#velvet worm appreciation post

[approximateknowledge]

There's something about velvet worms that just speaks to me on a fundamental level. I won't even elaborate, just look at them!

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

WYD💬2

Part 1 |

Warnings: non/dubcon and other dark elements. My username actually says you never asked for any of this.

Summary: A fan makes an offer your can’t refuse.

(based on suggestion he’s been overworking himself for weeks if not months. He knows he needs a break but his work is too important. Maybe what he needs is someone to take care of him so he can focus more on work. from @thezombieprostitute)

Characters: Bucky Barnes

My warnings are not exhaustive but be aware this is a dark fic and may include potentially triggering topics. Please use your common sense when consuming content. I am not responsible for your decisions.

As usual, I would appreciate any and all feedback. I’m happy to once more go on this adventure with all of you! Thank you in advance for your comments and for reblogging.

Your stomach writhes like worms in the dirt. You sit in the back of the uber, uneager to be at your destination. The driver asks if it’s a special occasion and you just sort of mutter. You look down at yourself; you’re sure dressed for something special.

It’s plain enough. A classic little black dress. Thick straps and a simple silhouette. Still, it’s tighter than you’re used to. You dressed it up with a slender silver chain that holds a heart charm and a velvet clutch. Your usual cotton and wool pale in comparison.

You watch on the GPS as the car moves closer and closer to the endpoint. You take out your phone and check the messages. You can barely read any of it as your hands jitter.

You’re being stupid. This is dangerous and stupid. You can’t meet a stranger. Even if he did pay you to do so. Even if you really need the money. You should just send it back.

‘Reservation for Barnes. The hostess will seat you.’

He sent that about an hour ago. His anticipation has only been met by your silent dread and dulcet agreement. It’s one thing to post photos online, faceless at that, but to meet a man like this. This is more than just posing and primping for a camera.

You thank the driver as he pulls up to the restaurant. You get out reluctantly and linger along the curb, tipping the uber as an excuse to take your time. You look up at the dusky facade and gulp. The cursive moniker assures you of your displacement. 

You take a breath and cross the broad sidewalk. You dodge out of the way of another couple entering the restaurant. You don’t follow them as you hover outside. There were at least a few decades between the pair; what is this place?

You hug your wrap tight and teeter on your heels as you try to see through the tinted windows. You need to scare yourself out of this. You get one look at this guy and you’re gone. You’re running the other direction. Only then will it really be real. Only then will you get a bit of sense in you. 

“Just in time, doll,” a deep voice crawls up your spine and you gasp as you twist around to face the speaker. 

Your ankle bends dangerously as your heel catches in the pavement. You bat your lashes up at the stranger; it’s him. He’s even more handsome in person. It almost takes your breath away.

“Uh, hi,” you murmur. Your escape is foiled. Your second doubts are crushed in that instant. You don’t have the courage to walk away. If he’d never seen you, you could've easily scurried back to your hole and deleted everything. “Mr. Barnes?”

He laughs. His smile is deadly. He puts his hand on your arm, bold but casual.

“Bucky,” he offers, “come on,” he checks the watch on his other wrist, “we’re late.”

He nudges you towards the door, bringing his hand down to hover along your lower back. You walk forward numbly. You don’t know what else to do but go with it.

He opens the door and ushers you ahead of him. The hostess greets him as ‘Mr. Barnes’ and is prompt to lead you through the dim lounge. A round booth awaits you near the back of the restaurant.

The hostess takes your wrap and you place your clutch on the seat as you settle onto the curved cushion. Bucky sits and orders a bottle of Shiraz. You fight to keep your shoulders up, trying to wilt in the luxury of the place. You’re an assistant librarian, what are you doing here?

He slides to the back of the booth, reaching over to wrap his hand lightly around your wrist. He tugs until you reticently shimmy closer. You keep your eyes on the table, fumbling with the wrapped silverware.

“Nervous,” he says. You nod and still the cutlery. “Me too.”

You’re surprised by his confession. He must do this all the time. He’s rich and handsome and oh, how stupid you really are. Of course you’re just another in the long line. 

You look up at him, flinching as you find him watching you. You wonder if your lipstick is patchy or if you smeared your eye liner again. You bring your hands back into your lap and wring them.

You notice the gray patch among the short stubble along his jaw, a few more strands of silver laced around his temples. His hair is smoothed back but the longer strands threaten to fall forward. He lifts his arm coolly and rests it on the seat behind you. He smells amazing.

“I…” you begin. “I think I made a mistake.”

He tilts his head, his eyes narrowing slightly but otherwise, he does not react.

“How do you know? You haven’t even made the mistake yet,” his hand drifts down to tickle your shoulder, “one glass of wine. How about that? You have one glass before we order, then you can decide.”

“I… I’m not what you think I am,” you utter.

“Doll, you’re exactly what I want,” he winks just before he turns away, another dashing smile sent to the waitress as she arrives with the wine.

One drink. You can do that.

[adaptacy]

A Found Flame {Pt.2}

Pairing: Mentor!Gale Dekarios x Apprentice!GN!Reader

(Previous Chapter) – (Next Chapter) ➔ (AO3)

A/N: Gonna cross-post this to AO3 eventually once I have more of an idea of how the plots gonna go cause you all have convinced me to full-send it and make it a longform thing. just adding it to the list of wip.... a sincere apology to my tcm fics.... anyways! i love my little depressed magic-cancer nerd and im glad im not the only one. here's more of him :) [it wont all be angst, but i gotta set the scene and the stakes, yanno...?] ALSO 'a found flame' is just the working title, idk what the official one is gonna be but i'll let yall know when i figure that out

Word Count: 3.1k

Stepping outside grants you an opportunity to taste the last flavors of the fading winter, only feeling the quick spikes of a chill every few minutes, and even then, it’s only thanks to the setting sun. You still wear a purple velvet shawl, as per the request – well, demand – of Gale. He insisted many moons ago that you shouldn’t ever risk getting sick when you can take measures to avoid such a fate, and you’d decided it was much simpler to go along with it than to argue your safety. That plan was cemented when he purchased you a finely tailored purple shawl, the edges of the hood and cloak lined with lynx fur, dyed a dark pink to complement the thick purple velvet that made up the majority of the shawl. A gift that nothing short of surprised you, even had you fooled into believing you’d been dreaming when he presented it to you. Why he was so particularly fearful of the cold, you weren’t sure, but you deeply appreciated the gift, and even if you did enjoy winter’s nip, the shawl was both gorgeous and comfortable, and you’d be insane to leave it behind.

Gale was also particularly sensitive to cold weather, from what you could tell, which likely had a role in his passionate bias against the chilliness of post-snow air. Frankly, you were fine with the occasional runny nose in exchange for a chance to wander down a snow-dusted forest trail, and you didn’t mind a shiver here and there while you caught free-falling flakes that Waterdeep was ever so rarely granted. 

