#so attempting to post this on the app

[cowboythighs]

steddie semi-meet cute where adult star steve (whos attempting a record-breaking gangbang) falls for a mystery man (eddie) who takes him from behind and babbles (endearingly) in his ear nonstop until he finishes and is shuffled out. the only problem: steve never saw him—never got his name!

so steve does the only logical thing and gets a list of the participants from the producers and tracks them down, hoping to find the man he’s fallen for. when he gets to the last name on the list—wayne munson in forest hills trailer park.

steve’s disappointed when an older man—with a voice that’s clearly not his guys—answers the door and says he’s the only wayne munson living there. seeing steve’s despair, wayne invites him in for a drink and sets steve down at the kitchen table with a hot cup of coffee (with a healthy splash of bourbon) and a slice of chocolate cake and asks what brought steve to his door.

steve isn’t ashamed of his job, but he also is very aware of being alone in an unfamiliar home with a man he doesn’t know, so he glosses over the fine details and tells wayne that he’s an actor and he fell in love with an extra on scene and was trying to find him.

steve finds that talking to wayne is easy, and between the chocolate and the hot drink and a sympathetic ear, he starts to feel a bit better. he doesn’t know why someone used wayne’s name and address, but he’s glad his path crossed with waynes none the less.

wayne might not have answers to who his mystery guy is, but he’s a great listener and offers great advice.

when steve hears a car pull up outside, he regrets that their conversation must be coming to an end.

“don’t you worry about that,” wayne says, waving him off when steve tries to make his excuses. “that’s just my boy; he’s supposed to cook for me tonight. you should stay for dinner. he makes a mean lasagna.”

before steve can protest further, the front door opens and all ideas of leaving are gone. because the guy walking in looks like steves wet dreams—like the kind of guy he used to dream about skipping class with so he could rail steve over the picnic table in the woods behind the school.

wayne’s nephew has his hands full—bags of groceries hanging from both arms, a dish in hand that steve assumes is the lasagna, and an orange cat yowling at his heels while he apologizes to his uncle for being late.

steve’s so caught up in looking at eddie that he barely registers wayne explaining steve’s presence there.

when eddie turns to look at him, steve can tell eddie feels the same way about steve—that instant connection.

feeling confident, steve steps forward and offers his hand.

“i’m steve,” he says with his prettiest smile.

“i’m eddie. i think we’ve met before.”

[thiddleston]

[I wrote an Adar lives Adariel ficlet set in Rivendell while they're recuperating

Mutual hair braiding and deja vu ensues]

Adar goes to visit Galadriel's tent at night to talk and finds her sitting on a tree stump by her bed roll attempting to brush and braid her hair for the night. However, the ache in her wound makes it difficult and she huffs in frustration while trying to talk to him.

He offers to assist and she hesitantly accepts with a skeptical inquiry as to whether he knows how to braid hair. He only responds with a long-suffering raised eyebrow and taking the brush from her hand moves around to stand behind her and begins.

She finds herself simultaneously too relaxed and too tense with his ministrations and she distracts herself with chatting about little nothings and eventually they fall into a comfortable silence with him steadily working at her hair.

When he finishes, she surprises him with a reciprocal offer to do his hair, and after a beat too long of silence, she almost thinks he'll decline. Then, without a word, he nods as he hands her the brush and turns to kneel down with his back to her.

She starts brushing but realizes he's still too tall for her to work comfortably and bids him to sit between her legs against the tree stump. He settles in as she resumes and they revive their small talk and delicately dance around deeper topics until once again slipping into silence—the only sounds being the quiet of her fingers weaving his hair and his own private battle to keep breathing steadily.

His battle is quickly lost though as her fingers keep brushing into his scalp and a soft stuttered moan escapes his throat, but though he tenses his back, she spares him by continuing as if nothing happened.

As she finishes the end of the fishtail braid she's given him to match the one he’d given her, she sets aside the brush and rests her hands on his shoulders in a wordless offer. Inch by inch he accepts it as he relaxes his muscles and slowly leans back to rest his head on her shoulder—her right shoulder to spare her wounded left.

Galadriel slides her hands forward to wrap around him and tilts her head to the side to catch his eyes. "This seems familiar," a cautious humor to her voice.

Adar smirks lightly, "At least you don't have a dagger to my throat for a third time."

They gaze at each other in a mimic of those memories for a moment. This time though, with no sharp objects to stop him, he slowly tilts his head closer—first brushing his nose against her cheek, then mouthing light kisses at the corner of her mouth and jaw.

