#really nice friendly guy

[red-dyed-sarumane]

i went to m3!!!!!!! i got juuuuuust a few things lmao. i went to go get vocatech from shu's booth bc theres a dopam!ne song on it & i impulsively got his 3rd album as well & we were talking for a bit & he's like "oh u want me to sign it ?" and he went all out omgggg hes SUCH a nice person look at this. he even told me to stop by & say hi again if i go to any other events he's at

[remxedmoon]

save me bonnie isat… bonnie isat… save me…

woah what!!! isat fanart with color??? preposterous. greyscaled versions under the cut!! (and also the last doodle without the crusty old drawing next to it!! incase you want to use it for anything)

anyways. uh. scampers away like a little rat

[sinlizards]

it me birthday once more !!

i wont write up a whole thing cuz im still tired and congested as hell BUT getting to see Everything Everything live front stage AND meet them in person was so insanely life changing that i highly doubt i can beat that as far as birthday celebrations go T_T

[mingmingbats]

An angel sent ahead to guard you in all your ways.

[melien]

[eonars]

I hate feeling this way cause I hate feeling like a total nlog pick me nightmare and it's so disappointing but when I go to hardcore shows and there's already hardly any women there and groups of them who are all five foot nothing with giant acrylics and tons of jewelry (including those choke chains that pull tight, idiotic thing to wear in a mosh) and dangly earrings and a full beat and a latex bra are scream giggling at each other cause my face has come up in the background of all their selfies bc we're so packed in I can't even back up a bit I instantly get transported back to high school. Like we're in the fuckin trenches at the front of the room getting nearly knocked over and smashed up by crowdsurfers and they're still finding ways to make exasperated eye contact with each other and fake cry as they reach out to touch fingers cause my giant self briefly separated them. I'm dressed comfy and baggy cause it gets really hot in there and I'm gonna go to a goth club or a rave if I want to turn a look and they're shooting mocking looks at me and a larger woman whos barefaced and has her hair in a bun and is also there alone. And then one starts grinding on me I guess in a weird attempt to make space around us but the guy behind me literally has his hands on my back and I can't move at all, to the point where I got actually really uncomfortable and had to stick out my thigh for her to grind on instead. It's so ass and particularly bitterly disappointing cause you know full well all the guys in there are on the same team and we're here as like 10% of the crowd scoring own goals instead of looking out for one another. Literally who are you trying to impress

[silverselfshippingchaos]

I am less than ten minutes into this movie and I am already blushing and screeching over this cute boy. Gamers I think I'm fucked.

[batsplat]

oxley bom pod was talking about the friendly atmosphere in the paddock today and they brought up vale as someone who would make himself hate his opponents in order to beat them. they mentioned biaggi before saying vale didn’t need to make up a reason there lol, and the gibernau, stoner, lorenzo, marquez. thought it was interesting to hear them say that especially since oxley specifically had a particularly close working relationship with vale!

got around to listening to the podcast rather belatedly + had a chat about this general topic that helped me organise my thoughts on this a bit. I transcribed the most relevant comments - probably some small errors because of cross-talk and like... I'm a fast transcriptionist but can't be bothered to properly do it, here:

O: One is because racing is so fucking complicated now. [...] They've got so much to do, so much pressure - to have the negative energy of anger and hatred is actually - B: It's a waste. O: It's a bad thing, you're just wasting your energy. I mean it depends on the character, okay - B: So maybe Vale was the last who really needed to hate somebody to give him - and now even Vale invites Casey to his ranch to ride with him. But he really needed to - It was not difficult for him to hate, but he - Some riders he really looked for a reason to hate them even more, because then he could dig deeper in himself - because he was just a happy chap - in order to beat them. O: Max Biaggi. B: But it was easy to hate Max! That was not very difficult. Sete Gibernau, basically he needed to try - O: Casey Stoner. Sete Gibernau. Marc Marquez. B: He hated Vale probably before Vale hated Casey! But that's another podcast. O: Yeah, I think so. No, definitely, definitely, definitely. [...] Some people - they get fired up by hating other people, and that's fair enough.

so yeah. I mean, qualified agreement, I guess? they're definitely right about casey hating valentino before valentino hated casey lol. if valentino ever really hated casey at all. which is not necessarily a mainstream take, so it's nice to hear it!

