#some food for thought or whatever

[foliejpg]

realistically pete and patrick are both the sun AND the moon. they’re twins, not yin and yang - which is why i think the new fob logo is split straight down the middle instead of curved. that’s why on the 2ourdust poster the sun is crying and the moon is happy, they’re complex and more than just one or the other

[pup-pee]

sunshine & maybbbbb starlight?

gift 4 @melonlthawne !!!!!! bc i love their art smm

[letterful]

Jean Madar, chairman and CEO of InterParfums Inc, recently told Bloomberg that fragrance is part of a person’s “core identity”. And while cosmetic companies can face criticism for conflating external products with existential outcomes [...] perfume conveniently sidesteps the problems of the flesh. It’s not trying to change how you look, but how you feel, and, for the span of a spritz at least, it does. In the age of wellness-as-beauty and neurocosmetics, the science of scent is marketing gold.

[...] I wonder if what we’re after here is not a sense of self but a (related) sense of life.

I say “we” because – despite my documented skepticism of beauty brands – I, too, am powerless against a good perfume ad.

Last month, casually depressed and subconsciously seeking comfort and some sort of release, I spent $240 on a scent called Tears by Régime de Fleurs. “What a luxury to weep,” the website read. It described the perfume as “emotion in liquid form, the romance and the sadness”. It promised “nostalgia” too, with notes of lilac to remind me of my grandmother’s front yard and frankincense to call up childhood Sundays spent in incense-blessed church pews. I suppose I wanted Tears to take me back to a time when someone who loved me baked me cookies every week, when I believed in God and goodness, and life stretched ahead of me in an endless expanse of hope and potential.

Of course, it didn’t do that. It smelled fine. I felt something, for a second. But I was still me, and I was still mostly numb.

I thought of that perfume the other day while reading the preface to Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove. James summarized it as the story “of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life” – someone “passionately desiring” to “achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived”.

Something clicked: how to explain Tears if not a brief and broken sense of having cried?

[riacte]

so hey guys i finished dungeon meshi yesterday and i'm still thinking about it

[melatien]

tiny yoichi (unwillingly) lures out soldiers by being his helplessness little self so his brother can strike

[moongothic]

A stupid Crocodad related mental image that keeps on haunting me is Crocodile somehow getting to witness a Usual Strawhat Banquet, seeing Luffy eat The Normal Amount of Food Luffy Usually Eats and think to himself "...yeah that adds up"

[dragontamer05]

Okay so something I've been thinking on for awhile about Opera that I don't think I've ever seen others touch on is that although so far having only ever been referred to with and as They/Them.

By all accounts has been confirmed that Opera doesn't align themselves specifically with any gender, beyonc Non-binary I think an argument could be had of them being (by human labels) Agender perhaps.

At the very least Opera very clearly doesn't seem to be the type to have any specific labels happy to use which ever.

I say this because of the Sukima in which Iruma asks if they are a guy or a girl and seems pretty chill with just being whatever Iruma wants/however Iruma sees them.

Oper really saying my Gender is your choice.

This lending me to believe if someone did happen to use other pronouns beyond They/Them Opera might be okay with it. At the very least seem none to bothered if someone were to just assume a gender and just shrug it off as "Well if ghats what you think guess I am"

Though I suppose it could also depend on the person.

Mostly here to say that while we may say Non- Binary Opera is just Opera and very much gives the vibes of someone who doesn't really subscribe to keeping to any labels.

Also Demons in general seem to be a very you are who you are and probably don't bother much with categorizing folks in the same way we do anyway.

[icewindandboringhorror]

More misc. daily life pictures and such

[love-songs-for-emma]

flavored water tastes like water drank from an unwashed cup

[not-poignant]

Character Ask Game, 20 for Temsen?

20. Which other character is the ideal best friend for this character, the amount of screentime they share doesn't matter?

In The Nascent Diplomat it's the entirety of the Ohlo Ohlo clan.

Literally everyone comes second to them.

And in Underline the Black I don't think Temsen has any best friends, and I'm not sure who an ideal would be, because he doesn't really want to be super close to anyone.