The garden, however, was much like Gale – hardly a fan of the cold. Gale did not have a green thumb, but he still shared similarities with the plants you tended. Those plants that, currently, were dead and buried. While you’d managed to convince him to try his hand at herbalism and gardening, he had more of Bhaal’s touch with the sprouts than the ‘magic’ touch he so often joked about. It was amusing, and a little pitiful; the exasperated sigh and the troubled frown that followed your breaking of the news, that his poorly packed and overwatered plants had passed. He was dramatic, and managed to find the humor in the situation, though vowed to let you handle anything to do with seedlings and crops from that point onwards.

It was unfortunate, as you appreciated his entertaining company (even if it came mostly in the form of griping, displeased that he had to get so up close and personal with dirt and worms) around the garden beds, but it allowed for moments like these. Truth be told, you had no intention of gardening. You would have to wait another twelve dawns until any useful plants would be back in season, so planting anything this late in winter would be a waste of both time and resources. 

Instead, you aimed to explore a small forest trail that you’d just recently discovered, not far from the tower you stayed at. To say you lived there felt like too strong, too certain, of a term. It was the only place you slept, and nearly all of your time was spent there, but you knew it wasn’t home. It was Gale’s home, and you were a mere guest. A sixteen-month-and-counting guest, but a guest nonetheless. You worked, your apprenticeship laboursome and sometimes really quite demanding, and Gale repaid your loyalty and assistance by giving you a place to stay. You’d just never planned to stay so long. 

In all honesty, you expected it to be a very temporary arrangement. You suspected Gale felt the same way. But circumstances changed, and so did minds, and you didn’t see yourself leaving anytime soon. It helped that you got along quite well with your boss-slash-roommate, despite the differences in personality and age. You were comfortable with the way things were, and Gale had just recently begun to sprout ideas of passing his own spell-casting knowledge on to you, with today’s lesson being a prime example. When you weren’t helping out around his home, or running errands for him, or tending to the garden, you were most usually subjected to reading long passages from books that were once very far above your understanding. 

If Gale was a master of anything, it was surely knowledge. You’d found it odd, at first. Spending all of his days wasting away in his tower, just reading, rotting into a hermit, you’d assumed. But you’d soon gained an appreciation for his boundless mind, and felt almost honored that he’d decided you worthy of learning from him. Being a wizard’s apprentice had never been in the plans, not even as a fleeting hypothetical, and yet you found yourself in that exact scenario – and enjoying it nonetheless! 

Glancing down at the small woven basket hanging from your arm, you frowned, lost in thought. Gale taught you a lot, and he still had plenty left to teach, but by no means did that translate over to you really knowing the man you shared a house with. He taught from books and scrolls, and on a few spare good days from his own vast experience. Even with all of the lectures he gave, you found that any details about him that weren’t related to magic, or your lessons, were all quite lacking. What you did know about his personal life was almost purely from observation. 

Well, a few times when Tara had made a passing comment about some personal detail and surely was later scolded for it, but those were few and far between. If anyone were to blame for your curiosity, it was most certainly the man himself. He loved preaching the importance of curiosity, exploration (despite rarely leaving the confines of his study), and seeking knowledge, and you’d be a rather poor apprentice to disregard such lessons. Or, arguably worse, cherry pick when you applied those lessons to real world scenarios. 

Most recently, your nose for curiosity had picked up on the notably pungent scent of Gale’s behavior. It was unusual, slightly withdrawn, perhaps a little panicked if you truly squinted between the lines. Gale was predictable, for the most part – it was one of his traits that had earned him your trust in the first place. Though as of recent, he’d been rather strange. And not the typical Gale kind of strange – an unsettling, uncharacteristic strange. One that you knew better than to ask questions about, but one that certainly sprouted confusion. 

You neared the edge of the forest, giving the pale trees a smile as if to promise your peace. Pausing just before the tree line, you peered into the woods, interested as to what you might discover. You proceeded, following a very faint trail into the woods. You had a pretty solid confidence in your navigational skills – otherwise you most definitely would’ve gotten completely trapped in the maze of a city that was Waterdeep every time you ran any sort of errand – so you weren’t particularly concerned with getting lost. 

Allowing your thoughts to return to Gale, you reminded yourself that you weren’t really lying to him. You definitely weren’t going to the garden, but you still planned on harvesting plants. You’d known him for almost a year and a half, and you knew the gist of what he’d been through, what with his mentorship from Mystra herself – which was so cool, and he was way too casual about it – and his strange appetite thanks to the Netherese orb that had become one with him. All that aside, however, you didn’t know many details about his past. For as chatty and sarcastic as he was, you couldn’t shake the feeling he had a good number of secrets he withheld from you, and big ones at that. 

Of course, Gale was entitled to his privacy, and you didn’t want to intrude or push his boundaries, but it was impossible to ignore the signs of unease. His constantly drifted mind, his long breaks between lessons, his increasingly frequent requests. Or the way that he’d direct you to read a passage from some folktale or other, only to remain silent for several moments after you finish, gazing longingly past his balcony. He’d been consuming more artifacts than usual recently, and gained a sudden eagerness to push real world practice into your schedules. Not that you minded the inflow of new information, but it didn’t seem to come from a place of excitement. Instead, you figured anxiety; judging based off of the common rapid bouncing of his leg, the messy-and-messier spread of his books and trinkets – especially when compared to how well-kept the place always was whenever you’d started working under him – or his new tendency to forget what he had and hadn’t asked of you, or which lessons he’d already covered, or hell, where he had last placed his staff. 

Well, what better way to get someone to open up and relax than with a hand-picked bouquet and some herbal tea? 

Even if he didn’t spill his guts to you, he certainly needed a pick-me-up. Sure, you already did a lot for him, but he did a lot for you, too. Maybe even more than he realized. He deserved a treat. 

–   –   –

“Though it may be bold of me to say, I estimate they’ll be a fine caster someday.”

“Bold indeed, Mr. Dekarios. Awfully bold. They quite nearly began trembling at the idea of a mere fire bolt!” The small beast chirped back, seated firmly atop his desk, pawing at a small fuzzy ball that swung from a thin string, easily entertained by the simple contraption. 

“Even I stumbled; all beginners do. Time is all they need. ‘Time heals all wounds’, is that not how the scriptures read?” He asked, sticking his tongue out and running the tip of a long harpy feather over it. 

As he dipped that same tip in a vial half-filled with a thick, clear liquid, Tara quickly outstretched a wing, the end of it not-so-accidentally hitting her companion in the face. The startle nearly caused him to knock over the bottle of magic ink, his torso leaning forward as he just barely managed to steady it with both hands, and he glared at his familiar out of the corner of his eye. She merely stretched out her other wing, feigning obliviousness before eventually looking back at him. “You are still the same fool who summoned me all those years ago. You are a prodigy, Mr. Dekarios! You were half their age then; to compare your ‘stumbles’ to the incompetence of a commoner such as them is exhaustively inconceivable.” 