I also agree with this general take about... y'know, the creeping professionalisation of the sport and how that affects how likely you're going to get fun drama. goes beyond just hours spent looking at data and also about... having a bit of a life, having time to actually form a personality. and as I've said before, it's the fans! clickbait news + social media featuring partisan fans, who aren't just going to read every statement but also react to every statement like it's life or death shit. pecco and jorge have gotten push back for some incredibly, deeply, ridiculously mild comments these last couple years. they HAVE to phrase everything they say as inoffensively as possible while still getting their points across, and even then they'll generally be jumped. like, forget valentino, how do you think casey would have fared in this current media environment? up against a fanbase as partisan as valentino's - or marc's nowadays? not well is the answer! I think to some extent you can get away with this stuff more depending on people's perceptions of you, so marc and increasingly pedro will generally be fine... but on the flip side, the pecco's, the casey's, the jorge x2's of this world... everything they say gets read in the worst possible light, but now everyone's just so much louder about it

but this ask was more about valentino than the current landscape, so I'll get back to him. I do think it is a bit of an issue if you frame it as a completely either-or issue - at the end of the day, most competitors will probably motivate themselves through their enemies at least a little. pecco definitely uses negative emotions to fire him up, people criticising him and the like. casey absolutely used them, often directed at valentino. all the comments from the haters to fire them up right, to show everyone how wrong they are. on a psychological level, there is not something *fundamentally* different between using your rivals or the fans or the press to motivate yourself - it's still the same underlying motivational process (and indeed the podcast references lawson's distaste for the press). casey signs off his first every grand prix win by saying how nice it was to beat a spanish rider sponsored by the circuit, like are we calling that pure love for the game? he and mostly martin and to a somewhat lesser degree pecco do share a tendency to... believe the world is out to get them, and use that to fire themselves up. idk if casey strictly needed to do that or if it was just ingrained at a young age and became a stable self-perpetuating way in which he viewed the world but also, it doesn't really matter, right. maybe in both valentino and casey there is a pure unpolluted soul who could have enjoyed winning just for the sake of winning, but in practise it's clearly more complicated than that. as has been recently discussed in quite some depth in this parish, late 2007!casey was getting sympathetic interview write-ups that described his mentality as informed by 'bitterness and rejection'. including bitterness at valentino, who at that point in time was not meaningfully reciprocating any of that stuff!

so I do have a bit of a bone to pick with this idea of 'the last guy'. valentino didn't 100% motivate himself by hating his enemies, the blokes after him didn't do so 0%. I think of the aliens casey is probably the most similar to him by this metric... some are definitely less inclined to do so. lorenzo's a bit of an odd case where at times it felt like he was better at making other guys hate him than necessarily hating them himself... complicated guy but I think he actually really did want to mostly fuel himself in a positive manner, except then for various reasons both external and internal he needed to also draw a bit more from. the darkness. marc is more likely than either valentino or casey to just fight to win for the sake of winning... then again you do have cute little incidents like misano 2019 where marc - off the back of two back-to-back last lap defeats - miraculously happened to find an extra bit of motivation through a spat in qualifying after duly harrying the yamaha's all weekend. again, it's a question of degree, right. marc is just inherently less restless than valentino and less inclined to think the world is out to get him than casey, which are all contributing factors

with valentino, I think I disagree a teensy bit in terms of framing more than I do in substance. first off, not to be a broken record on this, but obviously all of these feuds were very different, involving very different emotional landscapes. I don't think it's correct to say valentino needed an enemy to fire himself up, but he did always need something. some mission to dig his teeth into, some way of making the whole thing exciting. of making it fun! I'm not all that convinced of this happy-go-lucky characterisation of valentino - a lot of the time he had to go to an awful lot of effort to keep himself entertained, and when that didn't work he could get pretty miserable. he needed to keep himself stimulated, he needed to stop himself from feeling lonely, he needed to give himself a purpose to work towards. hatred did help him in a motivational sense, and he's talked in his autobiography about how anger has made him ride faster. it's useful... up to a point. it's just not a uniform thing across rivalries

my sense is that it comes down to two things. 1) he needs something to motivate himself and get excited, be it a rival or whatever. and 2) he needs some distance from his rivals. motivating yourself through a rival is not quite the same thing as motivating yourself through an enemy. for instance!! casey was only really his enemy once they were no longer on-track rivals - it was unrelated to actual competitive calculus, and was in some ways more about casey than it was about valentino. when valentino did that shit to casey at laguna 2008, he's not like... mad at casey. he doesn't hate him. he's gleeful at least in part because of how obviously pissed casey is, but he doesn't hate him. because he doesn't need to hate casey to want to beat him! casey is already so considerable a challenge that beating him is reward enough in itself - he's this super tricky puzzle for valentino to work away at... and when he comes up with the answer at laguna 2008, he's delighted. he doesn't really hate jorge in 2009 either - dislike, yes, hate, no. he's already plenty stimulated by the challenge of beating his feisty young teammate... he doesn't need anything else. he gets through 95% of the 2015 season with barely any animosity with his title rival - there, he would have seen it as distracting from his primary mission of winning his tenth in a way that was entirely disconnected from any particular rival. he also runs into the problem that it feels like any psychological warfare feels like it's getting aimed more at marc than jorge - but that's entirely accidental, he isn't TRYING to fuck with marc in the middle of the season. why would he!! and jorge refuses to be fucked with on the track because he's just never in the same postcode as valentino, and valentino isn't attempting to fuck with him off the track. he's barely even doing like,, mild mind games, like they're quite actively friendly the entire year

