#things my uncle says

[mbrainspaz]

me at the lakehouse last weekend: Hey... hey. Can you stop she/her-ing me to death please. It makes me feel like you still only see me as a woman.

My conservative gay uncle, looking me very earnestly in the eye over the kitchen counter: It just so difficult because my whole life I've known 'they' as a plural pronoun.

me: Stop— because you definitely already use it singularly when you refer to someone whose gender is unknown.

my transphobic mom who loves grammar: Yeah like 'somebody left their keys. We should find them.'

him: o____o

me: o____o

and then believe it or not after 2 years of me being out as non-binary he may have actually corrected himself and used 'they' pronouns for me like twice.

He also spent a bad 30 minutes trying to out-debate my socialist politics and convince me that people are good for nothing except being worker bees for the economy but that's another post.

[estelle-speaks]

Ok ok I’ve been thinking a lot about @morganbritton132 Steve’s older siblings au and I love the idea of him becoming an uncle at 2 because of the crazy age gap. Then I also started thinking about the theory of Gareth and Steve being cousins but may I raise you one better and say Uncle Steve and his nephew Gareth. PLEASE ITS BEEN PLAGUING MY BRAIN. It’s so funny. Like imagine the shit he’d get from the boys. Eddie constantly making jokes about banging Gareth’s uncle. Gareth is disgusted by the whole thing.

[nedlittle]

so i work for a small regional museum. remotely, i should add. the museum itself is about 2000km west, so i've never actually been there but i research and write articles about local history for them. and because the town was only formally settled in the 1920s and a lot of the museum's supporters are older, the majority of the history i write about is within, or just outside of living memory. this means that people will comment on our posts with memories or connections of their own. they'll tag their friends and family and say 'remember this?'

a few week ago, i wrote a week's worth of posts about immigration, largely displaced persons in the aftermath of the second world war. there was an outpouring of memories and people tagging their family members and sharing them. our notifications were blowing up with people saying "thanks for writing about my uncle" and "i knew them when i was young, but i never knew their story" and "she looks so beautiful here" and "our families used to get together for dinners, i'm still friends with his daughter."

regular people, non-historians, are inclined to think of history as a monolithic past leading up to the present; an easy timeline of textbook names and events. and we think of museums largely the same way. you have the louvre and you have the smithsonian and maybe a modern art museum or a niche museum for skeletons or canoes or one specific guy. museums are reserved for the big things, but they're also for the little things and people that will never be in textbooks.

and i'm thinking about the way people responded to those posts, seeing their own history remembered with the same reverence as the big stuff. maybe you never knew the people being written about, or maybe you did, and for a few days, they are alive again, and your neighbours and your classmates and your councilmen are remembering your family, and they are alive.

[rapha-reads]

No but I gotta talk about Medusa for a minute actually.

It's been. A very long time since I read the PJO books so I don't exactly remember how Uncle Rick presents Medusa in the book. But the way the show introduces her myth? Fascinating. For me as a Greek mythology enthusiast, that is.

The show makes Medusa a victim of Athena. Of course, the show is mainly for kids, so they can't exactly say that, hey, kids, Medusa was Athena's priestess and she was raped by Poseidon, YEP, or protagonist's father, IN Athena's temple, nah, that's neither kid-friendly nor does it endears us to Poseidon. Not that Poseidon is very dear to us viewers/readers at this point, our narrator/protagonist can't stand his own dad.

But still what fascinates me is that even though they twisted the myth to ft the narrative they still managed to evoke Athena's curse as being actually a gift, and Medusa not feeling wretched over her condition but blessed.

Which is not a modern reading of the myth, actually. Saying that Athena couldn't punish Poseidon for his transgression and could only punish Medusa, but did so in a way that would give Medusa weapons to defend herself against whoever and whatever would try to harm her again, is a narrative that exists since Antiquity.

My point is that the re-framing of Medusa's myth, departing from the traditional, non-kid-friendly version while still incorporating both classic and modern elements, is a good frame of reference for the series (book and show)' entire approach to mythology. And I guess I'm saying that mostly for the non-book readers who are discovering this world, many of whom might be Greek mythology fans and might have gone "wait, why is Hades AGAIN presented as the bad guy when he's the chillest, most normal, most stable god in this entire pantheon", because that's a conversation the book fandom has been having (over and over again) for more than a decade.

Anyway, yeah. As a long time book fan and a show appreciative, here's my advice to anyone who knows WAY too much about Greek myths and still want to enjoy the ride without going every five minutes "wait, that's not correct": reframe. Contemporary rewritings, modern audiences and Fantasy genre.

[garashir]

arthur talking to the rest of the gang:

arthur talking to charles:

[charlottenewtons]

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) + Hitchcock/Truffaut

[arolesbianism]

May I offer some Siffrins on this fine day

[roomba-mangga]

thoughts on thistle and yaad's dynamic that i vomited in the tags of another post but will now try to articulate here: they're not actually family, or at least they shouldn't be. not in a conventional sense anyway. framing them as uncle and nephew (even in a non-literal, silly fantasy world way) rides more on technicality than anything concrete.

what i mean by this is yaad calls thistle by name and says he and delgal were raised "like" brothers. he talks about thistle like he's an outsider imposing himself into the melinis' space, and it's clear that thistle was never legitimized as a member of the family. for thistle's part, though we don't know how he would treat yaad pre-demon brainrot, it's safe to assume based on the way he punishes him—turning him into a doll—and how little is shown in the way of any sort of relationship between them that thistle only cares* about yaad as an extension of delgal (otherwise i'd expect something like kabru and milsiril, because it's not like another complicated interspecies family dynamic would be out of place, yet there's next to nothing on them even in bonus content, just their scant interactions in the main story).

