#unrealising

[eddiestightywhities]

you know what's pretty fucked up? the lump-in-my-throat-inducing fact that eddie diaz hasn't yet been kissed stupid by the love of his life buck buckley

[aroacesigma]

everyone talks about the she/they to trans guy pipeline but no one talks about the little girl holding 7 chairs to spite the teacher asking for some strong boys to help to trans guy pipeline

[storyshark2005]

Fic Rec - New Carraville!!!

absolute fucking instant classic Carraville. Amazing writing!!! Anon if you can hear this-- well done!!! I am IN LOVE WITH THIS STORY! 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

Gary glances up at him and there’s a flash of recognition in his eyes, like Jamie’s words have some double meaning that he’s just now understanding. (They don’t). Staring back into the bottom of his glass, he says: “No. I couldn’t. I just… belong to David. Always will.”  It’s strange to hear Gary refer to him as David — Jamie thinks he’s only ever heard Victoria call him by that name, in oversaturated, sickly-sweet television interviews.  “But,” Jamie says, like he’s grasping at straws, “Even if—” Gary cuts across him quietly. “Even if he doesn’t want me anymore.” His shrug is well-practised; it implies he’s resigned himself to this fact a long time ago. “That’s just how it is with him and me.” The pub is still chattering all around them, an old Stone Roses song playing so loud everyone has to half-shout to be heard, and Jamie is unbearably lonely. He knows quite acutely that he’s never been in love before, not like that. He has no fucking clue what to do with that information, that he’s only ever glimpsed the real thing once, in a moldy, low-lit stairwell at twenty-one years old. He feels as though something’s passed him by, something he never knew he wanted in the first place. So far behind him it’s already out of reach. All his life, Gary Neville has flaunted the fact that he only ever wanted one thing, that playing for United was the only dream. It was one of many things about him that rubbed Jamie the wrong way. And now, to learn he’s only ever wanted one person too… Jamie lets jealousy crash over him like a wave, even though he knows it’s misplaced. To have one dream instead of a drawerful, to be so pure and uncompromised— what must that be like? As though he can read Jamie’s mind, Gary says: “It’s not supposed to be like this. I love him, but it’s not supposed to be like this.” When he glances up, though, Gary’s not looking at him, and Jamie can see Gary didn’t say it for his sake.

[theanaloglibrary]

Presage - Unreleased I (1987), self released, cassette (tape)

Tracklist A1. Section 25 - Human Puppet A2. Asylum Party - Where have you Gone my Friend? A3. Brigade Internationale - Memories and Break A4. Clair Obscur - Wreck A5. Mary Goes Round - The Shelter A6. Odessa - Trouble A7. Brigade Internationale - Silence of my Brain B1. Orchestre Rouge - 1980 B2. Art Remains Tangible - Numéro 32 B3. Little Nemo - Future is Now B4. Norma Loy - Ghost Parasite B5. Brigade Internationale - Heart of the Volcano B6. Complot Broswick - Panem and Circenses B7. The Cultural Decay - I Never Loved You

Presages is a self-released French underground compilation from the 80s in three parts (1/3). It is now hard to find and expensive, as are most releases from featured artists.

[mlmfocalette]

a dream

[neurotoxizity]

[litres-of-cocaine]

elle was a fascinating character and if she had stayed longer the run of criminal minds would have been so much richer change my mind.

also it’s insane that the way she exits the show compliments her arc in a way that no other cast member leaving did even if it ends up ending the storyline completely. like from the very start her impatience and history as a sexual offences agent is established, and then putting the unsub of 2x05 in the context of her trauma being a violating experience has cataclysmic implications. it completely accounts for her actions. especially following gideon’s advice - ‘i want you to think about this job, what you’ve been through, and what you’re capable of’ and the trigger of lee’s words ‘you’ve made a lot of women very happy’. props to glaudini’s acting here because you can see elle’s faith in her own morals die right when he says that. ‘what you’re capable of’ is tied to ‘what you’ve been through’; she’s capable of revenge because she’s been through it. this becomes a justification for murder rather than an encouragement to abide by the ideals of law enforcement that she feels have failed her and others.

she’s impatient and loud and devastated by the cases she’s worked on and then forced to live through the same thing via being shot.