(I do sometimes think you can do a bit of displacement here where you don't necessarily need to hate the person you're actively fighting to get the job done - cf marc at misano 2019, also... tbh casey 2011-12 kinda had that vibe where he was getting all that energy out of his system in valentino's direction and could then keep things civil with his actual title rival. there's a LITTLE bit of that 2015 even pre phillip island but mostly valentino does have a more early 2008 'we move in silence' vibe or whatever that pecco tweet read. this is the restlessness thing, right - he kinda needs to fill his brain with SOMETHING)

which brings us to the second element: needing some distance. zero problem with biaggi, which is kinda the training wheels feud in that it takes a bit of a life of its own before valentino REALLY was intending it to. he's a kid (literal eighteen year old) who's kinda snarky about biaggi in the press and biaggi takes it EXTREMELY poorly and confronts him about it and it kind of spirals from there. with casey + jorge, valentino ensures that they never GET too close. I do think there is an element of... y'know, not wanting to be close friends with the guys who are your title rivals, because it's harder to beat people you care about and deprive them of the thing they want most in the world. which I actually think is pretty normal!! valentino's problem is that on a few occasions he has ended up in rivalries with blokes he was at some stage close in - and either he preemptively withdraws as with marc and... ? probably...? melandri...? - or the relationship deteriorates and then blows up as with sete and also marc. the 'preemptive withdrawing' bit does suggest a degree of self-awareness with regards to his own competitive process - and as has been previously argued in this parish, valentino's relationship with marc developing as it did was in large part due to his competitive situation 2010-14. the two of them falling out was probably always going to happen if they were competing, the two of them falling out that badly required valentino's stint in the competitive wilderness to let him lower his guard to such an extent

so that's the argument in broad strokes. yes, valentino can use enemies to motivate himself - he certainly enjoys having rivals, he enjoys fucking with them, he enjoys figuring them out and measuring himself against them and also a little bit of competitive edge. that doesn't mean he needs enemies per se, or certainly he wouldn't have seen some of his rivals in quite such extreme terms (casey in particular of course felt differently). he did need SOMETHING to motivate him... rivals, definitely - enemies, perhaps. and he also needed a bit of distance from those he was competing against. which post-sete he tended to preemptively enforce, except that one time when he didn't, and when it wasn't preemptively enforced it did have a tendency to blow up rather spectacularly. so in essence, you still end up at the same conclusion, right - valentino did get a lot out of having enemies, did motivate himself with them, did need to beat someone. but the working process is a bit different as I see it. sometimes making enemies is about emotional regulation, y'know. feuding as a healthy outlet for competitive tension. as it should be

[slowdesire]

there’s really something so world-tilting about finding out/coming to the conclusion that a guy, a complete stranger, might have a crush on me. or be interested in me romantically at all. ultimately he made it clear he wants to see me and encounter me again. my world is ROCKED. not necessarily that i’m certain he has a crush on me but he actually made such an effort to get to know me. simply after seeing me LAUGH (and look ‘pissed off’ at the gym when i wasn’t laughing…) and i don’t want to read into things but the few friends i’ve detailed everything that happened to said there’s definitely Something. and now im just. there’s so much to comprehend. it’s complicated but on a base level i just feel uncomplicated happiness because why did it happen when i finally stopped wishing for anything new to happen when i finished work on friday

[mariocki]

Pathfinders in Space (ABC, 1960)

"Now, the remainder of us have fifteen hours of oxygen left. That leaves fifteen hours in which to complete our research here."

"Well, what's the good of all that if you can't come back with it?"

"The moon never destroys her treasures, Henderson. We shall leave a record and it'll be preserved in the vacuum of the caves. And the future expeditions you mentioned, they will find it."

[grimmweepers]

i really do self sabotage when it comes to irl dating 😭💀

[pandaspwnz]

One of the hired cleaners that clean the stairs and laundry rooms of the apartment buildings in the area I live in, who's super handsome, around my age or a little older, has the most delightful accent, is always smiling and friendly and who I've only briefly greeted in passing and seems super bubbly and positive, initiated jokey smalltalk with me today and then paid me a compliment and told me to have a lovely day and I'm like

[per-the-jellicle-magician]

My siblings got me this little diy craft kit thingy for my birthday, it's one of those book nooks, a garden house themed and its really cute

I plan on slowly putting it together over the next however long and I got some polymer clay today so I can make tiny little Munk and Feliks figurines to put in there too :3

[creatures-of-albia]

I FOUND THE COB THAT MAKES IT SO GRENDELS DON’T ALWAYS HIT NORNS IN C1. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU CREATURES CAVES

[eebie]

dude on funny apocalypse game yesterday thought i was a 10 year old boy until he overheard me talking to my roommate and was like WAIT HOW OLD ARE YOU ???

[tiggyloo]

Had a VERY good introductory phone interview today for a painting position that I applied to! I'm going in Wednesday for an in person interview and tour of the property!! I'm extremely excited!!!!