Galadriel, with eyes closed, is utterly lost to sensation. Adar continues like this, kissing every bit of her face he can reach, for an amount of time she could not possibly describe until it is her turn to release a moan. At the sound, his lips barely leave her skin to whisper, "Tell me to stop and I will."

Galadriel only tightens her hold and opens her eyes to look sharply at him. "If you dare stop now then I will hold a dagger to your throat again."

A deep sound between a hum and a chuckle rumbles from Adar's chest as he continues to nuzzle her face with his, "Is that a promise, my light?"

[magicalgirlfia]

Guilty Gear XX♯Reload Comic Anthology Translation: Escape Boy

This is a comic the Guilty Gear XX Sharp Reload Comic Anthology, which I wanted to start translating. The original scans of this comic are by @tillman and can be found on archive.org

By the by, since I don’t have a Japanese folk tale to link to, I’d like to add the fact that in this comic (from 2003) Bridget’s serre-tête has the trans symbol instead of the male symbol. This is off-model for her XX design and (given the other times she is seen in the anthology) this seems to be a purposeful choice by the artist. Make of that what you will.

You can read the previous translation here

And the next translation here

​​Usual disclaimer: I am not fluent in Japanese and all of this is a one Fia job so everything might not be 100% accurate but I always try my best!

[clydefrogzz]

feeling floaty ♡

bonus:

[cyphrgrey]

Artfight off to a good start here’s an attack I made for @cantdanceflynn!! ;)

[burstfoot]

Santalla skin fancam

[veridienn]

me when my dad just finished eating brisket for dinner and is now picking the food out of his teeth with his tongue and making the most egregious obnoxious mouth noises known to man

[dumbthink]

the final verdict on decomytree: it’s an excuse to advertise an ai app, and to ask for money. developers are scummy, but as long as you don’t download any of the shit associated with it or give them money, you’re likely fine 👍 signed, your local computer scientist

edited to reflect that both versions of the decomytree app (android and apple) seem to come from their respective app stores now.

[hypaalicious]

TFW you spend an hour & a half getting to seaborn!Skadi just for her to wash your party like a typhoon

IS3 is going great btw

[buyingaradspaceship]

December

I think it’s beautiful

Going outside in the cold winter air to grab the parcel that arrived while I was asleep from the garden

It’s 1pm and I only just got out of bed

The harsh freshness catches me off guard for a moment

Forces me to really notice

I notice the brown leaves in their resting place

The bird bath glazed over solid

A robin curiously hopping closer

I notice and it’s beautiful

I take some deep breaths and I give the robin some seeds

I soak it up because as wonderful as it is I know I probably won’t go back outside today

The parcel was candles

They smell beautiful

The postie drew a smiley face on the ‘sorry we missed you’ card

The neighbours were putting up christmas lights

Everything feels so still

And I think, what if I died in 2014?

Not ‘what if’ in the sense of ‘imagine if that happened’

More like ‘what if it’s true?’

A part of me, at least

Gone

Irreparable

A piece of 2014 me might be a ghost

I want to honour them but I also don’t want to be haunted anymore

If I died that day so what?

Shit happens

Then it’s winter again

And I wonder why my life is strung out like this

It isn’t cohesive

It’s bubbles on a web

Today I lived

Insignificantly but boldly

[zuntoshere]

This place is becoming QSMP theories and memes journal for me, a lovely way to engage with a community.

Not sure that I will ever collect the courage to draw in fandom again, but even if not, I'm ok with it. There are few people that I see under qsmp tag every day and there is so much cool stuff! You guys are nuts <3

[bloobydabloob]

I’m not a big account or anything by any means, but I want anyone who has ever reblogged me to know that I read every single reblog I get and I appreciate your words and additions. I wish I could respond to them easier.

Responding to last reblog though

who I’m reblogging here (I think? Don’t know how it works really) no it was not on purpose haha. But if that is your read then go for it.

I’ve had a couple other people say the same thing. Shoutout to you guys

Rudimentary things for today. Queue applause from the fishing enthusiasts

[vivalasthedas]

in the same way that you can start sims opted out of fame system via a menu option, there should be menu options to start opted out of social bunny and cupids corner. Hate you both. Go away.

[justaleafinthewind]

If any one of my posts is to break containment, make it this one.

Before January 2025, download your favorite fics, especially those with smut or queer content.

If Project 2025 goes into effect (which it very likely will now that we have three red branches of government in the US), they may attempt to restrict the use/sharing of media on sites like ao3.

This particularly applies to fics with smut or any type of queer content, because the official Project 2025 document states, "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance... has no claim to First Amendment protection... Pornography should be outlawed."