i think something interesting that wasn’t necessarily intentional (though there’s a good chance it was) as well that i’ve kind of alluded too was the way that that experience of being violated for elle (by the fisher king putting his hand in her gunshot wound) was sexual in nature even if that wasn’t randall garner’s goal. it underlines the theme of elle’s - and the rest of the team’s - vulnerability existing in complete contrast to the confines of her profession, especially considering the her role before in convicting those charges with sexual offences.

obviously lola glaudini leaving was a personal choice so it wasn’t like elle was written out as a creative additive - but tbh if they had lengthened this plotline so we got to see more of elle and had this ending it would have an incredibly interesting period in the show.

and just to add, her leaving at this point in the series also could have had a much more monumental impact on the plot if mandy patinkin hadn’t decided to quit also, as gideon’s desire for peace competes with elle’s (somewhat ironic) craving for justice, but alas, it was not meant to be.

[toastys]

I have a really out-there theory that The Pale itself is symbolically/metaphorically/allegorically/a physical manifestation of the influence of The Players of Disco Elysium. The Pale wiggled its way into Harry's comatose, bender-beaten brain and shattered him into twenty-six different pieces for the Players to convene with. Strap in cause this is a Long One.

The Pale is often described as 'consisting of' everything that has ever happened in Elysium's past - the memories of everyone you meet, speech, radio waves, etc - it would make sense that it would be almost completely inaccessible to the Player as its own plot device. You can't just dip your head into Elysium's Lore Sauna to learn everything immediately... In a sense, you have amnesia too, and are learning everything with Harry as the catalyst. He is an unreliable narrator in an extremely specific position in the world - as a cop stuck on a case in a destitute part of Insulinde - allowing you to absorb the worldbuilding little by little instead of slamming you in the face with all of history at once.

Elysium is giant, but not infinite. Not even the people who live in Elysium know what it looks like from above. The Pale acts as a physical barrier around the most important parts of this world, and is eating away at it - much like the Player absorbs its geography, politics, and cultural sensibilities to utilise to the best of their abilities through Harry. Dora and Harry's past being inaccessible due to physical or mental manifestations of the Pale is another way of motivating the Player to shape Harry into someone new, as You are all he has now.

(She'll be coming soon. Le Retour. One day I will return to your side.)

The rest is out-of-bounds. Dora is not even seen in the game, since Harry's subconscious can only see her as Dolores Dei, ramming home the fact that Dora is long gone from Harry's life and the realities of poverty he must face. Dolores Dei was killed 300 years ago by a person she was close to after being perceived as something inhuman, and the bourgeois are not human.

Dora is middle class, and using this, she has literally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually transcended from the love she became disillusioned with. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with Harry because she thought he 'looked cool' during a brief economic boom. When the economy went to shit and the shit that made Harry look cool became outdated and tacky, she jumped ship using her class status. Harry is haunted by this - she is eternally leaving him in his dreams (his subconscious saying: 'why couldn't you take me with you?'). This mirrors the upper-class vacating Revachol, that was once the capital of the world, not once but twice. However, after everything, Shivers can still take the letter from you. The city proclaims her love for you. She finds you coat to keep you warm. You can't get Dora back; you couldn't even save yourself from crashing and burning - but the city needs you.

^ Key phrase 'Let me'. Implying that Harry of all people could kill it via neglect, and that Harry of all people could stop a fucking nuke from dropping on it. Shivers - the City, the Pale itself - could have taken Harry's memories away; the memories that drove him to attempt suicide - and replaced it with voices which guide him (however flawed) and an outside influence so far removed from Elysium that it can see beyond its outermost walls. The Player, baby.

Furthermore, the Pale is often implicated to be made up of alternative universes that contain events that never happened in whatever current playthrough...

This supports the idea that the Pale - and the resident pale-brained Inland Empire - is at least unconsciously aware of future events. Inland Empire deals in both Harry's inaccessible past and every future that could happen. Furthermore, could this imply that the route in which Kim survives the Tribunal and makes it to the island with Harry is the 'canon' series of events?