“Tara, I implore you to exercise patience. They are a fine apprentice, and they certainly have the potential for brilliance. Am I not a competent mentor?” He asked, raising an eyebrow, intending the question to be at least somewhat thought-provoking, but the only reaction he received was Tara turning her head away and murmuring something too quiet for Gale to hear. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, he knew her well enough to predict it was something snarky, and he didn’t bother investigating. He dipped the large quill again, unable to recall if he’d already wet the tool, and the liquid dripped off of the tip, shimmering in the glint of the fading sun as it rejoined the rest contained in the bottle. “Why is it that you repudiate all of their attempts to bond with you? Surely you don’t think them ill-mannered?”

“‘Ill-mannered’, he says,” she mocks, her tail flicking in irritation. “It is not their civilities that I have quarrels with. It is the expectations I deplore.”

“Expectations?” Gale repeats, his palm flattening against his desk, pressing out the sides of a contorted scroll, the tip of the feather hovering over the yellowed paper. 

After solving her own deliberation, the tressym turns around, her wings folding against her sides, her tail curling around her paws. “Have you no fear that your confidence is misplaced? Mr. Dekarios, do you not worry that they may fall short in your plans for them? That they are not up to the task you have decided to burden them with?”

Gale’s irritated gaze softens, his hand relaxing, coming to join his other hand in resting on the desk. The clear liquid on the quill drips onto the parchment, becoming a black dot in an instant, the weave-infused iridescent ink soaking seamlessly into the paper. “I fear nobody could ever truly be capable. But my options are limited, and my few select choices are each disheartening in their own cruel ways.”

“Evidently, you have already made up your mind. Why is it that you allow them to remain oblivious? You know better than anyone how dire the circumstances are.” Tara’s paws slide forward, her belly laying flat on the desk, and she plants her head atop of her mitts. 

Gale moves his hand, letting the paper curl up without the weight, to gently scratch Tara’s head, her pitying purr drawing a sigh from his own chest. “I am but a ticking time bomb. Hardly much of a man these days,” he chuckles dryly, looking around the dust-riddled mess that he still called a study. It would be nothing short of anarchy if it weren’t for his apprentice, and he’s seen it in far worse shape, but it doesn’t quite shake the quiet guilt that rocks in his stomach at just how far he’s fallen. Gale is usually quick to excuse his carelessness as an incurable consequence of his age, but he’s well-aware that his energy is not merely being lost alongside his youth. 

The artifacts he consumes have only ever satiated a part of the orb’s appetite. Never quite satisfied – a commonly reoccurring trait of those Gale finds himself engaging with – the sortilege feeds off of him as well. The incantations he recites and the thaumaturgy he practices only grows stronger – more powerful than Gale could have ever predicted or wished for – while his body withers away as though his very anatomy is actively being shredded, and relentlessly so, to make room for spells that he now dreads casting. 

It doesn’t help that his learned reliance was only ripped away from him when he truly needed assistance. When the man who once considered himself the smartest in all of Faerun was clueless about his own condition, the only person who could possibly have the answers disappeared. 

Now, Gale was left to clean up the pieces. He understands this is his own doing – that he was, and still is, a fool. Once blinded by greed, a greed that led him to being blinded by love, a love that led him to being blinded by desperation, a desperation that led to him being trapped by fear. A fear that now has settled, more or less. Present as ever, but no longer unfamiliar, no longer a new addition to Gale’s emotions.

His hand returns to the paper, and Tara steadies her sights on the bottom of the quill, watching as it twirls, imprinting promises and bittersweet apologies onto the scroll. Words he couldn’t possibly utter aloud, but words that couldn’t be more genuine. The recipient deserves more than a written explanation and cursive laments, and he’s aware of the injustice he’s manufacturing, but he is a terribly faded man who is cursed by a deficiency in time and yet finds himself with so much left to do. He decides it is better a raven on her doorstep than his ghost, lacking any explanation. 

Each day, he wakes to find his chest a little warmer, his hands a little shakier, his hair a little thinner. And each day feels like his last. He is entirely helpless to the foe that resides inside of him, of all places. Incapable of defending against something that has already breached his castle walls, and even more useless as it has latched under his skin, reducing him to nothing more than a habitat. He hosts an aberration that has grown far, far too large for its enclosure, and who threatens to rupture its cage with every breath that he dares to draw. 

He’s held out for long enough. He’s lived longer than he ever imagined possible, but he knows his limits. The truth stings in places untouched by the Netherese’s reaches; his forced composure starts an ache in his face, but he knows better. With a sharp inhale, Gale rolls up the paper, setting down the large brown feather as he retrieves a thin, fraying string, tightly wrapping the letter up. He even finishes it off with a neat bow, a force of habit, and he sets it aside, leaning back in his chair. 

The moon is just barely visible now, approaching the stars and creeping over the mild coverage of the stone railings on his balcony, and the wizard watches the white giant rise. Some unburied, deep sense of longing reflects in his eyes, where the moon also resides, though she is much smaller and much dimmer. There’s movement on the desk, but Gale’s eyes aren’t yet drawn away from the beauty of the night. Then there’s a weight in his lap, and a purring against his stomach, and he lowers his hand to rest on Tara’s back, gently stroking, enjoying the silent tranquility. 

‘Mystra’s moon’ he used to call it. He’d tell her he could see her in the shadowed curves, but he isn’t sure if he ever really did. Maybe in a dream, long lost to him now. The moon that watched over him tonight was certainly not Mystra’s. It was bright, encasing the room in a beautiful blue, and the gaze it returned was a soft one. Free of judgment, free of stress, free of difficulty. 

“I reckon I’ll be up there soon,” he exhales, feeling his familiar curl up in his lap. “Ruling my own section of sky. Perhaps I’ll even have purpose. I can’t help but wonder what it’s like.”

“Peaceful, I suspect. An eternity of peace, at that. What a prospect.”

“You’ll join me some day?” 

The feline purrs out a quiet chuckle, her tail curling around her body so the tip rests on her nose, bundled perfectly atop his thighs. “Of course. I can only go so long without a self-warming bed.”

Gale smiles, his hand falling still on her back, though his thumb continues to run up and down her fur. “Give them a chance, will you? They can’t do it without guidance.”

“I’ll take care of them,” Tara reassures, her tone much softer now than when she spoke of his apprentice earlier. “Do wait for me up there. I’ll be by your side before long, Mr. Dekarios.” 

“I set out tomorrow night. I’ll inform them of what they need to know.”

