#the maudlin .

[homoquartz]

something something edwin appearing to charles as a glow in the darkness, appearing to simon as the first caring touch in 100 years, charles appearing to edwin in the same way, the two of them standing over niko's bedside as she's dying, working on a cure, knelt over crystal on the tube as she wakes for the first time as herself, snapping the wwi ghost from his fugue and telling him he was all right, something about the boys as guardian angels, as shepherds from life to death and back again

[thevoicefromthestars]

so i'm trying to come to terms with starship iris ending, y'know, as one does when there's a project that you auditioned for on a whim as a total amateur, eight years and a lifetime ago, that is finally coming to a close, and i am really truly trying not to get sappy about it. but.

in another universe, there is no ishani kanetkar. she was born with this show, for this show, and it's still a little unbelievable to me that there are people i've never met who know who she is. it's even wilder that there are people i HAVE met who want her, this person who has never been fully real but has always still been me, to help them tell their own stories.

i recorded the pilot episode on my wired earbuds' built-in microphone, in a bedroom in my grandparents' home in mumbai. those grandparents are gone; that house of my memory too. but every time i come back to this show, i remember sitting on the bed of the small room that once belonged to my great-aunt, trying and failing to find a scrap of quiet so that kay grisham could tell violet liu it would all be okay.

so maybe some of the things i'm feeling are for the end of a story, but i think some of them are also for the ishani who started telling it, who can't go back. some of them are for ishani kanetkar, this ephemeral self and not-self, whose own time is one day going to be over. and some of them are just for me, now, who looks forward to a future with other projects and other people but not this project, with these people, and is sad to say goodbye. i hope i can do my part to give it a truly phenomenal send-off.

[theminecraftbee]

happy birthday technoblade. for the more sentimental thoughts in me...

to say technoblade is why i'm in this fandom is just... in some ways it feels reductive. yeah, sure, i watched minecraft youtube in high school years ago (and even had a friend who wanted to become a youtuber and wanted me in his videos, before my mom banned me on the grounds of 'you're fifteen and your face and voice shouldn't be online', a thing i thought was stupid at the time and now am like 'yeah okay fair enough' about). yeah, sure, technoblade is not the ACTUAL entry point the youtube algorithm gave me to modern mcyt (it was by way of speedrunning videos in mid-2020, which then later lead into potato war after i'd already sort of started getting invested).

but technoblade is why i'm in the fandom.

potato war is what hooked me, and i subscribed to technoblade and began watching everything he had. somewhere in there, he had a stream! it was on the dsmp; it was his festival preparations stream. i didn't know what i was watching yet, but i could pick up enough to know he was rping. i was intrigued. i decided to come back the next day. i witnessed the red festival live. i went "holy shit i have to get more of this i think?????" and started watching the fandom from the outside. eventually it all built up in me enough i had to write black box; from there i tried to quietly sneak into a discord and then got grabbed by people who are still such good friends to me that i just got back from out-of-state visiting them.

and yeah. i ended up drifting away from dsmp (although i was always around for technoblade), and am here in hermitcraft land--also because of the friends i only made because of technoblade, so you can probably blame technoblade for the fact i'm into hermitcraft. but none of that changes the fact that technoblade was the first. technoblade is the guy who got me here.

the fact i'm still here... three years later? coming up on four? that's unusual for me. that's a fandom with STICKING POWER for me, normally that space is taken up exclusively by like, pokemon and that's it. but here i am.

i'm even setting up to make minecraft youtube videos myself again, just a bit over a decade later. i'm no longer fifteen, mom, my voice can be on the internet now. no one will know.

anyway, in a lot of ways i owe all of that to technoblade.

so you know. happy 25th birthday, technoblade. technoblade never dies.