So, the Pale - which eats away at the fabric of Elysium - contains information from alternative timelines, and the future? Sounds a little like a Player's cumulative knowledge coming into Elysium to influence events that would otherwise remain unaffected... This would track with Harry's record of Knowing Shit that he definitely has no way of finding out, or even just 'can-opening' people. It's an essential gameplay mechanic turned into a pseudo-supra-natural ability. Other characters pointedly cannot read people's minds, see things that are happening miles away as if they were there themselves, or slow down time enough to make thought-out decisions in the blink of an eye. The Player, combined with Harry's Skills, may be a kind of lightning-rod for the Pale's container of near-infinite information. Of course, it is fallible, but it can also be excruciatingly accurate - so much so that you can freak people out by knowing or predicting shit. The Pale gives voice to Revachol via Shivers; voice to the RCM via EDC; and voice to the inner minds of the people around Harry via Empathy. The way Harry's brain is organised at all (via lists/trees) is genuinely an RPG mechanic based around extracting as much information as possible... Like the Pale. Human can-opener, sending facts straight back into the Player.

^ See, Kim? Harry can teleport... By the Player glitching him with game mechanics. So, the Pale is the out-of-bounds area inaccessible to characters? Where you have to travel through a physical 'loading screen' skybox of nothing that can do nothing but repeat other areas of Elysium?

I enjoy reading about people speculating on Harry's potential status as an Innocence, while also acknowledging the fact that every Innocence that has ever existed was elected from already-high-status by a politically-motivated court. There have probably existed people with Harry's/ previous Innocence's abilities all throughout history, but were simply never going to go anywhere due to their social standing. Dolores Dei was technically a nepo baby, and built a cult that absolved her of every crime against humanity via religion and political absolutism. A husband who vanished from history, as if his only purpose was to introduce her to the court. Her influence was a part of her Innocence- people were caught in the spell of her (funded) intelligence and (happenstance) beauty. There is another theory that Innocences were Player characters in different genres of games that all took place in Elysium: the Perikarnassian as a 'civilisation builder'; Francongero as a 'dark ages royalist military simulation'; Dolores Dei as a 'political strategy' (maybe Innocence Sola as a representation of the eventual disillusionment of Elysium in Moralism as a religion and the Innocentic system as a whole?). Wouldn't it make sense for the entire world to revolve around the Player? Wouldn't it make sense for them to have a massive outward impact, the future and history seemingly manifesting itself through them? Through the choices they make - the ways they choose to play the game, against an antagonist, and towards a victory that only they can see?

Wouldn't it be natural for Dolores Dei's assassination be the result of Her Player not investing enough skill points into 'appearing human to outsiders'?

^ The bourgeois are not human. 'We were supposed to come up with this ourselves!" - a reference to Dolores Dei pulling the future out of the Pale; from future universes where she never existed and retconning inventions into this one. Inland Empire who?

Appearing so perfect that she seemed inhuman worked for a while. People adored her, submitted to her. But, it eventually backfired.

An Innocence of Humanism - Humanism being a ideological strategy to increase the population and produce more expensive goods? Gaining EXP?

At the same time, using her wiles and her 'Army of Humanity' to crush and slaughter any dissenters to her rule? Holding tin soldiers between her fingers... The most 'socially secluded' and 'least self-aware' - perhaps secluded to prevent a game over? Un-self-aware because her consciousness is literally separate from Elysium? Is her assassination fundamentally detrimental to Elysium, the world coasting on the Player's absence like a softlocked game? Is Disco Elysium taking place in a 'game over'? 'Elysium' is the word for the resting place of dead gods...

Harry, without the Player, has made an absolutely clusterfuck of his life out of grief. It cannot be discounted, however, that he was an incredible detective. 216 cases cleared, earning the reputation of being a 'human-can-opener'; knowing things that he has no feasible way of knowing; carving a path across Martinaise and taking in every tiny little thing related to the case. From the Phasmid-traps to the Maybells. Perhaps pre-amnesia Harry even knew about the sniper, throwing his shoe through the window to gaud Iosef into shooting again.

^ Harry's parallels to Dolores Dei? Her toy soldiers, his human cans... Appearing out of nowhere and causing an avalanche, people both attracted to and terrified of them. The difference being - Harry's in a detective game where you start playing as a poor, ugly, drunk, amnesiac cop - and Dolores' political strategy where you begin climbing the ranks of the richest of the rich as a beautiful and immensely educated woman. Harry's scared of his own supra-natural abilities to the point where he doesn't even want to think about how they work? Talk about a sequel....