[hallucigeniahive]

Paleo Appreciation Post #1

this here's a Hallucigenia. it's a wacky-lookin' worm-thing from the cambrian named cuz it looks like a weird hallucination. they're tiny lil fellas, only about .5 to 5 cm (or .25 to 2.25 inches if you're from that hamburger place) and have a slender neck, spindly legs and some mean-looking spikes. you can find 'em in deposits like the burgess shale in british columbia or floating around your house if you chug dish soap.

a little thing i'd like to add is that for quite some time, paleontologists thought those gnarly spikes were its legs (which is odd). slightly less odd is that bulbous head there; that's not supposed to be there! the "head" is actually the result of this lil fella's insides exploding out one end (because i hate to break it to ya, this thing's long dead).

this isn't some really inefficient way of telling the world i've found a living Hallucigenia, that's a velvet worm. some taxonomists propose that Hallucigenia and this guy right here are part of the same clade, dubbed Panarthropoda, which also includes all living arthropods and tardigrades. in this proposed clade, both velvet worms and tardigrades are listed as descendants of Hallucigenia's phylum, which is neato.

i hope you appreciate the dude™ as much as me.

[papiliona]

Im here for headcanons. Feed me, I'm starving for headcanons

Okay okay okay I bring them as mother bird brings the worm to her screeching children.

Ranboo cannot gauge normal temperature. This mainly has come from the fact his house has no walls and is in a snowy biome, but i feel like the end is very cold so his enderman half means that he just doesn't get cold at all.

I also like drawing him so that his enderman half and the white part are different textures. Idk why.

Techno in my brain is a man wearing a pig skull mask, but because he has the same size head as regular pigs the mask comes from a nether Hoglin. In general I picture Techno as like... A seasoned warrior in the vein of Odysseus (as opposed to Tommy who is an Achilles type person), so maybe his entire outfit consists of battle and adventure spoils he's gained over the years.

Technodrip

Eret still wears his king outfit, but the metal is tarnished and the Cape is torn.

A lot of these are aesthetic idk what to tell you.

Niki dyes her hair with flowers. The pink was originally light and calm and meant to symbolise hope, but when she saw how hopeless the world around her was she made it more and more intense until it was like fire.

Also she totally uses baking skills to make potions/explosive concoctions.

The people in the badlands actually originate from a badlands biome (the one with the hArDeNEd cLaY) and were nobody's there, so they left to gain power elsewhere.

The egg smells kind of like red velvet muffins. Until you get close to it.

The smp afterlife is like an echo of the overworld, but really faded, empty and with a short render distance. It looks like the smp but before anyone did anything and with no mobs

Dream is in the mortal world as some kind of punishment. I like to think of him as a Greek God figure, human in appearance but able to change the course of fate and absent from normal moral codes. He's on the smp because he committed some petty offence in the immortal realm, so he's bitter, playing with everyone. Like dionysus in percy Jackson but like... Evil and shit.

In the L'Manhole you can hear screams echoing.

Karl occasionally uses really outdated words mixed with modern phrases because time traveller. Like occasionally he'll just be like 'are you biting your thumb at me dude?'

George's goggles are made of really boujie materials and are gem encrusted

Ranboos crown is more tiara like. I need it to be a bejewelled elaborate designed circlet because otherwise the way the pixels are spaced on his skin will irritate me.

Wilbur had a room littered with unfished songs and compositions. Before L'Manburg he wanted to be a musician (this is kind of more just canon). They made a statue of him in New L'Manburg, but ghostbur couldn't bear to look at it because it looked wrong. The reason was that it was an image of the destructive Wilbur as opposed to the creative.

All of the clothing on the smp is of one distinct aesthetic and period for each group but the only modern piece is Tommy's red and white shirt. Nobody knows where it came from.

Ranboo naturally has his irl hair colour, but he split died it permanently and couldn't remember that it wasn't originally like that.

Twitch Prime is a god that looks like Jeff Bezos in a toga

All the technology on the smp is run by cogs. In my mind the smp is like the world in this series called septimus heap, where its simultaneously high fantasy in aesthetic but a clear post-futuristic version of our world. So there are relics of 'modern' technology that is broken and dispowered (like Jack Manifolds headset)

Everyone's netherite armour has different carvings and designs on it

Dream and Awesamdude play chess together in prison, in silence. Neither of them speak but Dream seems to appreciate the company (does he though?)

Tubbo used to like playing piano and ukelele in his bee house sometimes. Sometimes he would sit in the corner of caves whilst Ranboo mined and play instruments too.

Hamilton in the smp universe is a fictional novel (its pretty much fictional irl anyway) and Wilbur read it when he was a teenager.

Erets wool blocks are actually scarves he knits and leaves lying around, wrapped around tiny notes.

Quackitys voice is not autotuned he just sings like that™

I know foxes do this thing where they will sneak into farms and cause ruckus, and for some reason whenever Fundy is near technoblade both of them are just really uneasy

Snowchester is also a front for people to go ice-skating because fuck you my child is completely fine

Ranboo gardening 👍

Sometimes endermen will put grass blocks in piles near Ranboo's shack house when he blacks out for a long period of time or is visibly distressed.

Sapnap used to have wanted posters of himself everywhere because he is a petkiller but when the hype died down he framed them all and put them in his house. Also he plays the violin.

The twitter trending guy is canon but he runs a newspaper which is consistently sued unsuccessfully for having political biases, because as soon as it seems like he's writing in favour of one person he just writes in favour of another. The one true anarchist, Ranboo could never.

[wickedsrest-rp-archive]

Welcome to this week’s roundup! We do these every week to provide plot drops, highlight starters posted that week, and share other information about the setting. Anyone is welcome to use these bullet points in starters, plots, anons etc. Also let us know if you want us to include one of your setting-related plots in here for next week by sending us a bullet point!

We just wanted to let you know that due to busy-ness, we skipped the WCW last week and won’t be having one next week. However, we’ll be back to regular schedule after that. Thank you!

What’s new in town?:

Something fishy is going on with time in our new POTW. Astral and dimensional madness are still in full swing as well.

Molly Teller is cheerfully selling goods from her farm at Nightshade Farmer’s Market. The eggs are extra tasty, just be sure not to let them hatch. 

A string of bodies are being found along the main roads downtown. A few witnesses have spoke of seeing seven foot tall people seemingly drop from the sky and attacking.

Local vegetarians and residents who just happen to appreciate the cuisine are up in arms. Veggie Tables location is prone to rewinding a few decades every so often... which would be fine if it was still a vegetarian restaurant with an 80s theme, but steak house is not the vibe Veggie Tables clientele is going for. 

Starters: 

Does anyone have experience with velvet worms? Sage could use a helping hand! 

Are you hiring or know of someone who is? Help Crow find a job. 

Baz needs a pick me up. Join them at Central Station to “help” all the lost travelers.

Levi is dealing with some giant pests thanks to the lighthouse light being pranked. Help it get rid of a giant moth. 

Mateo says when in Maine, eat the giant lobsters. Who wants to help catch one and have the biggest lobster roll ever? 

Rhett needs a boat so he can scope out the ghost boats. Help a warden out! 

Correy needs to know how to permanently break a light. For some reason, he’s not too big on lights or lanterns?

Bees? Ulfric needs them up outta his stove while he’s working. Any tips for humanely getting them to go away is appreciated. 

After finishing up a ton of paperwork, Portia can’t even enjoy the outdoors with the fishy smell. Anyone got any idea what’s going down or good indoor activities? 

