#this is also the christmas surprise

[naturecalls111]

[queerprayers]

If you need this year to end, if you crave a slow beginning, if you need to be confronted with (re)birth, may I interest you in a liturgical new year? What if, on the first day of Advent, you forgot about the resolutions and the diets and the parties and you lit a candle? What if your new year was a season (not just a day), and you had time to prepare, and January 1st was just another day of Christmas?

Construct your calendar how you wish of course, but I want to invite you to join the Christian new year, even halfheartedly. You have a week to decide (and you can of course have two new years, or none at all).

Advent is for small lights in big darkness, dim mirrors, veils and unveiling, cleaning house, waiting. Christianity beckons you to a new year devoid of self-improvement. We will be changed, of course. But ultimately there's nothing we can do about it. We create what we can and know God will shatter our plans.

It's almost the new year, is what I'm trying to say. If you choose it. Christmas is our second-highest feast day, one worth preparing for. Let secular Christmas happen, participate in it as you wish, but know that the Church will be holding its breath still. There is a dark womb before the birth. Be patient in the growing.

(And if you need a liturgical end of the year, one that is a surrender and a calling amidst the politics and nationalism of this world, may I interest you in the feast of Christ the King?)

[egophiliac]

Waittt, what did you mean with your last post?? I don't want to spoil myself so I'm waiting for the nightmare before christmas event to arrive on the eng server before diving deep into the wiki. But I HAVE to know; were there hints of Lilia joining in for a rerun or a sequel ??? Your big "OR IS IT???" filled me with way too much hope !! please tell me it wasn't a bit : (

there was a little teaser at the end that implied there'll be a sequel event, though we don't really know anything beyond that! I do think it's likely we'll get the other half of the cast in it, even if it's just wishful thinking on my part. 🤞🤞 NIGHTMARE SUITS FOR EVERYONE!!!!

as far as I know there's been no confirmation on whether it's going to be next year's Halloween event or a separate thing (the snow makes me think it'll be more Christmas-themed, or otherwise more related to the plot of the original movie) so. we're probably going to have to wait quite a while before we find out anything solid. :') they really do love just dropping these things on us and then watching us go absolutely wild with speculation while they watch like

[guzekna]

[tojosuggestionbox]

[momentomori24]

Soooo to celebrate and cope with finishing Chapter 1, here's Golfgang crashed out on the sofa after a Christmas Party. They seem to have had fun, at least.

This will be my last drawing for the year. Merry Christmas, y'all :3

[thoughtfulchaos773]

Sydney is not a sister or cousin to Carmy; they are telling us it's a partnership, with Sydney being Carmy's wife and Natalie and Richie's sister and cousin-in-law.

Hints:

In 2x08 Richie points out now she has Carmy and Natalie while a song titled The Crane Wife plays. (The scene before this Carmy obviously not serious says he "like loves Claire a lot")

In 3x07 Legacy, Carmy discusses all work-related matters about Legacy, but Marcus points out something closer than that: a family tree right as Sydney enters. This is something Sydney will help grow, all while hinting this on 3x01 as she's tasting a piece of Carmy under the tree.

In 3x09 Apologies, Sydney is talking Pete, her brother-in-law, about a legal contract(marriage) with Carmy. Pete is wearing an original Beef shirt and has just had a baby with a Berzatto, making him an official family member.

Same episode- Meanwhile, Claire—often referred to as "Clairebear," which should tells us she is also considered family—is having a conversation with The Faks, who are not officially part of the family, about her relationship with Carmy.

This is the same episode where Tiffany is getting married, who makes up with Richie and tells him she's doesn't have much family left. This is why she invited Richie. she was an in-law once to the Berzattos - they were married and are still family.

Next season is a teaser at possibly a wedding - one of the official ways to make someone part of you, part of your family, it's about Sydney being closer than just work. It's more personal.

She's Sydney Adamu- Berzatto.

[burningcheese-merchant]

BurningCheese/GoldenSpice Playlist

Ok, time to stop being a bitch and post the ship playlist I keep harping on about already.

Gonna mark each song with an emoji to signify if it's meant to either be Burning Spice's POV (🔺) or Golden Cheese's (🧀). It's also going to be band/singer name first, song name second, for ease of understanding

Thank you to everyone who's reached out to me, both on here and on AO3, with song suggestions! A good chunk of these came from me myself, but a lot of people introduced me to plenty more songs that I loved and agreed suited these two perfectly. It's been fun putting a playlist together with this help, it feels like a fun group project now lol. (Hell, you guys are actually helping me think of new writing material. Music is a huge source of inspiration and creativity for me, as I'm sure you've noticed. In a way, you're all indirectly making fic requests lol)

You're all still more than welcome to keep shooting me song ideas to add, the playlist is ever-expanding! I'll just come back to this post and edit any new additions in. (This playlist is 3x longer than my PitayaFire one. I need you all to understand how big of a deal that is for me personally. I never thought I'd be this down bad for a ship besides that one. It's fucking surreal)

Some of it is meant to sound one-sided, others like it's a mutual love/relationship. I'll let you guess which is which lol. Now rock out to Evil Spice Man x Pretty Cheese Lady with me 🤘🤘🤘

Mindless Self Indulgence - Shut Me Up🔺

Fall Out Boy - I Don't Care🔺(with the Wild Spice crew as the backup singers!!!)

