#thinky thursday

[willowfae82]

i'm on a 'White Collar' kick so i have some feelings. one thing that 'bothers' me is that all through the last episode it feels like Neal is like openly saying his goodbyes. like it really sticks out when he talks to June who's sitting with Mozzie and she mentions the thrift shop. like it feels very 'reminiscing before death', and the way he says 'i love you' with that big hug at the door.

then, right after, he gives Mozzie the Queen from their fist meeting. it's very 'giving away beloved possessions' and he says something about 'going back to the basics' like he's going to be starting fresh.

and when he's having dinner with Peter and El. and he says 'i'll stop at nothing...' and the prolonged eye contact. it just all feels like 'this is the last time i'm going to see these people.'

[bearotonin-international]

Cocoa and Butter are having a real Thinky Thoughts Thursday that's for sure

[youarestellarverse]

Nobody asked, but I feel like adding some positivity to the world, so.

Paul is named after a hotel maid who helped his mother out of an abusive marriage. This is why he has such strong feelings about being a good stepdad; he, too, grew up with a single mother who eventually met and married a wonderful man, and that man is his dad despite having met him as a tween.

He's the youngest of five kids and the only boy. Two of his sisters are identical twins, and both of them are lesbians. All of them are musical in some way; one twin is a cantor at a local temple and the other is a vocal performance professor at Juilliard.

Altogether, Paul has like a dozen niblings, all of whom are very excited to have a New Cool Teen to show around and help out at all the holidays and family gatherings. Percy enthuses over kosher coke, and for his birthday, all the cousins get in on everyone buying him a bottle and the little ones especially giggling as he unwraps liter after liter, getting increasingly more delighted as he goes. "I NEVER HAVE TO BUY COKE AGAIN THIS IS GREAT"

Paul cried a little bit when he saw his nieces immediately drag Percy off to tell him all about shabbat and help him get ready. Sally thought it was adorable.

(Speaking of Sally, she decided to convert because she took an intro class out of curiosity when she met Paul, and found through that class that she resonated much more strongly than she expected. She told him "honey, I'm going through with this even if we break up". They do not break up, though. :3 )

Eventually, Paul quietly asks Thalia if she's completely sure nobody in her family is Jewish, because she looks eerily like one of his aunts when she was young. Thalia realizes that actually, no, she's not completely sure, so Paul hooks her up with his oldest sister who is the Geneology Aunt (did you guys have one of those because I do). Thalia finds out Beryl Grace changed her name from Baila Gertz, and was in fact raised Jewish. (Currently thinking she got chewed up and spit out by casting couch abuse and hollywood cultishness, which is why she was estranged from her family.) Thalia and Jason convert back in after this.

Percy wakes up one morning in his thirties and realizes "wait a minute, why am I not already Jewish? I should fix that".

And that's pretty much what I have so far.

[obakanosandoitchi]

after every thinky thought thursday comes a fall apart friday

[scurvgirl]

If a vampire likes to fuck when they're feeding...is it a food kink for them?

[andromeda4004]

I am probably just passed half-way through writing my first fic (the chapters in the middle keep expanding) and at this rate it’s going to be longer than Northanger Abbey, which it’s based on.  I am still very much enjoying it, though, even though I had planned to be finished by now, and don’t really have the time to keep up the original writing rate any more.  

Chapter 5 went up earlier today, which has some of my favourite moments of the first act of the story, and in particular the moments where I have been able to repurpose original lines and scenarios of Austen’s by giving them to characters who are in different places in their lives.  Tilney’s gentle wit becomes Crowley’s biting sarcasm; Catherine’s confused indecision when presented with an unexpected situation becomes Aziraphale falling back on Doing The Right Thing.  And it’s so much fun when things line up!  I definitely haven’t made things easy for myself writing a fic based on two books at once, but damn it is good fun!

[xoxoemynn]

one of those days I want to physically remove my brain, plop it in a bubble bath, and then forget about it for the next 12 - 14 hours.

[polar-jake778]

I just spent 4 hours writing my book without stopping. Until now, of course. My head is in a flurry of discomfort. I feel the end of such story nearing. It’s going to be one hell of a moment.

And you will be sad to know, I do not mention a single polar bear in my book.

The story is solely for existential thought provocation. Therefore, Interpretation is of grandest fascination!

It’s decently short, but is overly complex. My writing skills are certainly not the best, but I’m learning to be better. For now, it’s just a matter of pumping out things I seem proud of.

Metaphor galore, and open up that door!

I just really hope people like it. Although, I must admit, this story will only appeal to a small portion of readers.

-

As for any grandiosity to whom presents themselves, here is thus reward!

