#she's real good

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The squad of all time has arrived on scene.

[inkskinned]

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.

[thundergrace]

Me:

[rubikor]

they were her people

[dimenirvana]

𝐒𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐒𝐎 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐋 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐦𝐚𝐨𝐨𝐨 😭

[hilacopter]

tbh ryoko kui cooked with this one why is this the funniest image I have ever seen

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

while we wait.

may i offer you all a pubby?? lil bby barns?

[punkitt-is-here]

you gotta believe her

[bluenoisen]

plunged into the deep end

[anthyies]

the thing about disco elysium is that it has women in it. what you see on the internet about it might lie to you about that but it has women, gay women even, very compelling women even, in it.

[mossy-rock-in-a-field]

Several weeks ago, my retirement-age mother requested that I play Baldur’s Gate 3 for her because she has trouble with controllers/keyboards and wanted “to see what all the fuss is about with that cute wizard boy.” For context, my mother and I have done this sort of thing in the past with certain RPGs (dragon age, mass effect, etc.), but it’s been a few years since she’s personally requested a game like this. Basically, I control her Tav but let her make all the choices so she can determine how the story plays out without worrying about mechanics. She treats it like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

Anyway, here is a list of some of the things my mother has said and/or chosen to do throughout the course of BG3 in no particular order:

She is (obviously) romancing Gale. She is quite smitten with him and his passion for books and learning; she also thinks he’s polite and qualifies as “relationship material.” She also REALLY likes the things he’s said about his cat so far (my mom is a cat lady), so I know she’s gonna flip shit when we meet Tara in Act III.

She’s playing a normal druid Tav with a generally good alignment. Her favorite spell is Spike Growth because she thinks it’s hilarious whenever enemies walk into the AOE and die. I usually end up having to cast it at least once per battle per her request. Sometimes twice.

Contrary to her alignment, my mother tasks me with robbing every single chest, crate, barrel, and burlap sack we come across; this also includes people and their pockets. The party is always at max carrying capacity. ALWAYS. She doesn’t like selling things because “what if I need them.” The camp stash is in literal shambles. There is no hope of organizing it. She’s got like fifty seven sets of rags and a billion pieces of random silverware.

She MUST talk to every animal and corpse in the game. I think five hours of her total playtime so far (47ish) has been spent speaking to animals as many times as humanly possible. Like, I was thorough in my own playthroughs, but this is on a whole other level.

She did NOT get Volo’s lobotomy, but she did let Auntie Ethel take her eye in hopes of a cure for the tadpole. I did not understand the logic then. I still do not understand it now.

She is far more interested in fashion than equipment stats. Do you have any idea how much gold I’ve had to spend on dyes just to make things match? SO much. Same vibe as that “please someone help me balance my finances my family is starving” tweet but instead of candles it’s thirty thousand fucking bottles of black and furnace red dye.

We broke the prisoners out of Moonrise, but they got on the boat too early and bugged the fight by leaving Astarion and Karlach behind. Wulbren Bongle somehow got stuck in combat mode even after engaging the cutscene on the docks below Last Light; he he kept trying to run ALL THE WAY BACK TO MOONRISE nine fucking meters at a time while I frantically tried to finish the fight with the Warden, otherwise Wulbren would have run straight into the shadow curse. (I would’ve let him go; fuck Wulbren Bongle, all my homies hate Wulbren Bongle. But my mom didn’t know that, and she wanted to keep him safe. So.)

She had me reload a save like eighteen times to save the giant eagles on top of Rosymorn Monastery. Wouldn’t even let me do non-lethal damage just to get past things. I think getting that warhammer for the dawnmaster puzzle took us like an hour and a half alone. (Yes, I know you can use any warhammer, but SHE didn’t.)

She’s started keeping an irl notebook to keep track of her quests between play sessions. She writes down ideas and strategies when she thinks of them during the week, then brings them to her next game session at my house. I think she wrote about three pages on possible approaches to the goblin fortress alone.

She insists that I pet Scratch and the owlbear cub before every single long rest, no exceptions. Sometimes I have to do it multiple times until she is absolutely sure that the animals know exactly how much she loves and cherishes them. She has also commissioned a crocheted owlbear plush from a friend of hers and is very excited.

I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I’m forgetting, but those are some fun things I thought of. She’s enjoying the game and is telling all of her retired friends to get it and play it for themselves. She asked me “what is Discord” yesterday and I think my life flashed before my eyes.

anyway shout out to my mom for being neat

Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4 — Part 5

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Not beating the allegations.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[shotmrmiller]

re: rugby team ghoap

it'd been a one-off, seize-the-moment kind of thing. casual hookups aren't really for you, plus you distinctly remember your ex prating on about how the team would only be here for the weekend hence the absolute burning need to go, and you've got work monday.

goodbye, great knowing them. you'd traipsed out of the hotel room with your sneakers in hand, soap's used jersey in the other- a memento of sorts, a trophy. mild serial killer behavior but you reckon since you just became another pearl in their long string of conquests, the least you could do is take something with you that won't be gone with a warm epsom salt bath and a couple of days rest.