Mariah Carey - Obsessed 🧀

Three Days Grace - I Hate Everything About You🔺🧀

Lady Gaga - Bad Romance🔺🧀

Dead or Alive - You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)🔺

Mindless Self Indulgence - What Do They Know?🔺

Britney Spears - Toxic 🧀

Fish in a Birdcage - Rule #34🔺(this is also a great PureShadow song ngl. It's how it was first introduced to me, even lol)

Shayfer James - Filthy Habit🔺

King Gnu - SPECIALZ🔺🧀 (look up the English version of the lyrics. Very BurningCheese-core imo)

Mindless Self Indulgence - This Hurts🔺

Jack Black - Peaches🔺(shout out to the anon in my inbox who suggested this. Joke's on them, I had this on the playlist right from the start lolololololol)

Arctic Monkeys - R U Mine?🔺

Lady Gaga - Poker Face 🧀

Olly Murs (feat. Flo Rida) - Troublemaker 🧀

Rihanna - Where Have You Been🔺(fun fact: I had this playing on a loop as I wrote "Our Little Dance" to get into the Yandere Spice mindset lol)

Lady Gaga - Judas 🧀

Miike Snow - Genghis Khan🔺

The Orion Experience - Obsessed With You🔺(this song is just really funny. You can probably apply it to all Beast x Ancient ships tbh)

Nine Inch Nails - Closer🔺

Mindless Self Indulgence - 5TR82HE11🔺

Air Traffic Controller - This Is Love🔺

Bad Omens - THE DEATH OF PEACE OF MIND🔺🧀

Isabel LaRosa - favorite 🧀

Bloodhound Gang - The Bad Touch🔺(listen I imagined Spice singing this to Golden and just started howling with laughter, it's fucking hysterical ok)

ENHYPEN - Bite Me🔺

Scissor Sisters - I Can't Decide🔺(GC would sing a few parts tho)

5 Seconds of Summer - Teeth🔺🧀 (mostly Spice though)

Buerak - Культ Тела 🔺(look up English lyrics, very Yandere Spice coded. Thank you to the anon who suggested it)

Tom Lehrer - The Masochism Tango🔺

Lady Gaga - Disease 🧀

G-Eazy (with Halsey) - Him & I🔺🧀

Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time🔺(imagine Spice singing this while stuck in prison. Please. He's singing and the other Beasts want to off themselves because it's so annoying and he won't stop. Please it is so funny. I have so much fun imagining this freak acting stupid-)

[peculiarbeauty]

would your muse decorate a christmas tree with belle if she asked 🎄 🎄 ?

[conwise]

I know the holidays are still far out still but I literally can't stop thinking about a Candlenights special that's just TAZ vs A Christmas Carol where Lady Godwin, Mutt, and Phileaux are hired to play the 3 ghosts

Of course it all falls apart during the Ghost of Christmas Past bit and they just start fighting Ebenezer Scrooge

[necrotic-nephilim]

as an apology for being gone for a month, have a uquiz i spent a week making! pls feel free to reblog with which character you got, i worked way too hard on this silly little thing. there are eight different characters you can get that are varying levels of unknown, with comic recommendations for each character <3

[squarebracketsmileyface]

"A Christmas present from Monni"

121,772 words of fanfic is being posted in a series on Christmas day (well, Christmas day in the UK, it might be a different day depending on timezones), all at once, as a Christmas gift to the Marble Hornets and Everyman HYBRID fandoms :D

There are 6 fics in this series, the shortest is about 1000 words, and the longest is 11 chapters and two words away from 42k words, with the other four being oneshots around 15-20k each! Two are Everyman HYBRID fics, four are Marble Hornets. Five out of six are E rated smut fics (the 1000 word one is just a fluffy little thing I liked)

I'll reblog this with the link to the fics on the 25th of December so mark your calendars lmao :D

[sparxyv]

some minilena for you all because she's SO CUTE

[sarcasticgaypotato]

The Best Solution

On cold, clear nights that bathed the world in pale blue light, Chell turned her chin up and looked at the sky.

She was not afflicted with the condition known as ‘sentimentality,’ no matter how many scorch-marked, heart-adorned metal cubes got thrown her way and left behind in fields of wheat a hundred miles away. But the ravaged surface world offered her little (save for her own freedom) and the nights were as quiet and lonely as the days, just without an excuse to fill her time by finding something to busy herself with under the light of the sun.

So, she looked upward and let her mind wander.

Every streak of a shooting star she hoped was a certain circular heap of scrap metal finally burning up in the atmosphere.

“Let go! I’m still connected. I can pull myself in.”

Of course he could. If she had given him half a chance, he would’ve pulled himself back in just fine—and let her fly off into space without a second thought if it would save his own steel.