in essence, they're strangers to one another. thistle's desperation to preserve the illusion of a family, a model where he doesn't even fit, was the snare they were caught in for the past thousand years of stasis. yaad-as-nephew is a prop to uphold that illusion, and thistle is playing a role he's unfit to play. in the context of post-canon interactions, attempting to reconstruct that facade would only be a reenactment of trauma for them both (in a deeply compelling way i'd love to watch unfold, tbh), as that "uncle and nephew" framing places thistle in an implicit position of power over someone he's already traumatized through misuse of authority in the past, a role which also perpetuates his adultification and yaad's infantilization in turn. it'd mostly be an obstacle to any real connection.

best to burn the melini family bridge, i think, and if there's still anything salvageable left in the rubble, let something different supplant it.

[tacagen]

one of the things that fascinate me about thawne: yes, he CAN be normal with kids! surprisingly normal!

((not at all times, though. his mental illness still spills through and as usual he, in trying to manipulate or hurt others, spits out at them the exact stuff that would hurt him (or have in his childhood/barry's rejection interpretation) the most in the first place lmao))

but at the same time. his like second instinct when doing his bullshit is FUCK THEM (as) KIDS

(and, well. whatever this classifies as)

[anto-pops]

Nearing the end of my HL replay and I just gotta say Anne and I are a different breed. If my brother was adamantly searching high and low in crumbling ruins, reading ancient texts, casting Crucio on his besties, and still making house calls while I was cursed and basically dying I would maybe not be such a huge wimp about it

[jewishrizahawkeye]

man, the show 911 is so cool. i wish firefighters were real.

[mbrainspaz]

Me: —no my issue with the whole system is that I CAN'T PHYSICALLY WORK HARD ENOUGH OR LONG ENOUGH TO MAKE A LIVING

Rich Uncle: Well—

Me: Meanwhile Bezos is buying his seventh mansion!

Rich Uncle: HE EARNED THAT.

Me: Oh yeah?! What did he do to earn it?

Rich Uncle: He worked all his life!

Me: SO HAVE I! And I'm saying I can't even work hard enough to afford rent on a shack! So why can HE work hard enough to afford multiple mansions!? It's because he's exploited the labor of everyone working for him.

Rich Uncle: No no no no it's because he worked smarter.

Me: oooOOOoh, so intelligence is the key factor in being deserving of massive wealth. That explains why Elon Musk is one of the dumbest people on the planet.

Rich Uncle: He's... smart.

Me: pfffffffffffff hahahahaahaaaahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAA

Rich Uncle: He made good business decisions, anyway.

Me: So in order to make it I just have to do what Elon Musk did.

Rich Uncle: exactly.

Me: So first I've gotta figure out how to get adopted by a guy with an emerald mine.

Rich Uncle: Yep. *walks away*

[hollygl125]

Gil Grissom + summing it all up after 8+ years.

“I mostly do a lot of thinking.”

[sandwichmustbetasty]

okay.

so it's either a very fancy very nerdy little anvil paperweight

OR

little tyelpe had a teeny tiny forge-like dollhouse made for him by feanor, who painstakingly designed every tiny detail and made all toy equipment himself because tyelpe, too young to be in forge, insisted that he absolutely needs to be a smith like his father and grandfather and needs to begin learning now.

and who was feanor to refuse his only grandson who wanted to learn his craft when he only started to walk without bumping into everything? feanor would be elated and would spend hours playing with tyelpe in his little forge. it was before the silmarils when feanor had all the time in the world for his beloved grandson.

the anvil was one of many parts of that dollhouse, one of few that made it to beleriand and the only one that made it through to the second age with celebrimbor.

he could never make himself part with it.

[set-phasers-to-whump]

whumptober 2024 masterpost!

day 1 - race against the clock - illya kuryakin

day 2 - trust issues - illya kuryakin

day 3 - "i warned you" - illya kuryakin

day 4 - hallucinations - sakari nurmi

day 5 - sunburn - illya kuryakin

day 6 - not realizing they're injured, "it's not my blood" - illya kuryakin

day 7 - unconventional weapon - river cartwright

day 8 - sleep deprivation, isolation chamber, forced to stay awake, "leave the lights on" - river cartwright

day 9 - bruises - river cartwright

day 10 - passing out from pain - sakari nurmi

day 11 - seeing double - river cartwright

day 12 - "just a little more" - lech wicinski

day 13 - familial curse - river cartwright

day 14 - no-holds-barred beatdown - illya kuryakin

day 15 - painful hug - peter sutherland

day 16 - swamp, wound cleaning - illya kuryakin

day 17 - nowhere else to go - river cartwright

day 18 - shivering - sakari nurmi

day 19 - abandoned cabin - illya kuryakin

day 20 - emotional angst, shoulder to cry on - river cartwright

day 21 - friendly fire - sakari nurmi

day 22 - bleeding through bandages, tourniquet, reopening wounds, "oh, that's not good" - illya kuryakin

day 23 - forced choice - illya kuryakin

day 24 - equipment failure - illya kuryakin

day 25 - stitches - river cartwright

day 26 - nightmares - river cartwright

day 27 - motion sickness - river cartwright

day 28 - cctv - sakari nurmi

day 29 - "who said you could rest?" - river cartwright

day 30 - "what have i done?" - eddie diaz

day 31 - asking for help - illya kuryakin

[sashthesloth]

I'm going to rotate them in my mind.. the angst potential for my poor poor Rook . .... .