Who fucking knows what was going through Harry's head before the game started. It doesn't matter. All we know is that we now have an option to combat past-Harry's declaration of 'getting worse'. And we can save-scum this shit as many times as we want until we succeed, with a precinct of voices to converse with when it is necessary to read between the lines or take an action. We even know how likely it is for Harry to succeed at something, down to the percentage. In real life, we might have something of a clue about how likely it is to make a jump or whatever, but Harry's got it down to a percentile. Because he's a goddamn RPG main character, and the Pale cleared out the room for us in his head since Elysium needs another Innocence. One who is not 'innocent' of anything at all. One who is an absolute dumpster-fire drenched in flammable alcohol, representing the culmination of Revachol at this point in history. Born in a place where people go to die, contracting a disease that everyone was too poor to be vaccinated against, catching the momentary fancy of a richer upper-class only to be vacated and haunted into a recession fueled by addiction and poverty - now, reborn and rising and able to prevent his death in as many ways as the game allows us to.

^ Access to hidden places and circulation among those who are hidden - is this referring to his uncannily good detective work, and the trust and information he is able to can-open from those in hiding from one thing or another? 'Hidden places' could even refer to the future (or things otherwise unrevealed to most people), in this context. 'Hidden people' could be those who have been so downtrodden by capitalism that they are essentially nobodies - trapped in spirals of poverty, addiction, etc, - just like Harry. He is able to converse with them on semi-equal footing because of this.

His status within the RCM and whatever special treatments he socially benefits from is apparently paramount in him saving Revachol. Perhaps the RCM will become less of a tool used by the Coalition and more of a People's Army, fighting foreign control. A free Revachol. Not everyone in the RCM is a fan of this whole 'Moralism' thing...

'ONE DAY I WILL RETURN TO YOUR SIDE', burning in fuel that Harry lights with a tiny spark, written to be seen by the Coalition Warships above by a young revolutionary. The flames warm them both. We don't know how exactly Harry will stop the nuke from falling on Revachol - it could be something as little as a butterfly effect decision he takes, or as big as playing a leading role in Le Retour. A plea from the city to be vigilant. A stack of boxes, representing all of history, holding for a small moment with the help of Harry. Something beautiful is going to happen.

This one kind of got away from me, so thank you for reading all of it. What I think I really want to say is that our determination and hope to see the HANGED MAN through to the end is for us to witness all of Recachol's bloody history and fall in love with it anyway. To want to make it better, even a tiny little decaying part of it like Martinaise. Even a broken, objectively terrible man like Harrier Du Bois. Disco Elysium was meant to be only a prelude to a bigger series of games; a taster of the wider world. Sadly, we'll probably never get anything like that due to the original artists who created this world being fired from ZA/UM. But I don't think we'll stop loving or dreaming of this wonderful story and the characters who inhabit it. Capitalism can't kill an idea, after all.

^ Thank you to these people for planting this girthy idea in my head. I need a lie down.

[ohfugecannada]

Of all the characters I could possibly hyperfixate on once getting back into guardians of the galaxy after watching vol.3, I had to go and choose the character who has been canonically dead in universe for at least over a decade!

[poutyniall]

[divinekangaroo]

Thoughts from a sidelong chat: fiction / shows that tell stories in a way that make the audience realise how impossible certain power fantasies are tend to lose a large part of their audience along the way.

[jennablackmorebooks]

I accidentally stumbled into having a beach chapter and then it got too long and so I accidentally stumbled into having two beach chapters and then they both were too long so now I've stumbled into having three beach chapters. It's a nice change in pace from the previous arc, and enjoyable to write, but I didn't expect to be doing The Beach Episode But For A Novel in this one.

[laurelindebear]

Maybe it's just because it's my birthday this week, or because I've been dog tired all day for no obvious reason but my 'suggested for you' playlist this week has multiple songs all about 'we're young and nothing will stop us', 'I'm in my 20s', etc. and I'm just like, I'm happy for you, but I am old as shit and feeling every hour of it and I wanna hear some people sing about that, too.

[granolora]

It is 5am, and after removing the now crisp bread, and chasing away the chill of the night with the aid of the meager heat emanating from the still warm toaster, I take the butter out of the fridge, and spread a sliver of it upon my toast, hoping that this day would be better than the last.

[immiiiick-va]

Hi!!!! :D :D :D :D Hope you all have had/will have a absolutely Swag day :] Have this silly lil goober for good luck :3 May your travels go well adventurer of the web o7

[akkivee]

in high school, i was the brand of nerd that helped my entire class pass algebra lol

my dad lent his voice for an anime movie in the 2000s so i’m technically a daughter of a voice actor lmao

my bday is the middle date between two of the yamadas

i have aquaphobia