The cold vacuum of space. When she closed her eyes, Chell could still feel it in the wind that tickled the stray hairs on the back of her neck, in the cold that stole the breath from her lungs as she gasped it. That rush of weightlessness, her eyes watering and freezing her eyelashes together, and that pit in her stomach that said, after everything she had survived, this might be it.

She stared up at the moon; a pale white beauty, once near enough for Chell to reach out and touch, now as distant as ever. A sliver in the night sky, it grinned down at her with a smile that knew the taste of her fear. An untouchable queen who would have her head, if she had her way. Chell would have called it as familiar as it was deadly, if not for one thing that nagged at her mind as she stared, lost among stars and memories alike.

This was always the point in her late-night stargazing that Chell started scratching absentmindedly at her wrist, where the phantom burn of cold metal claws still seared into her skin.

Chell never fell for any of GLaDOS’s tricks; she knew her too well. That hate was familiar, expected. Working together in Old Aperture was a surprise only for a moment; it was logical if they wanted to survive. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, or “Everybody likes revenge,” as a certain someone had put it. 

She trusted GLaDOS’s intelligence enough to know that she would play nice for as long as they had a shared goal, and for as long as Chell held all the power. Don’t bite the hand that holds your consciousness trapped in a potato battery, or something like that.

Chell had even been fairly confident that after they beat Wheatley (she never had any doubt that they would), as long as she kept her guard up and an eye on her, GLaDOS wouldn’t risk betraying her. The world’s most intelligent lifeform had finally learned that Chell wasn’t worth crossing—it only took two losing battles for the lesson to sink in.

GLaDOS would keep her end of the bargain as long as it was convenient to do so. That was why Chell couldn’t make sense of what happened. No matter how many times she replayed those seconds in her head, watching her own memories in slow motion as GLaDOS knocked Wheatley free of the chassis and sent him spinning into space, robbing Chell of her only anchor to Earth. 

Freefall. 

Could you call it falling without gravity? Spinning, flailing, her body wrenched outward, seconds away from dying in space, embarrassingly outlived by the very same moron who was responsible for this whole mess. In the second that she had to process her impending death, Chell took a small hint of satisfaction in knowing that at least she took him down with her. Sure, the lack of air wouldn’t kill him as quickly as it would her, but he was far from a self-proclaimed king of Aperture out here. He was nothing but a hunk of junk destined to get knocked around by asteroids like a pinball. At least GLaDOS had a death worth bragging about under her non-existent belt; Chell had blown her to bits in what she would humbly call ‘a spectacular fashion.’

GLaDOS. Was her last thought before unconsciousness took her going to be about GLaDOS? How apt. GLaDOS would’ve loved to hear that, not that Chell would’ve ever told her, even if she had the chance.

She wouldn’t have the chance. She wasn’t supposed to.

When Chell felt that familiar metal claw clamp around her wrist, the first thought her fading consciousness could conjure was that GLaDOS wanted to be personally responsible for flinging her out into space, maybe so she could get a good spin on the throw. The realization that GLaDOS was pulling her in, back towards Earth, to safety, was one that proved entirely too much for her oxygen-deprived brain to process. So, she passed out.

GLaDOS could have done nothing at all, and Chell would have died. If she wanted the satisfaction of doing it herself, she could have crushed her under a metal plate or thrown her in the incinerator while she was unconscious. Instead, GLaDOS saved her life, watched over her recovery until she awoke, and then … let her go with only a bit of theatrics and nothing else. 

She pinned the blame on Caroline and made a big show of deleting her, neither of which Chell believed for a second. That golden eye took her in, unflinching, with the same inscrutable expression before and after the automated voice cheerfully announced Caroline’s removal. A long dead secretary Chell had never crossed paths with had nothing to do with this; there was no difference between the GLaDOS that pulled her from space and the GLaDOS who watched the elevator ascend to the surface now.  

This was all her, and she was supposed to give them both a satisfying conclusion to them parting ways with weapons lowered, standing (even if one of them didn’t have legs) on equal ground. GLaDOS was supposed to make this easy by sending her off with an insult or a half-hearted threat of one last murder attempt for old times’ sake.

“Killing you is hard.”

Liar. 

Killing me would have been easy if you wanted to.

Why didn’t you want to?

[daily-pryce-and-carter]

Survival Tip No. 1002

Anything which may have happened on Christmas Day, particularly any births of note, is irrelevant to your mission objective. Your survival is dependant on being aware of what is happening currently. There is no room for celebration, rest, panic, joy, or any other divergence from your mission parameters.

REMEMBER: A distracted crew is a dead crew!

[ryuki-draws]

Some photo draw-in for a vague MahoYome idea with pre-curse Joseph travelling with two mages for a while before meeting Cartaphilus (aka "instructions unclear - apprentice acquired" AU) based on my two Slavic mages + Slovak Joseph headcanon (since Merkmal metioned him being from eastern Europe). And I wanted to use this photo I took back in 2015 for something as I still really like it!