[thegreencarousel]

A witch older than even himself, told him that the weight of his virtues will drown him one day. Xenk had merely tipped his head at her courteously, heeding her cryptid words but not taking it to heart. He was not afraid of death. Not when fear of death was what had taken away his family and tore his soul apart. However as ominous as her words sounded, the witch did not mean his death. She had seen a boy who had lost too much and was given nothing. He thought himself living on the the periphery of others’ existence, a spectator in their joys and sorrow. In thinking that his life was spared and extended for something greater, he forgot that it too was like leaves in the wind. Fleeting, but never alone unless he walked it so.

[pierremcguire]

[estrellami-1]

The Foundation (I’m Not Leaving You)

Had a vague idea. Churned this out in probably five minutes. Haven’t even read it through. Bone apple tit and all that jazz.

Steve thought of love like a house.

Not just any house; his house.

It looked great on the outside, and the inside was always ready, poised and perfect for guests, but really? It was lonely. It was fake. It was empty. It was everything Steve hated, everything he couldn’t get away from.

His breakup with Nancy only served to further prove his theory.

But then Eddie came along, and he couldn’t help but fall for him. He couldn’t help but love him, whole-heartedly.

And Christ, did that scare Steve. Because under all his throw pillows and open-concept living space, who was he? Why would Eddie stay when everything that makes up Steve could be gone with just the flick of a match?

It doesn’t make sense, really, for him to be standing at the site of where his house once was. It’s a pile of smoking rubble now—product of a faulty gas line—and Steve’s breaking.

Hard.

His knees crumble, and he’d fall to the pavement if Eddie didn’t catch him. “Hey,” Eddie says softly. “I know it’s a lot. I know it’s scary. But you can get through this, okay?” He whispers. “We can get through this. Cause I’m not leaving you.” He helps Steve back up, leads him towards the ash and ruin.

“Look here,” he murmurs, tracing the line of where the kitchen had been with his pointed finger. “The foundation’s still there, baby. All that’s gone is everything you hated in the first place. I know all this change at once is scary, but maybe you could see it as a good thing. The foundation’s still there, rock-solid. Now you can build it back up the way you want, the way you need, with everything that makes it you. How’s that sound?”

For the first time, Steve lets himself love fully; lets himself turn and bury his face in Eddie’s neck, lets his fingers clutch at Eddie’s waist as he tries for regulate his breathing. Lets Eddie see all of him. “Sounds pretty good,” he admits.

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[clowndensation]

sorry for loving the way they love or whatever

[lucy-moderatz]

wild horses couldn't drag me away

[antigonenikk]

"i wish we were going together"

[beckyblah]

My Durge and new names: at the beginning of the game, when she discovered her true nature, and when she was finally free of her Bhaal’s influence.

Also my Durge is a bard and I thought I was real funny huh

[zarla-s]

[previous] [next]

Never know when a flashback will strike! Although actually Gaster had a pretty good idea that it was likely going in. He actually kept it together pretty well until the laughing started.

I was going to have one of the other ladies in there with Jockey and Mousey, but Hunter doesn’t like books, Smoker’s a grouch, and Charger wouldn’t laugh that much. So I went through my old sketches and found one of Jockey’s nerd friends who died in the zombie apocalypse, Lorelei. She’s happy to be here!

[index] [patreon] [comicfury]

[ribbittrobbit]

18 years old vs. 26 years old

turned 26 today, meaning i'm one year out from charlotte lucas' "I'm 27 years old, I've no money and no prospects. I'm already a burden to my parents. And I'm frightened."

I think 18 year old me could take me in a fight, honestly. She didn't have carpal tunnel + wasn't googling stretching routines for her hip flexors. BUT she weighed 60 kg soaking wet so I could totally just sit on her and she'd be done.

[lord-morpheus-ravens]

A visit to the Dreaming.

[skelleste]

Mad Tom and Mad Maudlin, OCs based on the famous 17th century mad poems Tom o’ Bedlam and Mad Maudlin’s Search.