Feeling artsy? Reach out to Metzli to have your work featured at the gallery! 

Ren Faire or literal blast to the past? Ari isn’t here for her TikToks being interrupted. Give her a heads up on how to avoid the past pockets.

Know someone who forges weapons? Send Marina their way so she can get a dope custom made knife for her new bestie.

Lil’s phone is back and she’s ready to get out of the house. Someone should show her some demon-free fun. Or demon-filled. 

Winn is back and has some friendly advice, just skip the beach. The lobstrocities aren’t worth it. 

Meanwhile Caoihme is recruiting plucky, hockey-stick wielding volunteers to fight some lobstrocities. 

[harrystyleswatermelon-sugar]

Gas station encounter - Part IV

Part III

The next day I wait for him standing behind my window. When he pulls up outside I smile because he is too early. His black car is standing in the same spot than the day before, when he brought me home.

I see him getting out of the car and shooting a glance up to my flat, then onto his phone. He leans his back on his car and puts his hands in his pockets. He wears a black hat and a black coat with some brown Chelsea boots and dark pants.

When I close my door behind me I feel my phone vibrating and look at it. Harry sent me a text and I start going down. He smiles when I open the door and step outside.

“Hey there, how are you?” he asks and hugs me.

“Great, how are you? Ready to grab some coffee?” he nods and kisses my cheek.

“Sure, let´s go. I thought I would show you my favourite café. Believe me, they have the most amazing things” he promises and opens the car door for me.

The way to his café is not very long and when he finally found a parking spot a few streets away he looks at me.

“I apologize in advance. It is very likely that I am recognised and because you are an attractive woman it probably will be in the media tomorrow. Be prepared” he warns me and I shake my head.

“No worries, I can handle it I think” I assure him and he gets out of the car. I shut the door behind me and we walk next to each other in comfortable silence. He seems a bit tense but when nothing happens and no one tries to stop him, he relaxes a bit.

“So tell me, what happened to Anna? She told me yesterday, that she is feeling so much better and she might be able to go home? I thought she was on the edge of dying when I visited her the first time” he asks while he leads me towards the little café.

“There are moments when those miracles happen and I try to not question them too much. Her bloodwork is great, she doesn’t need more chemo and she feels better. Her vitals are really great. This might be a miracle but to be honest, we should appreciate it as long as it is possible” I explain and walk through the open door into the café. We find a table in the corner and he pulls my chair, so I can sit.

“So you think she might get sick again?”

“It is possible. At this point, no one can say yes or no. I will do my best to let her go in a few days and give her some time at home with her friends and family. But I try to not let it get too close to me” I reply and he nods while he hands me the menu.

“I hope the best for her. Maybe you can keep me updated” he asks me and I agree to nod. I decide to get a normal coffee and a blueberry scone.

When our order arrives we dig into the food and I immediately know why it is his favourite café. The food is excellent and even the coffee seems to be better than other coffees.

“This is really good,” I say and he smiles at me. He got a cinnamon roll and seems to enjoy it as well.

“I´m glad you like it. Their cinnamon roll is the best I ever ate” he declares and I giggle.

“That’s a huge compliment from someone who has probably eaten in the whole world”

“You want to taste it? Then you will see that it is the best” he holds his fork with a piece of that roll into my direction and I nod, eating from Harry Styles´ fork and I close my eyes in awe. This is the best cinnamon roll I ever ate.

I nod and he smiles delighted that I agree.

“It´s great. Wow. Thanks for showing me this place, I´m sure I will come back some time” I assure him and he takes a sip from his coffee.

“I don’t share those special places with anybody but I think you deserve the best. I appreciate the work you are doing so much, I am so impressed how you handle all this and I can´t believe anyone takes this for granted. You and your team should get an award, you are the real heroes” he says and I try not to choke on my scone. I am very much touched by his words and I honestly don’t know where to look.

“Thank you, I think it is normal to us because we love what we do. We don’t need an award…a simple thank you and some smiles on those kids faces, that’s why I do this” I reply and take my cup in my hands.

“But you sacrifice so much, please don’t get me wrong…but someone who tries to make others happy should be happy themself. What would make you happy? Maybe I can give something back” he asks and I shake my head.

“No, no it´s fine. I am happy, I really am” he looks at me and licks his lips, to get all the cinnamon and sugar.

“I have some time off, so if you would like…I could come and play and sing with the kids. It would be a pleasure and I absolutely don’t mind it” he proposes and I truly don’t know what to say. It’s a very kind offer from a very busy man like him.

“If you want to, sure. I am happy when the kids are happy” I agree and he bites his lip, what I find very sexy.

“Great, I will contact you if you don’t mind”

“I don’t. Soooo…it´s already 3 pm and we still need to get my car. How long do you want to spend time with me?” I ask him and look at my phone.

“If you want to leave, we can go immediately…shit I think I got spotted” he whispers and I am clever enough to not turn around as he tries to hide behind me.

“Are you Harry Styles? You are, right? Do you mind, if we take a picture with you?” a young girl asks next to our table and eyes me sceptical. Harry smiles friendly and gets up to chat with them and take a picture. After they left he pays for our order and is eager to leave the place. Maybe he knows that when he was spotted once, there will be more fans in no time. I hurry after him and as we are a few streets away he gets a bit slower.

“Sorry for leaving so abruptly but I know how fast they are. By now we would have been swarmed and I don’t want that right now…we can get your car or take a walk in the park if you like” he suggests and I nod. Sounds great.

“A walk seems to be nice, we have a lot of time left, so no hurry with getting my car” we walk next to each other, chatting about anything that comes to mind. He tells me about his family and friends back in Manchester and I listen very interested. His mom sounds lovely from his stories and at this point, I am just happy that I met him at the gas station.

“It is lovely spending time with you, Y/N,” he says and smiles at me.

“Likewise, I never thought I would spend time with you after our first meeting. But I´m glad we do, you are easy to be around and I kind of like you” I confess and giggle a bit.

“I appreciate it very much, that you are accepting me in your life and I have the feeling you don’t mind me having in it? Or am I completely wrong and this is just your average kind of being nice?” he asks a bit concerned and unsure.

“I don’t mind having you in my life, not at all. And no, you are not wrong” I can see his happy smile and follow him at his side across the park.

 A few weeks later during my shift, I can see Harry sitting amidst a lot of kids with his guitar and singing with them. They love having him around and he loves entertaining them. Anna was able to go home and I promised to come visit her soon. The last days have been really exhausting, we have a few very critical patients and I had to tell their parents that it´s only a matter of weeks.

Harry comes here as often as he can and I am very thankful that he spends his rare time with all of my children. We usually don’t spend much time together but when I have the opportunity I stop and listen to him telling stories or singing to them. When he notices me, he smiles at me and I return it gladly. I know that he won´t come here forever, he has a job and soon he will be gone because of promotion and recordings and tour. But he never mentioned it, when he walks me to my car after my shift.

