#this has been a post by 4-man

[4-man]

[zaahvi]

GLORY TO THE RISEN GODS

[your-local-granny]

"Our job is to find truth, no matter how painful it may be."

[aurorangen]

Guilt consumed Vincent whenever he lied to Renee. Vincent thought it was risky to let her know about investigating the secret basement with Isaac. She'd want to help and that meant gathering unwanted attention from the police and the media. When they arrived, Vincent sat there in his car, shoulders slumped. He tried to think. He strained to think. But seeing his childhood home only triggered traumatic events from his past, obscuring all his plans for the day.

"Isaac…I don't think I'm ready today," he said, hiding the tremor in his voice. "It's okay, we can take our time to solve it," Isaac had his own nerves seeing Vincent's childhood home; they were facing the unknown after all. "I'm ready whenever you are."

[holocene-sims]

next // previous

october 1, 2021 4:15 p.m. grant's house

[luck-of-the-drawings]

"I think this is the most inhuman; and human, that I've ever felt.." MUCH CAN HAPPEN IN A YEAR. IN FIVE YEARS. A DECADE. imagine how much can happen in a century. just ONE (1). How will you grow? what phases do you find? even in 5 years, you will find patterns.

[shedontlovehuhself]

Misha: gets praised(again) or acknowledged for continuing to be the most vocal destiel and gay Cas supporter of the Cast.

Hellers on Tumblr: "how can I make this about Jensen?"

[degenerateshinji]

LONG POST!!!⁉️

happy birthday to me and by proxy happy 4 years since i've (more or less) started digital art!! i've never talked too much about my art journey on here but i thought it'd be fun to share a few of my pieces over the years to showcase my growth

2021

i literally did not DARE draw without reference. I hated drawing characters with their eyes open because i never knew how to draw them exactly, and i hated drawing hands more than anything cause i just couldn't get them to look right. My colours weren't horrible, but they definitely weren't always great.

2022

aaaa!!! colourful!!!!! i started doing more anime fanart! i was kinda afraid to do it beforehand since i was worried i couldn't get the characters looking right since i didnt really have an anime artstyle and was mucchhhh more comfortable with more realistic proportions, which is why for the pieces here i also mostly used reference and then just plopped the characters' designs on top. my faces & hands were definitely improving, but not quite there. Also ocs!! i love my ocs!!

2023

welcome to the year of sskk and also the year i finally started posting comics!! (we ignore my webtoon that i definitely didnt have in 2022) im trying not to post too much art i already have up on my tumblr here but you can look up the sskk tag on my tumblr you can see how insane i was!! in fact, because of how much i drew them that year, i think i very rapidly improved at my anatomy and expressions AND hands compared to 2022. crazy what a hyperfixation does to you

2024

getting daaaangerously close to tumblr's image limit and also 2024 was probably my most active year on tumblr to date, so it's all here anyways, but here's some of my favourites for my overall improvement. i'm not sure i drew a single background all year.

2025

anyways!! we're all caught up now! These two have been my favourite drawings from 2025 so far (one of which im techincally not supposed to show yet, oepsie) and i hope i can make hundreds more that i'm proud of! i've never really set up my art and looked at it side by side, so seeing how far i've come in the last four years is actually kind of heartwarming. thank you so much to everyone who's followed me and supported me & my journey! im getting sappy now so i'll stop jaja

[kazuaru]

Sofia's Biker Boyfriend.

[pass3ra]

cressida's storyline was genuinely shameful tbhhh it's like they started rewriting it in the first half of the season then completely forgot about the changes they'd made to make it fit the book plot and it just ends up making everyone else look bad😐 every character in the second half got a "penelope did nothing wrong" lobotomy so we ended up with eloise completely ignoring cressida being sold off to an horrible man (when she made every effort to support her in the first half of the season) and for some reason resenting her for pretending to be lady whistledown? Then they somehow frame her ignoring colin's offensively bad pleas as it being her turning away from redemption when all she's trying to do is escape being trapped in the country with her likely abusive aunt... and it ends with her meeting her horrible fate and it still being framed as tragic only to immediately juxtapose it with the bridgerton family winning the idgaf war while gleefully seeing off francesca and her future dead husband. The bridgertons were the villains of the season frfr

[raiiny-bay]

consider: a monster boyz movie, but it's... a romance?