[ilovetoplay]

spourtney + true love waits

[kylejsugarman]

hey I lurk for your Breaking Bad content. please give me all of your Jesse in Alaska/recovery headcanons. I need it like I need air.

jesse in alaska.......where do i even begin 😔 im going to avoid lingering too much on my alaska oc's and that little world (tldr for newcomers: jesse gets to haines, starts working at a repair/custom shop called carvings owned by sheila, and befriends and falls in love with the local vet demi who is raising her niece baby) just because there are Plenty of those posts and i want to focus more on jesse himself

this is one ive talked about before, but its just so precious to me, and thats jesse getting into cooking. at first, him learning how to do it is out of pure necessity. the canned food that ed left him only lasts for a few weeks and the prepackaged stuff at the store is all queasily redolent of the "treats" (<- meager sustenance) that were dropped into his cage, so he picks up a box of dry pasta and looks at the recipe for chicken penne printed on the box. it has all the steps, the ingredients. he was always good at following a recipe. jesse dutifully buys the stuff and what begins as him robotically following the text later on in his small, dim kitchen starts to feel. Good. there's no harsh fumes or chemical burns. he doesnt have to measure the garlic down to a hundredth of a gram. he has a recipe to follow—something to guide him—but nothing awful is going to happen if he experiments a little. if he deviates. and he isn't making poison. he's making something Good. for so, so long, jesse only Destroyed and when he did create, it was poison. now he gets to do what he wants. he gets to make good. that chicken penne is the first thing he eats in weeks that actually has flavor—or maybe he's letting himself Taste again. jesse starts cooking more and more, using those supermarket recipes and eventually recipes that he prints off from the public library computers, and even once it becomes a part of his daily routine, he never loses that weird excitement for it. there's the satisfaction of successfully executing a task even with his memory issues and adhd, but also the excitement of realizing over and over that he can do what he wants.

jesse thinks he's "done" with drugs when he gets to alaska purely because he hasn't been able to use and doesnt have immediate access to anything stronger than alcohol or tobacco, but he quickly realizes that he does not have any other kind of coping mechanism ready to deploy or way to sufficiently distract himself once he's physically and mentally well enough to Be Aware. alcohol doesnt seem to "work" fast enough. he thinks over and over about hiring a sex worker or finding a bar somewhere so he can have sex with and fall asleep next to a warm, living body. he drives for hours and sometimes hits the brakes hard on the icy road when theres no one else out there, letting himself skid uncontrollably and hoping he crashes. he wants to start a fight with a stranger. he wants to hug a stranger. and he does end up using drugs again, several times. i mean he's a severely traumatized addict arriving in a new location with zero support. it's not a failure, it's not irreversible backsliding: it's just the reality of what being in this terrifying, vulnerable situation would be like for jesse. for a long time, he sees these relapses as signs of weakness and that Certain People were right about him being a pathetic junkie with no will or value, but as he starts meeting people and finding new ways to be happy and getting the right treatment for his various issues and sometimes even sitting in NA church basement meetings because he just needs to be Understood, jesse comes around to the idea that addiction is not a moral failing and sees his life as worthy enough to safely and healthily preserve.

lightning round!! jesse decides once he arrives to grow his hair and facial hair out some to look less like his old mugshot, but also because as soon as the cold winter air touches his shaved head, he basically reverts to spongebob and patrick duct-taping fur off of sandy to survive in her dome during winter. he stops to stare in awe at eagles and whales and moose even after years and years of living in alaska. his sense of smell is nearly totally destroyed from cooking without protection, but he still always buys lemon scented soap and cleaning stuff because lemon was his aunt ginny's favorite scent. he reads up on a lot of first-aid on the public library computers, sometimes out of a sense of frantic compulsion or guilt, sometimes out of legitimate curiosity. when he drives home from doctors appointments or NA meetings, he plays the music in his car so loud that his seat shakes. the people of haines know that mr driscoll can be a little cagey and will flinch at the sound of his own laugh, but they also know that he brakes for animals and carves beautiful gadrooning and buys ten of whatever the kids are selling to raise money for the band or their scout troop. and they like him quite a bit :)