A soft knock on my door jerks me out of my thoughts and I look up, seeing Harry in the doorway.

“Hey, can I come in or is it bad timing?” he asks politely but I don’t mind it at all.

“No, it´s fine. Come in, you alright?” I reply and watch him, as he sits down in front of my desk.

“Yes, I love being here seeing the kids smile but I noticed something…” he says concerned and I sit up straight.

“What? Is something wrong with one of the kids?” I start to panic, that I haven’t noticed. I get up and walk around the desk to get to the door, but Harry holds me back by grabbing my wrist.

“They are alright but are you too? You hardly smile and you look tired and exhausted, can I do something for you?” he asks and I meet his soft green eyes. I relax a little and lean against my desk his hand still wrapped around my wrist.

“I´m alright. Just a bit tired but nothing I haven’t handled before plus I have a free weekend ahead of me. The first one in three months” I answer and see him smiling.

“Free weekend, huh? How about…I try and make it the most relaxed weekend in your life? I just want you to feel good and we haven’t spent much time in the last weeks” he requests and I raise an eyebrow at him.

“And what are you picturing?”

“Hmm maybe me cooking some dinner for you, watching a movie, getting a massage and not worrying about anything. How does that sound?” his eyes are shimmering with hope and I chuckle. It sounds great but what if it gets really awkward? I have never been to his house or the other way round. We usually just hang out in a café or here, this is kind of a next step.

“I´d love to do that but…I don’t want it to be awkward honestly” I say and he entwines our fingers.

“It won´t, I promise” his voice is low and deep and touches me like velvet.

“Okay” I agree and he squeezes my hand lightly.

“Great, I´ll pick you up after your shift?” he sounds really excited and I grin at him while I nod in agreement.

Part V

Hey guys, 

sorry for the delay and lack of posting. I hope you are still here and enjoy my newest chapter. Please send all your love or hate, I´ll take it. 

You can still be added to the taglist for this story, if you want. Don´t be shy. 

Love, Julia xx

Taglist:

@wotamelonsugar @lanallaa @highladyofelfhame-remastered @lucky-worm @theresthingsthatwellneverknow

[blarrghe]

Shall We Not Revenge? Ch. 24

I finally wrote something!! This was going to just be a drabble, but now it’s a chapter. A very short chapter that I am posting the entirety of under the cut because it’s been so long since I wrote anything.

I recently broke my Inquisitor’s heart, and fortunately/unfortunately he and Dorian took the leap to start their relationship at pretty much the exact same time. I’ve had it in my notes to write a bit on how that affects things, so this soft bit of drabble quickly became uh,,, sad. On a lighter note, I got to make use of my extensive knowledge of curly hair physics. Ps. Shout out to @midnightprelude for giving me the push I needed to finish this thing. Sorry it got less fluffy, in senses both literary and literal... Read on AO3 or under the cut!

“Mm,” the sound Dorian’s waking mind made in response to Taren’s movement beside him was muffled by pillows at his lips. With eyes still closed he turned his head to breathe in the scent of Taren’s hair, and found it brushing up against his lips, wisping as it did in light, messy locks over Taren’s neck. Dorian shifted a little closer, hooking an arm around his torso and pulling Taren’s body up against his so that he could feel the bones of his hips press against the curve of his back. His hands clutched over his chest and then seemed naturally to drift downward, pulling his torso into place. It fit so perfectly there, pressed snugly up against his own. He leaned his head in and pushed his lips through that soft cloud of tickling, lightly pine-scented hair until they found purchase at the base of his neck, and the kiss he left there fell out of him like instinct, barely conscious and utterly natural.

“Soft.” Another murmur from his still mostly-slumbering mind tumbled out of his mouth as he nudged the delicate locks aside, as he brought a hand up to brush his fingers over the smooth section of hair that had been shaved close and patterned for the ball in Orlais. That night seemed oddly far away now, and Taren hadn’t tended to the intricate hairstyle whatsoever, but the soft fuzz left there betrayed the shortness of time, and Dorian could still feel the light bumps of texture under the stroke of his thumb, playing at his fingertips like embossed velvet.

Taren responded to his sleepy mutterings with one of his own.

“Hmm?” It came with the inflection of a question, as he turned his face and shook the loose hair from where it draped over his forehead and eyes.

“Your hair is so soft.” Dorian muttered the explanation into his neck, his nose still poking through some of it. Soft.

He felt Taren’s laugh rising up through the warm neck under his lips, lightly shaking the body his arms were hung around. The movements pulled him just a little closer to wakefulness, and a little farther away from the uninhibited musings of sleep. He was doing that thing again, he realised as he opened an eye and started to allow daylight and reality to float in, that unguarded thing. Waking up drooling and even a little sweaty - ungroomed, half naked - in another man’s bed, mumbling inarticulate compliments about the softness of hair. No wonder Taren was laughing.

“Thank you,” Taren replied between chuckles. He turned, breaking from the secure mould Dorian had made for him only to press himself back into place, his hands finding their way into his hair now, as though to compare their morning states of unkempt.

“Good morning.”

Dorian opened his other eye as Taren’s fingers delicately swept some of his own hair off his forehead, and as he came into focus, so did his thoughts. Mostly, they were pleasant; grateful observations on Taren’s full lips and bright eyes, and a more fully conscious appreciation of how good his body felt, still connected to him from belly to thigh, how comfortable. A leg shifted to wrap itself over one of his, and he couldn’t help but smile. But there was another thought, too, worming it’s way uninvited into the forefront of his mind: the nagging little voice that berated him for his naivety in being kept so close - in being seen and held and woken up with in such an unmanicured state. For a second, his blissful morning was soured by the thought that he shouldn’t really be there at all, but that he should have at least risen a little earlier, and fixed his hair.

His hair. It was getting long too, going uncared for as it had on the extended trips across the demon-ridden and war torn regions of the south. There was no one to cut hair in Skyhold - at least, no one he’d trust. For one entirely unsympathetic reason, he was beginning to regret not joining Taren on his recent excursion to free the man formerly known as Blackwall from a Val Reauex prison: it would have provided an opportunity to seek out a proper barber. He kept that thought neatly to himself; southerners never seemed to understand the importance of a well-styled appearance.

Taren’s hair tickled his nose again as he nestled deeper into the embrace, and he let his vanity fall aside without even trying to, though that little voice insisted on whispering a new question into his collection of lovestruck anxieties. How might Taren perceive his close attention to appearance? Would he find it tiresome, once the novelty of it all wore off? Look at you, it seemed to say, you’re being vain, and you aren’t even doing it well. Taren’s approach, of course, seemed only to be to keep himself cleaned and sweet smelling, without a single care being given to the rest. It suited him, but there seemed to Dorian to be a certain bravery to that which he did not possess.