[humanturch]

"spider-man mains are so bad" "dude just choose a new character" lalalalala counter argument! i have autis.m

[eugeniedanglars]

the cool thing about this being my blog is that if i want to write a literal essay recapping an album that exactly one of my followers (my sister) has ever heard i can just. do that

i talked about this a few days ago but seriously, the man from god knows where by tom russell is such a good goddamn album. it's a concept album chronicling his own ancestry--specifically following four key immigrant families, the russells and malloys from ireland and the larsens and olsens from norway--as part of the wider picture of immigration and westward expansion in the united states. it was released in the 90s, so if you do choose to listen to it don't expect it to be perfectly woke or up to date, but this album's general political sympathies are made pretty clear by the lyrics "oh beautiful for spacious skies and amber waves of grain / grain distilled to make the rye that pickled old tom paine / old georgie built the white house with slaves that died in pain."

that being said, i won't pretend everything about it aged well, especially regarding its depiction of native americans; tom russell's fascination with native american cultures and sympathy for their oppression is a common theme across a lot of his music, and he does devote several songs (primarily "the man from god knows where pt. 3" and "sitting bull in venice") to the fact that the entire story of this album is playing out on stolen land, but the way he does it comes across as pretty stereotypical and patronizing, at least to me, a white woman. i think, since the songs are specifically about sitting bull performing in bill cody's wild west show in europe, he's trying to be ironic and contrast the stereotypical native character that sitting bull would have played in the show versus the horror and grief he must have felt at watching his culture and home be destroyed by invaders, as well as play with the irony of exporting native americans and their culture to europe as entertainment while the real thing is wiped out by european colonizers, but he doesn't do a great job of parsing out the stereotypes from reality imo. it's a theme that could have used a lot more room to breathe on the album, preferably with input from an actual native american folk singer.

naturally, there are a whole host of content warnings, including but not limited to racism, ethnic cleansing, starvation, suicide, death of children, children being separated from their families, alcohol, slurs (though all used in an overtly sympathetic/satirical way mocking injustice and prejudice), gambling, incarceration, and basically anything you would expect from mid-1800s to mid-1900s america. it's also long as fuck: 26 tracks, 1 hour and 14 minutes. in short, while i adore this album, don't say i didn't warn you if it does something you don't like.

musically, the album is simply stunning. it's this gorgeous, lush blend of american, irish, and scandinavian folk performed by a whole host of folk icons like iris dement and dave van ronk. there are leitmotifs and throughlines and callbacks throughout the album that weave its incredibly ambitious scope together into a cohesive tapestry. aside from that, tom russell just has one of the most beautiful voices i've ever heard, plain and simple. (in fact, he got his big break when he was a cab driver and picked up the manager of the grateful dead on the way to a show. they were looking for an opener, tom russell told the guy he was a musician and sang him some of his music, and he opened for the band that very night.) a truly staggering amount of my musical taste and general personhood can be traced back to the fact that my mother heard a radio interview with tom russell and, after hearing him sing "rider on an orphan train" from this album, immediately called my dad bawling her eyes out and insisting that they had to buy this guy's music.

the album opens with the title track (part one of four), wherein the titular man from god knows where introduces himself as an ageless revenant roaming the earth, and calls upon the spirits of the dead to rise from their graves and tell him their stories so that the past won't be forgotten. the wayfaring stranger (iris dement singing just the first verse of the 1917 song "wayfaring stranger") explains the immigrants' unifying belief that america offered greater opportunity than existed in their homelands: "i am a poor wayfaring stranger / traveling through this world of woe / there's no sickness, toil, or danger / in that bright land to which i go." with this, the spirits obey and begin telling their stories. some of their songs are straightforward autobiographies ("patrick russell", "mary clare malloy (american wake)", "ambrose larsen"), while others are more broad and speak for whole groups of people.