If they exist, I'm not sure we've met them yet! You know it's probably Marikit though, lol.

~

From the character meme!

[mousiefrotting]

was just mulling over some twst thoughts (overblot-related and such) noticing how most of the incidents so far end with the victim getting enough time to rest and get back to a fit condition to live their lives?- and then i suddenly remembered a canon fact that makes for suuuuch good recovery-whump happenings:

if blot accumulation in a magestone subsides when the caster's physical reserves are replenished (food, sleep, etc.), what about the post-overblot recovery?? after all the wreckage of an overblot is said and done, all the emotions have been had and harrowed- what about the physical rehabilitation process?

we see a few mentions of overblotters feeling sick right after the fact- or just generally being physically worse off after burning through a notable amount of magic- and it got me thinking; what about all those post-blot scenes we don't get to see? sure, they've got emotional (often literal also!) messes to fix ahead of them-- but what about that moment where everything just feels bad and gross and the failure of your best laid plans is just heaping onto how absolutely wrecked you are and everyone can see it?

(the thought of any of the prev ob!ers actually having to voice a physical need is just too good to resist imo- especially after the fact and having to see the ramifications!!! augugughghh and while i may have reasonings "blot bad, sleep and food good" does something to the brain i must admit))

just.. AUGH.. i need to see the emotional vulnerability and the walls betrayed by the all-powerful denial-shatterer: good old physical needs!

[lbctal]

been thinking about how gamby and russell are dog/cat coded. like gamby’s all like oh you liked that thing i did? do you want me to do it again? and again? and again? and again? and again? and again? while russell is all like oh you liked that thing i did? well i don’t care and i’m totally not stashing that information in my back pocket for later to see you smile or laugh. absolutely not doing that. haha.

basically they both wanna please each other but russell is better at playing it off than gamby. lol. being weird about them hours.

[btsbs]

.

[kekkuda]