But here he was, unkempt and drowsy, spending another morning where he shouldn’t, waking within arms reach of the thing he had told himself he wasn’t allowed to have. His hair was long, and without creams or pomades to keep it in check, and Taren was pushing it out if his eyes, and he was feeling a strangely comfortable uncomfortableness with all of it. Taren’s lips met his forehead, and the voice reminding him that this was a perilous position to be in quieted a little more.

“Good morning.” He returned the greeting as he let his fingers fall through Taren’s hair and graze the length of his smooth cheek, taking the moment to study the little straw coloured flecks that sparkled in the mossy green of his eyes. Dorian leaned in, pulling Taren’s chin gently with one hand and his waist in tight with the other, and kissed him deeply, morning breath be damned. Taren returned the kiss, and he eagerly invited the quickening of his heart that came with it, falling into the all-encompassing sensation of warmth that drove away all his other cares. He let his mind go back to being mostly unconscious, let it go on with uninhibited wanting and appreciation for the softness of hair, of lips, of warm skin on his. His hands moved and he kissed and kissed and rolled Taren over him and pulled and felt and squeezed. Waking up where he shouldn’t, doing that unguarded thing with his thoughts and feelings and actions, keeping the day away for just a minute longer. And Taren kissed him back, dug his hands into his back and squeezed himself into it with his eyes closed and his breath quick, until he didn’t. Two blinks, and a sigh.

Taren was positioned over him when he stopped, blankets tangled about his ankles and morning sun glowing through his wild hair. Dorian’s hands were at his waist, poised to become more than just gentle guides for his hips - ready to reprise the passion of the previous night. Taren rolled off of him, slowing things down with a quick run of his fingers through his hair, which smoothed under them but sprang back in all directions as soon as they were through. Some of the curls broke apart with his fingers, and if anything the mess only grew from the attempted taming. He moved to sit up, looking away with an expression Dorian couldn’t read, but kept his legs wound over his.  

Dorian sat up too, staying close and planting a few more kisses onto his shoulder and neck as he did, then taking his own hands up to the soft tangles sprouting from Taren’s head.

“Sorry, I… um -” Taren gave his head a shake and flashed Dorian half a smile, one that was still lopsided and warm, but sad at the edges. He wondered which weight was holding it down - there were plenty to choose from - but commented on the hair instead. He patted down a lock that had gone particularly upright, tucking it carefully behind his ear and regarding the rest with a smile that bordered on laughing.

Taren caught his amused look and the smile seemed to rise just a little higher. He grabbed a few more locks from their stray places and tried to find them homes behind his ears, but they didn’t stay. Dorian chuckled.

“What - why, what does it look like?” Taren was back to speaking through quiet laughter, and he leaned his shoulder into Dorian’s.

“Magnificent.” Dorian replied, meaning it. Chunks of hair in all directions, some lumped to the side in a cloud of not-quite curls, and some smoothed into a crushed, bent fold where his head had pressed it into his pillow overnight. Some shorter pieces near his forehead stood straight up in little spirals, and the whole coiffure had no discernible part to it, with sections tossed this way and that. It was wild, hilarious in a way and unbearably sexy in another.

“Sometimes I think I should cut it all off.” Taren joked, pulling it all back now. With a few quick flicks of his hands he’d wrangled it into a thick braid, the ends of which still splayed out in haphazard curls and waves, but of a more orderly sort. The short pieces that didn’t make it still stuck up, but for the most part the wildness had been tamed.

“Don’t you dare.” Dorian tugged gently at the braid, pushing Taren’s head toward his own for another kiss. The kiss that Taren returned was full and warm, but as he pulled away the edges of his mouth were reluctant again.

Dorian frowned. “Something on your mind, Inquisitor?” He said it teasingly, hoping for an eye-roll and a playful reprimand, instead he received another sigh.

“Just a lot of work to do.”

Maybe bringing the title into the picture was the wrong choice, as Taren seemed now even more ready to jump up and begin his usual unceasing bustle about the fortress.

“Of course, no rest for the wicked.” Dorian kept his tone teasing, and nipped at his neck with sensual emphasis for wicked.

Taren didn’t take to the opportunity, however, and shuffled his legs out and his body up into still more of an upright seat. He kissed Dorian tenderly, once on the cheek and then softly on the lips.

“I have to get going.” He said apologetically, something dark and unreadable again behind his eyes. Dorian ceased his attempts at temptation and let him rise, watching him as he made his way to the folded piles of clothes on his dresser and hastily threw some on. The drab beiges and browns of wool and leather were a disappointing sight after the glow of tan skin and artful tattoos, but he tried not to let it show on his face.

“If you ever take a break, you know where to find me.” He said, trying to sound casual despite the flutter of his heart. The rejection felt shattering in a way that was utterly unreasonable and almost certainly unfair, but the sneering little voice that had been silenced under soft messy hair and impulsive kisses was screaming at him now,  and it was all he could do to keep it from biting into the tone of his speech as he tried to say something gentlemanly and take his leave.

It isn’t that, he told himself once he’d settled into his own work in a quiet alcove of the library, carrying on a debate with the suspicious voice in his head that insisted that whatever was wrong, he must surely be the cause. It had taken him the better part of the morning to weed out his selfish reactions from the truth. There was plenty to choose from besides his breath or hair or his being an Altus, plenty to worry an Inquisitor which had nothing at all to do with him. The most genuine person he had ever met was telling him that it was the work, and who was he to make it all about himself, anyway?

He sighed, rereading a sentence in the dusty tome before him for the seventeenth time, words tangling about like Taren’s morning hair. Hair that was messy and soft and sexy and wild, but wilder, he knew, because of how he had spent his night tossing and turning in his sleep, restless with some nightmare that crept into their bed even after he woke.

He shook his head at the jumbled words and runes that refused to make sense before him, letting the unhelpful little voice get one last word in. You are good for sex and excitement, not this, it said. You have never opened your heart to anyone, why should he trust you?

[jazzyishere]

This is a Velvet Worm Appreciation Post

Look at him 🙂

He shoots slime out of his face 🙂

[cinnaminsvga]

👻 anniversary raffle 👻

OH WORM... IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR... THIS DUMB BLOG IS OFFICIALLY 2 YEARS OLD AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS... actually it doesn’t mean anything at all but I just want to do a little something to show my appreciation for all of you. So many of you have supported me since the creation of this blog, and I’ll never stop being thankful for all your love and kindness. In times of trials and stress, I always find that the community here has been a saving and calming grace for me, which is why I wanna give back to all of you to show my appreciation!!

:: description ::

Like I said above, this is my way of giving back to the thousands of people who have been following all this time. I will be writing fics, drabbles, and SM!AUs for three lucky followers that will be drawn randomly through a raffle generator.

:: rules ::

You have to be following me! The only reason that I’m doing this raffle in the first place is because I want to give back to my followers, so it’s only going to be open to them. It doesn’t matter how long you have stuck around with me, because I probably love you anyway.

To enter the raffle, you must like or reblog this post, with each counting as one entry. Only a maximum of 5 reblogs are allowed, for a total of 6 maximum entries per person. 