[bearotonin-international]

Thinky Thoughts Thursday bearhaviors

loudly going "YOU'RE GOOD YOU'RE GOOD" to myself to ward off the memory of every embarrassing thing i've ever done

[bearotonin-international]

when you tryna have a good time and just monch some dandelions and the thinky thoughts hit

[bearotonin-international]

the eternal curse of Thinky Thoughts Thursday

experiencing thoughts and memories

[grizzly-bear-official]

doing a little experiment. please reblog so this poll can reach a larger bear-enjoying audience.

(a few of these days - like existential tuesday and thinky thoughts thursday - are exclusively posted by @bearotonin-international , so credit where credit is due.)

[aswrm]

Geoff Rickly in ‘Negatives’ by Amy Fleisher Madden

Transcript below

An Introduction to the Third Wave

Geoff Rickly

Thursday / No Devotion / United Nations

Everything is hardcore. Snapcase is hardcore.

Obviously. Strife and Chain of Strength and Bad Brains are hardcore. Sick of It All is hardcore, and they're from New York, so they spell it NYHC.

Shelter is hardcore and 108 is hardcore, and they're both Krishna, which means people call them Krishnacore. Earth Crisis and SSD are hardcore, but they don't do drugs; straight-edge hardcore.

There are so many little signifiers in place to help people know what's up, but each one of these bands does actually have something in common: They are all hard as nails. They're hardcore.

It was the mid-'90s. I'd moved out of the dorms at Rutgers and into a house on Somerset Street with my old roommate, Clay, and my new housemate, Louis. We were a good twenty-minute walk from campus, but the house was weirdly small on the inside; it got bad light. But it had a big basement.

Big enough to have shows in. Hardcore shows.

Luckily, by the mid-'90s, hardcore was everything, and everything was hardcore.

Converge was hardcore-full of guitars and drums that sounded like broken glass in a blender. But so was Rainer Maria, with twinkling clean guitars and dual vocals whispering and shouting in a joyous conversation. So were Ink & Dagger, in their corpse paint, smashing Aphex Twin electronics into Black Flag riffs. Fugazi was hardcore with a rhythm section that sounded like James Brown and a no-slam-dancing policy. Texas Is the Reason had twangy vocals and the most beautiful guitar parts that anyone had ever heard, and they were fucking hardcore-with the pedigree to prove it. They were one of the groups that inspired the latest wave of bands who were all playing shows in our basement, and in other basements like ours all over America: The Get Up Kids, The Promise Ring. Jimmy Eat World. They were all catchy and sweet, and full of youthful innocence. And they were all hardcore, too. Everything was. The basement show was like an Olive Garden:

If you were there, you were family-you were hardcore.

But holy shit, did we love to tease those bands— "You guys are so emotional, you're so fucking emo." Stick a tap in them and let the tears flow. That's all emo was to us: a taunt, a ribbing, a genre label that had never really stuck. I remember seeing Fugazi in the early '90s and someone yelled at lan MacKaye, "You are so emo!" His reply was simple and seemed to shut down the label forever. He said, "Emo Philips?" —forcing the crowd to think of the awkward comedian, with his strange bob haircut.

So, years later, when we had a great young hardcore band from Princeton play in our basement, we shouted at them, "Oh my god, Saves the Day are so emo." Their singer, Chris, acknowledged it dryly: "Boo hoo." Or that time when At the Drive-In destroyed the Melody Bar in front of a crowd of five people. I told them, "That was so good, I could have cried. but I didn't want anyone to thinkI was emo."

We didn't know we were already part of it. A joke or not, we were already emo. When we started Thursday, we thought we were just another hardcore band in the wave of hardcore bands that we looked up to: Saetia, You and I, Usurp Synapse, Orchid, Reversal of Man, The Locust, Charles Bronson.

Our friends. Our heroes. We were playing the same basements and VFW halls. We were buying the same vans and using the same dialers to get free calls on pay phones. We didn't know that, even as our own band took off, we were already emo, and we were about to be part of something new.

After Full Collapse came out on Victory Records-a very hardcore label —we spent a lot of time tracing the footsteps of all those who d come before. We played to five or ten people a night, occasionally landing a festival where we'd do anything to get people to stick around. "Yeah, we have a three-way split with Joy Division and Swing Kids, but we're sold out of them right now... Still, we're playing after Dragbody if you've got the time to watch us."

Then Saves the Day offered us a spot opening for them on a national tour. Our friend Dan from the band Joshua explained to us that Saves the Day was the biggest band in hardcore. They'd hit the indie glass ceiling-they'd sold 100,000 records without being on a major label. We took the tour - first of four in front of 1,000 people every night-and something clicked. The very next tour we went out on, we were the headliner, and it was entirely sold out before we even left home. Something was happening. We broke through the 100,000 record glass ceiling, shooting to 400,000 records. All our friends were right behind us, in the next couple years, hitting a million records sold and more.

