself speak quietly to Peter as the boy came out of the Professor’s study. “Your brother has been gone for hours,” she told him crisply, but she was privately alarmed, because Peter’s face shifted into panic and he disappeared upstairs without a word. 

Mrs. Macready followed him silently after around thirty minutes and pressed an ear to the door of the wardrobe room. Voices drifted from beyond. Edmund’s and Peter’s, yes, but she could also hear the soft tones of Lucy and Susan. 

“Why did he send us back?” Edmund was saying. It sounded as if he had been crying.  

Mrs. Macready couldn’t catch the answer, but when the siblings trickled out of the room an hour later, Edmund’s wooden sword was missing, and the flower crown Susan had been wearing lately was gone, and Peter no longer had his old cloak, and Lucy wasn’t carrying her lion figurine, and the four of them had clasped hands and sad, but smiling, faces. 

Mrs. Macready slipped into the room once they were gone and opened the wardrobe, and there at the bottom were the sword and the crown and the cloak and the lion. An offering of sorts, almost, or perhaps just items left there for future use, for whenever they next went into the wardrobe room.  

But they never did, and one day they were gone for good, off home, and the mansion was silent again. And it had been a long time since that morning that Mrs. Macready had found them all piled together in one bedroom, but ever since then they hadn’t quite been children, and she wanted to know why.

She climbed the steps again to the floor of the house where the old wardrobe was, and then went into the room and crossed the floor to the opposite wall. 

When she pulled the wardrobe door open, the four items the Pevensie children had left inside of it were missing. 

And just for a moment, it seemed to her that a cool gust of air brushed her face, coming from the darkness beyond where the missing coats used to hang.

[lackpenny]

a broken man's last effort, all for nothing

[glitter-glue-from-the-void]

Adding on to this! Here is Doctor Carmilla's Bandcamp. It has all of her music and isn't necessary The Mechanisms (ie. none of the Mechs appear in any of her songs as they all take place pre-mechs), but it still gives us more of a glimpse into the Mechs world, so I think that they are all definitely worth a listen. Plus, they're just good songs.

Doctor Carmilla also has not just a backstory song, but an entire backstory album, called Exhumed and (Un)plugged.

In terms of non-album stuff, this is a pretty comprehensive list for a newcomer already listed above. But, I would like to add on a few things. Firstly, the list of live performances does not list their last performance, Death to the Mechanisms. This is a recorded live performance of their album of the same name. Given that this is their final performance, I would recommend you listen to all of their albums first to get the most out of it. The beginning of this show is just them performing The Bifrost Incident live, while the second half is basically just a "best of" playlist, but with added new Mechs banter! So definitely worth watching. It's also an official recording by the Mechanisms, which means that it is by far the best recorded live show we have.

Another thing I didn't see on here was the Mechs tour of the Pitt Rivers Museum (YouTube link). I love this video so much it has so much chaotic energy in it and is pretty much just completely Mechs banter as The Toy Solider, Drumbot Brian, Raphaella la Cognizi, and Gunpowder Tim each tell you about about a little exhibit in the museum, complete with about as much utter nonsense as you would expect from them.

Put you clothes back on we aren't having sex I lied to get you in here. Yeah no I'm outlining all the mechs lore to you. And then we're listening to everything yhey have on spotify. And then we're watching all the live performances. Stop trying the door you can't unlock it

[glitter-glue-from-the-void]

Hey Gwen. Gwen. Why were you able to compel Ink5oul into sharing their life story?

[simcoesleftear]

do you know who would've had more of a chance against ben tallmadge??????

*bangs fist on the table* SELAH STRONG!!!

[count100]

I think a lot of terrible parents are like that because they genuinely don't believe that there can be a better future. They believe that misery and suffering are all that ever has been and will be and think it's a "kindness" to not "deceive" children into believing otherwise. They're wrong, of course, but it's still a disconcertingly popular worldview.

I hate when parents say the world is cruel as an excuse for their shitty parenting.

“I see that the world is cruel, and so I shall add to the cruelness to show my children how terrible life is rather than giving them refuge from the hostility of the world and hope for a better future.

Let pain be etched into their mind not only by the authors of this wretched tale we call life but by the ones closest to them as well. This shall be seen not as cruelty but as a merciful act”

They may provide shelter but they fail to provide warmth and security

[danerdybluebanana]

guys im no joke two seconds away from cutting my bangs with kids craft scissors rn cause it needs to be done and it's anything but what i should be doing rn do i do it

[camellia-thea]

i know we talk a lot about the isolation of chronic illness and disability, but i really don't think ablebodied folk get it.

i have made one new friend in person since graduating highschool in 2020. she is my housemate's girlfriend. she stays over frequently, and the only reason we are friends is because she stays over and we have shared university papers. i would not have had the opportunity to befriend her otherwise. that is in the space of three years.

i don't go out much. i cannot guarantee that i will leave my house within any given week. technically i have class i need to go to twice a week for an hour, but those moments aren't time for friends, they're time for classwork and i don't interact with people in a social capacity there.

i simply do not get the opportunity to meet people.

i cannot go out with friends and meet new people that way, because my social circle is already so small, and i don't have the energy to go out half the time anyway. when i do, i suffer for it later.

i don't meet people on campus because i'm immuno-compromised, and ableds seem to have forgotten that we are still in a pandemic.

i don't go to clubs or go out for the sake of going out because i can't. i've grown agoraphobic, because i am so worried that something health related will happen and i'll get stuck somewhere alone. i hate leaving the house because of the guarantee of an anxiety attack which leaves my body more likely to flare. it's a vicious cycle of isolation.

i am not the only one who has experienced this -- i can still leave the house, i can still go and visit friends with assistance. i struggle, but at the end of the day, it's still an option. there are others who are completely isolated.

the worst of it is that people leave. people get tired of the 'i can't come, i'm sorry', of the 'hey, i'm sick, can we postpone?'. even people who you love and hold dearly will stop trying. and it's awful. you have to sit and watch these people who you love walk away because they can't deal with your disability. i don't have words to describe how much that hurts.

it really is impossible for ablebodied people to understand, because for the majority of us, this isn't temporary. this is just how we have to live. and your social circle can only really get smaller.

[killerpancakeburger]

Fic idea where, when Astarion says "Gods, you're beautiful", Tav can't help but cringe/grimace/says thank you in the most awkward tone possible because they've never or very rarely been called that, compared to all the times they've be called ugly, and they know they don't fit conventionnal beauty standards.

And it feels even worse when someone as beautiful as Astarion is the one saying it.

Obviously Astarion notices your reaction and wanna find out more. Angst/comfort ensues.

[danerdybluebanana]

oh my god is that the fantasy version of my entire life story what how did you know-

One of my favorite tropes is when a character is the best of the best in their little town at whatever it is they do (magic, art, sports, whatever) and they get accepted into a fancy elite school/program and then they realize that compared to all the other students from fancy trained families, they can’t do shit and they feel defeated and desperate and then they study and practice and try really hard and they’re able to overcome it