Now, I don't expect ao3 to disappear or go anywhere without a fight, but it's best to be on the safe side these days.

To download your favorite fics:

Go to archiveofourown.org and open the fic you want to download.

At the top right corner, to the right of the 'subscribe' button, is a button that says 'download'. Click it.

A drop-down menu will give you the option to choose the format of your download. Choose your preferred format (.epub and .pdf are my personal favorites -- .epub lets you open a fic in the apple books app and .pdf is compatible with like every device and program out there).

When you click the button for your preferred format, a pop-up window appears confirming your choices. The title of the document will default to the title of the fic, so be aware of that and consider changing conspicuous titles to something ignorable, especially if you share the computer.

You're done! Now do this with all your favorite fics!

Stay safe out there, your favorite characters are rooting for you <3

[indefiniteavatar]

So basically, in a case about him shoving money at someone so they shut up about him. . .he can’t shut the fuck up himself. I would say something clever and funny here, except the sad part is that this is just so normal in current politics that it’s just. . .not hilariously absurd behavior anymore? Not to say that it’s not absurd - it is beyond such, but it is just. . . predictable, I suppose.

I guess this is how I feel about politics lately? Either I get mad at everything or I try to laugh at everything and normally that works because politicians usually aren’t so tragically stupid so very often, but now I just kinda have to chuckle at the particularly eyeroll worthy things like this, and try to ignore everything else or my brain will explode.

[ellieellieoxenfree]

it’s going to be nearly impossible to coalesce four days of scattered thoughts into something coherent that i can be pleased with, but let’s give it a shot. this is, eventually, relevant to this gifset.

i recently read the hours have lost their clock: the politics of nostalgia, which was overall a solid read but that also gave me significant food for thought when discussing the weaponizing of nostalgia and propaganda during wartime. after all, what is yiyun meng other than a constant state of war? ai di and chen yi live their lives permanently in the us-vs-them binary state of survival thinking.

grafton tanner writes, ‘as a concept, the home is associated with nostalgia as much as ‘the past’ is. that’s because nostalgia is partly an emotional abstract for physical security. home is where you’re supposed to be safe. if nostalgia provides a makeshift comfort away from home, then home is the place to which you could return to let down your nostalgic guard and finally relax. home for many people is a familiar haven, untouched by the harsh reality that made them nostalgic for it in the first place. and the yearning for a home is strong both for those who have a home to return to and for those who don’t. but if the home becomes tainted, if the harsh reality on the outside penetrates the home’s interior, then there will no longer be a safe place to return to.’

he further quotes psychologist harriet b braiker, who pointed out that in the aftermath of september 11, americans turned to a place of wounded retreat. ‘to a very significant extent, we are closing out the world, staying home and cocooning.’

drawing into oneself as a defensive measure primes you for surrendering control to someone else in a position of power or leadership. to place yourself in the fight-or-flight mode means that you’re not thinking clearly long-term. you’re thinking of how to get by and how to keep yourself safe in the immediate circumstance. and it allows you to be exploited. tanner points out that in post-9/11 america, bush and his cronies were able to manipulate people’s fear into wild government overreach and twist the perception of the country into ‘a place under assault, in need of aggressive defense from shape-shifting dangers.’ (this particular bit is quoted from journalist masha gessen, not tanner, within the text.) framing america as ‘the homeland’ was a neat bit of trickery that posits constant vigilance and defense as a moral imperative for all of its citizens. a homeland not vigorously defended at all times is at at constant risk of being destroyed or absorbed by the enemy. thus, as gessen writes, ‘anxieties are heightened; you never know where the threat will come from next. long periods of boredom are punctuated with bursts of violence. in the homeland, every day is war.’ (emphasis my own.)

and, as tanner adds, ‘there is no war to secure the homeland, no victors and losers, because there will always be another enemy.’ this part is crucial. the concept of the enemy can always be shifted or reshaped to fit whatever new threat an elite class dictates is most pressing. (a threat, of course, can also be manufactured wholesale — for example, continuing the discussion of america, many threats are brought down by relentless imperialism and overseas meddling.) but a group under siege, real or imagined, is a group easily controlled or manipulated. loyalty is instilled and strengthened through fear.