The press has always been a little tone deaf, and they'd already been using the term emo for years, so they tried to find something new and catchy for this rapidly developing phenomenon. They tried screamo, except not everyone was screaming- and the bands hated it. Emocore, except that term somehow sounded even wimpier than just emo-and the bands hated it. They even tried the term xtremo, and tried to line us up to play X Games-type events, with cans of Mountain Dew stacked on our amps, but the sponsors weren't sure about the crossover appeal-and the bands hated it.

[photo id: geoff leaning back into the crowd. he is shouting, with one arm raised above/behind his head and crowd members’ arms round his torso]

In the middle of all this, I had the chance to produce the first album from a scrappy bunch of hard. core kids who loved Placebo and Queen and comic books. They were called My Chemical Romance, and by their second record, they would solidify something that had been becoming apparent for the last couple of years: The 2000s were the decade of emo. It was everywhere. It was fashion and TV and billboards. It was celebrity. It was gossip.

And when money gets involved, things can quickly go to shit. Emo got increasingly commercial. It was codified. It was slick. It had songwriters and mega producers. It had A-listers directing music videos.

The only thing it lacked was sincere emotion. The feeling was gone. A pretty tough break for a genre called emo.

By the 2010s, being emo was about the uncoolest thing in the world. The heavy hitters started breaking up. Not just the early torchbearers like us or our West Coast buds, Thrice, but the big guns, too.

My Chemical Romance called it quits, and suddenly bands started dropping likeflies. Pop singers dropped the emo haircuts. Things cooled off.

But then, half a decade later, something strange started to happen. The young kids began to go back to the roots of the genre, appreciating the earnest sincerity and adventurous musicality that made emo break out in the first place. The Hotelier, Teen Suicide, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Joyce Manor, Hop Along-these bands brought emo out of the boardroom and back into the basement, bashing away at a glorious noise until the world started to notice. This

"emo revival" was actually the birth of something new. It inspired Thursday to start playing again, and it inspired so many of our peers to do the same.

We've gotten the opportunity to see this thing that we gave our hearts to through newer, purer eyes.

Watching Pianos Become the Teeth and Title Fight and Touché Amoré burn with passionate intensity has reignited our fire. Seeing these photos, through Amy's eyes- seeing the vitality that has always been there-is much the same. It's changed everything, allowing us to restore a true relationship to our past work.

Recently, I had the opportunity to stand on stage with Thursday and watch a sea of kids scream along to these words from "War All The Time":

All those nights in the basement,

The kids are still screaming

On and on and on and on and ...

And it was pretty hardcore-emotionally speaking.

[asgardian-angel]

How to make Loki Scramble Squares puzzle!

[bearotonin-international]

Gina’s having some unpleasantly thinky thoughts too

[phoenixiancrystallist]

I'm scheduling more photo dumps to post and getting sad that we're almost to the end of it. Still a whole month and some change to go, but still too close to make me happy. I want to keep doing them! As Cuff says, "Athia has so much to offer the dedicated explorer."

I've got a few ideas, though :) And I was gonna make a poll to see which one y'all wanted to see first, but then I went "well wait a minute, I have seven ideas and there are seven days in the week. I'll just do all of them on a different day!" So behold! A new schedule!! :D

Monday: Magic Monday, shots of every single one of Frey's spells. Every. Single. Spell. ...that isn't, like, cloak enhancement spells or whatever since those have no visual component lol

Tuesday: Tragic Tuesday, pictures of various skeletons scattered across Athia. May or may not but heavily leaning towards may include the drabbles/microfics I promised forever ago

Wednesday: Wet Beast Wednesday! Except most of them aren't wet, lol. Basically a bestiary of everything Frey can murderkill around Athia. Broken, Nightmares, Tanta minions, possibly the Tantas themselves. The possibilities are limited only by the number of enemies in the game! :D

Thursday: Thinky Thoughts Thursday, shots of the interiors of the Cognoscent's Guilds. Because they're cool and I like them.

Friday: Fashion Friday! All the fashions and styles of Athia and beyond, from Frey's cloaks and necklaces to whatever the heck Treahy's hat is supposed to be

Saturday: Caturday, naturally. A day for all kitty cats, both magical and mundane. Probably gonna run out of these sooner than any of the others, though. Still, that's 9 mundane cats, 20 magical kitties, and Homer, so at least 30 weeks of kitty pics :)

Sunday: Sunday Funday, random pretty shots of Athia because I can't stop myself from taking them anyway lol

The last of the current photo dumps is scheduled for Friday, March 8th. This new schedule will start up on Monday, April 1st, to give myself more time to organize and build up a nice backlog. I may add to the dumps ending on March 8th; it turns out Visoria Castle is visible on the horizon before spoilers happen, so I'm probably going to take a ton of pictures in Visoria that include the castle. Because it looks cool and I can :P But those shouldn't take up the rest of March, so expect a photo dump hiatus sometime that month.