Part of the process of recovering from my first psychotic episode has involved revisiting all of the famous gothic horror literature i read and was fascinated by as a preteen and reading Poe has been a constant experience of yeah I’ve been there before buddy and it really does feel like he was ahead of his time in terms of presenting reality as inherently absurd in a way his peers didn’t often touch upon. People often stop their analysis at “Edgar Allan Poe utilizes unreliable narrators a lot” instead of going a bit further to put themselves in the shoes of the characters and asking what it feels like to live in an unreliable reality. Reading Poe stories feels so very melancholic at a moment in my life when I don’t know how to get care for these issues, whether or not I’m actually sound of mind or just convincing myself I’m losing touch with reality-- in other words “faking it.” Ever since the incident moments of joy and curious hobbies have gone from being seen by those around me as quirky hyperfixations to something more sinister and unwell. Others who I thought really cared for my health and safety seem to treat the revelation that I am “losing my mind, no literally. . . please let me tell you what happened” with the if i’m retelling the story of what flavor of soda i picked at the vending machine. It’s so alienating as if being terrified of your own mind and it’s capability to break apart the rules of reality isn’t alienating enough. I think Poe really captures that feeling I get when things are just a bit off until they crescendo into an event that seems massive and tiny and inconsequential all the same. I really can’t describe it because the fear I feel is unlike any other fear I’ve felt and you don’t know it until you’ve felt it and it clicks. Out of curiosity I wanted to see how well H.P. Lovecraft held up or if my distaste for his work was strictly from the knowledge of who the man was in life. The answer is no, it does not. Frankly I find it insulting that H.P. Lovecraft is put at the same level as Poe, far above the tens of Gothic writers that preceded him by decades to nearly a century. . . of whom Lovecraft would openly take influence from just to water down down everything that makes those works interesting. The “indescribable” horrors that Lovecraft describes are paradoxically comprehensible. I’ve had many discussions with my partner about why more grounded surrealist art feels far more surreal and uneasy than art that is comprised of endless “weird” imagery. To keep this topic brief, think something like David Lynch. His films are utterly bizarre compared to your average hollywood blockbuster, sure, but as far as surrealist media goes? His films are very grounded in reality, but that reality feels off and strange in a way that genuinely is indescribable. When I read Lovecraft on the other hand, it feels like he read a lot of gothic literature about the sublime, indescribably transcendent nature of the universe and replaced that with essentially. . . a big scary monster. When Lovecraft writes “indescribable” or other similar words as a descriptor for what his characters see, it feels akin to when 14 year olds discover the SCP wiki and think that the more you write REDACTED or [DATA EXPUNGED] the scarier the object of horror is. It feels lazy when you’re not given any other reason to feel afraid. When I read Dagon it feels like I’m reading an early 2010s creepypasta written by someone who hasn’t been writing long enough to analyze what makes something scary. It genuinely feels like someone trying to write what they think psychosis might be like. His stories are so inhuman (and not in the way he’s trying to achieve) and detached, and I never get the is it real or not feeling I get from older gothic stories dealing with notions of sanity and humanity’s role in the universe. I know the big spooky space creatures are real in the universe of the text, so I don’t really connect the Lovecraftian hero’s lapses of sanity. You don’t see the same tragic decay of mind and body and ill-fated social dynamics that permeate so many of Poe’s stories. I genuinely don’t know what purpose there is to be gained from the oft-quoted declaration that the core of Lovecraft is about uncovering knowledge you aren’t supposed to know. I frankly don’t know how you can separate the art from the artist for HPL when so much of his work seems to pretty clearly match up with antisemitic “secret global society” conspiracy theories that go back centuries upon centuries. Think about it for two seconds: the “terrible knowledge” that gets discovered is typically the existence of some all-powerful cosmic race that seems to hide itself at all costs and could possibly end humanity’s pitiful existence should they so choose to do so. So much of his work involves this utterly unsympathetic view of otherness as an “indescribable threat” in society whereas I think a lot of Poe’s writing really captures the terror of being othered at a time when the treatment of mentally ill and disabled people was at one of its all-time peaks. I might revisit this idea again when I’m not tired as shit but I think in all, Lovecraft feels almost boring. Nothing feels really impressive despite the scale of its horror. In some ways, Poe really feels almost shockingly similar to a lot of postmodern man-vs-reality narratives, whereas Lovecraft feels like he takes a lot of the same aesthetics of gothic literature and uses it to craft a narrative that is far more simplistic than it seems at first glance. It hardly even qualifies as a man-vs-god narrative prevalent in the time of the Illiad, but given HPL’s track record when it comes to respecting human beings it’s all just a bare bones black and white us-versus-them man-vs-man narrative. Now, art doesn’t have to be thematically complex to be good, but I find it a bit insulting when the man with the copy-paste self insert characters with the personality of soggy paper wants to profess understanding of profoundly existentialist, indescribable terror. . . and the vast majority of his work is just an allegory with a metaphor writing-hand heavier than CS Lewis’s own that gives me no insights about the world other than that he literally couldn’t get over the “indescribable” fear of “grug look different from ogg, grug bad!” dog you didn’t make a cosmic discovery you are literally the fuckin meme “men will smoke weed once and think they’re enlightened for discovering empathy” or whatever. i have more transcendental experiences railing twinks and cuddling with pretty girls talk about smth really indescribable!!!!! it’s fucking caveman shit. mf really would be writing shitty fanfic of shadow puppets if you locked him in the cave fr fr. prolly wouldn’t notice he’s in an allegory fr fr life is indescribable and that’s what makes it beautiful and tragic and precious just eat a cock like the rest of us instead ur scarin the hoes with your shitty octopus fursona!

[johndonneswife]

[doomzday-zone]

The whole thing about Will hating Mike is like, at least to me it's me filling in the blanks with his dialogue and some of how the story goes.

I mean he wanted to burn his dad down, his dad keeps trying to trap him in this Weird Circle of Death, man definitely abused his kids if Mike's aggression towards his little brother is anything to go by

BUT THAT'S JUST A THEORY A GAYME THEO- *Matpat snipes me from a window*

- Ballpit anon

hmmm. yea ig that makes sense, like i see where that could come from but still iffy on it personally....... hmmm hmm hmm. hm.