to finally bring it back to kiseki, whose loyalty is better shaped than a group of malleable children? i think constantly about the lines ‘you gotta keep her thin and hungry / so she’s eager for your love’ w/r/t chen dong yang, who we see canonically has a pattern of raising child soldiers. in episode 3, we see xian (aaron lai) and shuo (hank wang) as fully grown men still vying for the approval of their boss — and we see the way he volleys between throwing them crumbs of affection and casually, callously dismissing them. he first teases them and offers them dinner, and then, once they’ve overstepped and try to discuss gang matters with him as equals, he doesn’t hesitate to slap them back down into place. ‘if you are like this, how can i trust you with my japanese business?’ he points out at their cockiness and recklessness. (in comparison, ming lei is an ass, but he holds no pretensions about what he is, and his openly sour disapproval is almost refreshing in the face of CDY’s shifting, snakelike maneuvers.)

he toys with the affections of the boys in his care, always holding his approval just slightly out of reach and knowing full well they’ll continue to strive for an impossible ideal. xian and shuo have the advantage of being established and in love and not pursuing his romantic attentions, unlike chen yi, but they’re not immune to the need for parental approval. they attempt to approach CDY as worldly-wise — judging chen yi’s performance as a leader and bragging about their own gang histories — but it smacks of a little boy running to his father and desperately begging for attention and kindness. please tell me i did a good job. please tell me you’re proud of me. i’ve done so much and fought so hard for you. don’t you love me?

xian and shuo are in the same boat as chen yi and ai di — raised to be soldiers in a never-ending fight, pliable in the hands of someone older and (allegedly) wiser who promises safety and protection in the face of the enemy. chen yi, especially, as second-generation yiyun meng, knows no other home than north hall. he knows no other life than endless warfare in service to CDY and ming lei. the sick irony of all of it is that CDY offers himself as a safe harbor — i’m your father, i’m looking out for you — but he is the reason they’ve been in danger their entire lives. the home he created for them is built on flimsy foundations. he gave them a place to stay and helped raise them, but never gave them a stable foundation, and neither of them had a frame of reference to realize how abnormal this was. chen yi would never have known another type of life; ai di was raised, and ostensibly abandoned, by addicts. to an outside observer, the fact that CDY gifts chen yi leadership of north hall at seventeen is fucking nauseating. but to chen yi, this is probably an incredible gift — it’s a path forward, it’s something dependable, it’s a sign that he’s trusted and reliable.

all of these things combine to create an us-vs-them mentality. trust lies entirely with the father/leader figure who knows best; those outside of the world cannot be trusted or inducted, for various reasons. zong yi is one end of the spectrum; he cannot be part of this world because it’s unsafe. zhang teng is part of the gang world, but he cannot be trusted because he is the enemy. he is the dog fighting over the same table scraps. much like post-9/11 americans, the members of yiyun meng have a moral imperative to fight and defend against zhang teng and his men to protect not only themselves, but their own homelands. they have been conditioned to view the survival of yiyun meng as above their own lives. (in ai di’s storyline, you cannot separate death from who he is as a person. the threat of sudden death is so ingrained in him that ‘i love him enough to die for him,’ he tells ze rui in episode 4. sacrifice to the point of death is the highest expression of love. and that’s because he’s been trained not to see himself as a person. he is a pawn for the motherland. regardless of his fractious relationship with CDY, ai di is awash in the constant propaganda that he is secondary to yiyun meng — and chen yi is the face of his branch of yiyun meng. it’s a very messy cocktail. die for the man you love, die for the homeland, finally make something valuable of yourself. you gain personhood and autonomy by ending your own existence as a person.)

the conversation with chen yi about zhang teng immediately frames ai di and zhang teng as two sides of the same coin, but there’s a crucial difference. what we, as an audience see of ai di, is sympathetic, because we get depth and dimension and see what motivates him. what we see of zhang teng is, depending on the audience member, arguably sympathetic, because we get to, again, see depth and dimension and what motivates him. but chen yi does not see that. that is the crux of it. the conversation about zhang teng killing his parents adds to his character for the audience; it defines him for chen yi and ai di as characters. the inner life we see of zhang teng in canon — his relationship with his sister and the underling who pines for him — isn’t something that’s privy to the yiyun meng members.

and that’s deliberate, both narratively and in-universe, because propaganda depends on one incredibly important factor: dehumanization. zhang teng needs to be considered a monstrous threat who needs to be eliminated for the sake of the homeland, and anything human about him needs to be discarded as unimportant, irrelevant, or actively detrimental to the mission. a soldier who sees the humanity in the enemy might hesitate to pull the trigger. this cannot be allowed if the warfare is to be effective and never-ending. the enemy needs to be faceless. (how many studies are there on assigning personalities to robots and how humans create an instant attachment to them because of it? the instant something has an identity beyond the purely utilitarian, the instinct is to waver. a crane or bulldozer may not inspire human affection, but paint pairs of eyes on them and name them max and molly, and the game changes.)