("would ye believe yer the prettiest we've ever brought back with us?" right. you know where you stand on that scale, and people like you don't typically pull men like them. another cringe-worthy comment like that and you'd mistake their interest with pity.)

you'd put both jerseys in the wash later that day, and the rattling of your washing machine marked the end of your exciting weekend.

or so you'd thought. from your side of things, you'd wiped your hands clean of their sweat, spit and come and went home, once again falling back into semi-familiarity, expecting to go to work feeling completely relaxed and loose, in more ways than one, while ignoring the photos taken of you and the "star players" at the stadium on social media.

(no one caught your face, what bloody luck.)

when you see them again, it's by pure chance. you'd been ordering a sandwich at a deli down the street, hand already reaching for your wallet when an arm curls around your shoulders, dark, coarse hair of a forearm brushing against your cheek.

cedarwood and citrus. it clings to your senses— a sharp, tangy reminder of that time you'd only look back on when the familiar pang of want pooled searing hot between your legs. small world, you suppose.

"didnae leave a note. stole my jersey. 'm surprised ye didnae leave us money on the table, bonnie." warmth flared beneath your cheeks but you didn't cow to his crude joke.

"i suppose i could've left a tip. what do you want?"

the playful lines around his eyes smoothed as his lips straightened into a firm line, his eyes frostbitten. you ignore the way his touch makes you feel trapped, tethered, a cage made of velvet.

"took my shirt and then didn't show up to a single game after tha'. jus' gettin' wha' i'm owed. unless he's yer favorite."

how can he be your favorite when you know nothing about the sport they play and have no interest in knowing?

"too bad. we come as a package. get yer food, we've a place nearby."

(simon had been nowhere near as good-natured as johnny had about you leaving without a word. made you spit out apologies with swollen lips, only accepted the ones that came with a fluttering of your raw pussy around the splitting thickness of him while soap condescendingly cooed in your ear about lessons having to be learned the hard way.)

[dappy-dappernette]

I keep on hearing people go all "The voice of the Smitten is such a creep. All he wants in the princess is someone to control and keep as a pretty object. He'd drop the princess if she wasn't the perfect petite maiden like in the damsel route." and I will not stand for the Smitten slander.

Like- He's been in love with her as a burning corpse ghost lady:

A terrifying ghost woman who wants to bring fear and chaos to the world:

And even a murderous blade monster woman who would kill you and enjoy every second of it:

Like, he ALWAYS loves the princess no matter what she looks like or how she acts, he loves her for being herself no matter what or who she is. That's the point of his character and I'm tired of people slandering my boy.

[hinamie]

truth is, I used to dream about boys like you

jjk atla!au with @philosophiums

[gondolier-in-battersea]

I was thinking about a little exchange of dialogue from the TV adaptation of Station Eleven and why it encapsulates why I vastly prefer it to the novel:

So in the book, it’s revealed through fictional interviews with a newspaperman that the main character, Kirsten, gets a little knife tattooed on her arm everytime she kills someone, and the book treats it so seriously. “You know better than to ask about that,” she says to the interviewer, and it’s treated like this dark abiding secret when it’s just par for the course in a post-apocalyptic novel! I don’t necessarily object to the inclusion of the detail, but be a little less lame about it, a little more nonchalant. Something like “She threw the knife at his face and reminded herself to call the tattoo parlor later.”

In the TV series, Mackenzie Davis (who is just insanely tall; she’s 5’10’’ [my height] but has tall vibes) is sitting on a raft with a stranger in the sunshine, and she gets up to leave, and the creepy stranger asks her “what’s that tattoo on your arm?” And she pauses and says “It’s for all the people I’ve killed,” and smiles. Like it’s a joke! And then she turns away, but the man says “To the monsters—we’re the monsters. Right?” And she looks at him again, and she says “Where did you hear that?”

I admire that moment because it shows how directly Station Eleven is willing to question its own source material. It signals very clearly that the tattoo means something more than memento mori. (The cheerful sunlight on the waves plays very well against Davis’s clearly unsettled body language; the moment has menace.) In the context of the story, the tattoo is a symbol of a spaceship, from a graphic novel that both of them have read; the Prophet, by speaking a line from the novel, is recognizing another fan. The moment works both textually (the series’s main thematic concern is the idea of adaptation, and both Kirsten and the Prophet will restage events from that graphic novel as the series progresses) and metatextually (as an adaptation of an existing text, Station Eleven tells you that it is going to alter things from the source.)

Anyway, I love that series and that little exchange of dialogue. Davis is very good in it, but Danielle Deadwyler is fucking incredible, and her performance is the starkest and most rewarding departure from the book. I think it’s my favorite thing I’ve ever watched but that’s maybe because I’m a baby who doesn’t really watch movies or TV.

(Also that A Tribe Called Quest scene got me into hip-hop, which is so embarrassing but nevertheless it’s true.)