this is where we get to "the outcast," which gets its own beat-by-beat analysis because 1. it was my favorite song as a child and whenever i told people this they thought i meant "hey ya" by outkast and 2. the fact that it was my favorite song as a child explains just... so much about me. so this song, performed by leftist folk icon dave van ronk, portrays the character of the outcast like a carnival barker luring people into a freakshow, shocking the audience by proclaiming that "your promised land was settled by bastards, drunks, and thieves," only to reassure them that he is "the worst of all of these" as the outcast. the first verse seems light and humorous, a joking tribute to the people cut out of the family tree for being embarrassing and abnormal (i.e., disabled or queer).

with the second verse, however, he brings up another type of outcast: the marginalized people who did much of the invisible work building this country. this is what i meant about slurs being used in a sympathetic and satirical way--the outcast is a personification of all oppressed communities, and he sarcastically refers to himself by all the slurs that are hurled at him while he carries society on his back. he's the chinese immigrant who built the railroads, he's the enslaved black man who picked the crops that built the american economy, he's the native american who was forced off the land that now houses and feeds us.

the third verse expands its scope even further to the systemic, inescapable nature of ethnic prejudice: every ingroup has an outgroup that they hate and degrade, no matter how outwardly similar they appear, and that aspect of human nature is not diluted on a country-wide scale but rather amplified. he mocks politicians and founding fathers, making it clear that he was not actually joking about them being "bastards, drunks, and thieves" (here's where the line about george washington building the white house with slaves that died in pain comes in!), and wryly observes that newcomers to the united states have no idea they're signing up to be the crabs at the bottom of the bucket. ultimately, the song functions as an absolutely scathing indictment of the united states as a nation built on hatred and brutal oppression, from the microcosmic (ostracizing family members for not fitting into the mold) to the systemic (slavery, racism, exploitation of marginalized labor, the perpetual othering of whoever the newest minority is).

that was my favorite song when i was in fourth grade. and now you probably understand everything about me.

anyway, the album continues, painting a picture of the lives of these immigrants and the struggles they face: alcohol, lust, homesickness, crop failures, the loss of children to death or poverty. "rider on an orphan train" is an utter heartbreaker, the story of one of anna olsen's children who, along with his older brother james, ran away from home and ended up in an orphanage. james and the narrator are split up in the adoption process. they never see each other again.

eventually the album arrives in the twentieth century and finishes its westward journey in los angeles, tracing the families we've been following down to tom russell's parents, charlie russell and marjorie malloy. charlie is a fascinating and complex character: he's a slick, charismatic, ambitious charmer who works his way up to a wealthy and comfortable life in hollywood, he's a devoted family man who adores marjorie and wants nothing more than to give her everything she deserves, he's a thief and a gambling addict who ultimately costs his family everything, he's an eternal optimist and a hero to his children, he's a has-been blowhard rambling about his glory days to an audience that's no longer listening. "chicksaw county jail" and "throwin' horseshoes at the moon" are two different perspectives on charlie russell's tumultuous life, the former from his own perspective and the latter from tom's. as an adult looking back on his childhood, tom neither idealizes his father nor condemns him, instead treating him with sympathy and nuance that's often hard to achieve when seeking to understand our parents.

having run out of ancestors' stories to hear, the man from god knows where condemns "the lies that i've been told" before turning to the audience and beseeching them to share their own pasts. a calmer, more reflective version of the outcast returns to muse on postwar american society, homogeneity, and the loss of ancestral cultures. the wayfaring stranger returns to sing the second verse of her song, now settled in her new land but wistful about the one she left: "i'm going there to see my father / i'm going there, no more to roam / i am going over jordan / i am going over home."

the album draws to a gentle finish with "love abides," which ponders whether illuminating the past helps us understand our present and navigate the future. ultimately, it concludes, we may be navigating life alone in the dark, but we can persist as long as we have love and hope.

that's the man from god knows where. it was the soundtrack to my childhood. i just spent several hours writing 1700+ words recapping it for an audience of zero. i'm not a music critic or a historian, but i'm someone who was shaped by this album, and i wanted to put all my love and appreciation for it somewhere other people could see. i don't expect anyone to read this or listen to the album. just having this post exist is enough.

[thejanisimiike]

so,,, it's been literal MONTHS and i've been attacked by multiple hyperfixations in the mean time so why not *slowly* add this back to the gay ass mix,,,

[4-man]

Cut to house with his nose pressed against the glass getting rained on by clouds centralised entirely above his head