what chen yi sees of ai di is always going to be colored by the fact that this was a boy he was raised alongside. chen yi scolds him the most but takes care of him the most as well. he was the one to realize ai di was so sick he nearly died. he, far more than CDY, has that duty of care. CDY doesn’t know how to manage this half-feral cat. chen yi is the only person ai di will ever truly respect or listen to, and even that’s dicey. but ai di, to chen yi, is a human being. he was a little boy that chen yi watched grow up. he knows ai di’s history and how deeply the scars of his abandonment run. (ai di makes savage little jibes at it — ‘don’t you need to say goodbye to him? he is your lifesaver,’ he says to ze rui in episode 3 about zong yi, and when ze rui says there’s no need, there’s a momentary flash of pain on ai di’s face that he quickly covers with sarcastic applause and a disparaging comment about ze rui’s maturity. later, after the red riding hood incident, he lashes out at chen yi for his concern. ‘why should i inform you? are you my mother?’ he snaps. ‘my mother doesn’t care about me. why should you?’ it’s bone-deep anguish, leaking out past the layers of jokey self-defense.) ai di hurts as a character — he’s in an immense amount of pain all the time, and it’s what makes him so effective as the teeth of yiyun meng. he is a masterful combination of self-destructive and hurting and he has so little regard for himself that he’s willing to be shaped into the weapon someone he believes to be his superior wants him to be. ai di channels all the pain he feels into violence as an outlet because he doesn’t know what else to do with it. he doesn’t believe he can do anything else with it.

and zhang teng, what we see of him, in limited glimpses, hurts deeply, too. he carries the same scars of parental abandonment that ai di does. when ai di mentions that zhang teng killed his father at only fourteen, it isn’t expanded on. to both him and chen yi, it’s just a sign of psychopathy. of course the monster would do this. (admittedly, ai di seems a bit impressed, but ai di’s morals are questionable at best.) but it’s a tantalizing plot thread to pull on, considering how close he is with sih ning, his sister. their closeness goes back to the very beginning of this — the cocooning away from the world. it’s you and me against everybody. i can only trust you. home is not safe for us. my immediate reaction to those lines was that like chen yi and ai di, zhang teng has never truly known safety or stability, and that he was betrayed by the people who were tasked with raising and protecting him. to kill a man at 14 — to kill your own father at 14 — isn’t something undertaken lightly. the implication to a viewer (at least, a viewer who is interested in looking past the surface propaganda of zhang-teng-psychopathic-irredeemable-villain) is that their father had a very good reason to die. i would put cash money on severe childhood abuse and zhang teng’s killing of him as a way to keep sih ning safe.

what’s fascinating is that zhang teng is half chen yi and half ai di — the fierce older-sibling protectiveness of chen yi, but the sharp claws of ai di (especially considering how brutally ze rui's betrayal cuts through him — this is a man intimately familiar with being let down by the people he thought he could trust). and he’s a fucking tragic figure because of the machinations of powerful men who needed to use him for their own ends. zhang teng dies not because he was wrong, but because he represented a threat to the homeland. he is the nebulous enemy who needs to be stripped of humanity and autonomy in order for the morally just group to achieve their desired total victory. and the further tragedy is that the characters in yiyun meng don’t see him as a peer or a victim, the same way they are. they don’t see him as someone exploited by an apathetic overlord, the way they, too, have been for their entire lives. he is on the other side of the ideological divide and so they can’t afford to give him respect or dignity, because that would cause the entire war machine to fracture and ultimately break down. he is a threat and a monster and something that ceases to be human.

ultimately, i think that’s what chen yi means when he says that’s not what i meant. it’s not about zhang teng being crazier than ai di. there’s a discomfort in comparing someone — something! — like zhang teng to chen yi’s beloved ai di. it veers too closely to the idea that they’re on an equal playing field. zhang teng had parents, yes, as everyone does, but to dig too deeply into the idea of why someone only fourteen would murder one of them is too dangerous. it opens the door to thinking of this monster as human, or hurting, or in the right. to chen yi, ai di’s pain is justified, because he’s seen it and grown up with it and because ai di is as essential to him as his own hands. zhang teng’s pain cannot be given the same grace. if he is even given a sliver of the humanity that ai di has, could chen yi pull the trigger when it truly mattered?

Gosh, he's even crazier than I am. You are different from him.

KISEKI: DEAR TO ME Ep. 08