General rules regarding what cannot be requested for the prizes are as follows: no underage, pwp, rape/abuse/infidelity, or overly kinky themes. I reserve the right to decline any other themes and plotlines that are not listed above if they make me uncomfortable to write about. 

MxM and MxReader fics are available, including poly ships (although I will admit that I’m not 100% good at writing those.) I write primarily for Bangtan, but groups such as Seventeen, NCT, Red Velvet, and more are also up for discussion. 

The giveaway will end on April 15 at 6PM PST. Winners will be notified on April 16 at 12PM PST and will have 24 hours to respond or else their prize will be forfeited.

:: prizes :: 

There will be 3 winners in total. 

FIRST PRIZE: A choice of either a 10-15K one shot OR a 20-25 part SM!AU according to your desire. You can control the ending as much as you like, including all polls that may occur if you choose an SM!AU. 

SECOND PRIZE: A choice of either a 3-5K one shot OR a 10-15 part SM!AU according to your desire. Just like the first prize, you can control the entirety of the fic’s conception.

THIRD PRIZE: A choice of either a 500-1K drabble OR a 3 part text series according to your desire. Themes/plot of this prize will not be subject to your entire control, so a short drabble prompt list shall be sent to you wherein you will be able to choose which prompt that I will be basing the fic around. 

If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to hit up my askbox or tweet me through @/agustszee!! I’m so excited to see where my blog goes starting now, since I’ve grown so much over the past two years of me writing on this blue hellsite. Thank you for being a part of my wonderful community, and I hope you know that I love you all very much. Love, Zee.

[wickymicky]

all girl groups and Pentagon ONLY ahahaha

YEAH

i mean i do like some other boy groups lol, and i’m sure i’ll find some more, but like... the feelings i feel when im listening to pentagon are pretty similar to the feelings i feel listening to my favorite girl groups. just like... safety lol... familiarity...

i think the reason i tend to like a typical girl group song more than a typical boy group song is like... hmmm... it has to do with the presentation and the atmosphere i get from the song, i think. and okay here’s my hot take about why girl groups tend to have more interesting and varied music than boy groups in my personal opinion.....

it has to do with misogyny. i know that doesn’t make sense at first, since wouldn’t that mean it’d be the other way around? wouldn’t that mean that girl groups get the same thing every time? well no, see.... look at this from the perspective of a record label executive who is an old straight dude. boy groups are marketed mostly to straight girls. that’s the demographic they have mostly in mind when they plan boy group debuts and comebacks. more goes into it than that often, i know that, but that’s the majority of the audience they have in mind. but are girl groups marketed towards straight boys mostly? well, they certainly are often marketed towards straight men, yes, but i think they have to appeal to girls too. toxic masculinity often makes straight dudes feel like they cant listen to pop music for fear of seeming not masculine. idk if that’s the same in korea, but like, south korea is a capitalist country, and this is an issue with capitalism, so probably. 

so yes, you will get an audience if you market your pop group to straight men, but it won’t be as big as the straight girl audience for boy groups. so what companies do is they market their groups so that they’re appealing to men and women, so even if they have them do really cute or sexy concepts, they try to make the songs also have an element of like.... either like “girl power” or like... concepts that arent about love at all. cause think about it, in the mind of a heterosexual business exec, a large part of the audience that they’re shooting for with girl groups are gonna be people who aren’t sexually attracted to the members. so they have to vary things up a little bit more and make things with all sorts of different appealing features, and different groups attempt to solve this in different ways. 

boy groups on the other hand are marketed towards straight women, and specifically teenage girls, who ARE gonna be more inclined to be attracted to the members. so, the concepts the biggest groups do are often fairly... same-y... because of misogyny. if something is meant to be For Girls........... i think you probably get where i’m going with this. 

this isn’t always the case of course, and it’s probably been changing a lot more recently. bts are huge enough that they can kinda do whatever, and they have more appeal to them than just how attractive and “cool” they are. ateez are a group that are very much marketed towards people who will find them hot, but there are aspects in the music that are more interesting than just another run of the mill dance-based boy group. and pentagon.... watch a video like humph and just try to tell me you think it was made to make them seem cool, attractive, hot, sexy... that song was not made with the explicit intent of having them be lust objects for teenage girls, and it shows. they still are, of course, but what i’m saying is that because that isn’t the focus, i feel more comfortable. i don’t feel like the way the song is presented is just screaming at me “WORSHIP THESE MEN. WORSHIP THESE MEN. WORSHIP THESE MEN.” i don’t wanna be told what to think about something, so if i get the impression that that’s what a company is trying to sell me on, i’m kinda checked out and i can’t get fully into it. i don’t get that with pentagon. it is still screaming marketing at me, i mean it’s a pop song after all and that’s kind of just how the industry works no matter what country its from, but its a bit more layered. the message i receive from a song like humph is less “WORSHIP THESE MEN” and more “FEEL NOSTALGIC FOR SIMPLER TIMES, THINK ABOUT HOW THESE MEN ARE HAVING FUN, THINK ABOUT HOW THESE MEN WROTE AND PRODUCED THIS SONG AND WHAT THAT SAYS ABOUT THEM AS PEOPLE, HAVE A GOOD TIME :)” haha

and i do wanna clarify, i’m not actually into aaaaalll girl groups. there are certainly girl groups that give me the message “WORSHIP THESE WOMEN” and i’m not really into that either. a lot of girl crush concepts are really hit or miss for me, and overly cutesy songs are too. and like, don’t even get me started on concepts that are meant to be “innocent” and “pure”, that’s my least favorite shit. but like, even though i dislike that concept, i still kinda like gfriend as a group, partially cause theyre moving a bit away from that concept, and partially because ive seen what theyre like as people and i think theyre funny lol. but yeah, a group like blackpink... i like the members but their songs scream “WORSHIP THESE WOMEN” and it just takes me out of it. i cant help but think about the marketing there. other massively popular groups like twice and red velvet dont give me that impression at all though. often, i feel like the mood of the song is what’s being sold to me, rather than simply the members’ looks. those are still of course being marketed to us, but its not the only thing i have to latch onto. also, there are lots of different ways to present someone’s attractiveness and stuff, but that’s something for another post. 

anyway, no matter what i said about who groups are marketed to, i like that us lgbts just worm our way in there and like all sorts of groups, and often for reasons other than the executives had in mind lmao. a lot of us try hard not to actually idolize these idols too much, even though their companies really want us to. okay this post is too long now, but i hope yall appreciated my galaxy brain hot take haha

[amaanogawa]

don’t you know, we were meant to see this through [1/4]

pairing: kurodai rating: T (later chapters to contain explicit content)

warnings: major character injury

“Kuroo often thinks about how the smallest decisions can lead to life changing events, be it cosmic energies or the product of a simple coincidence.”

Daichi loses his way. Kuroo realizes that he would follow Daichi regardless because after all, not all those who wander are lost.

word count: 2,853

also available on ao3

Kuroo doesn’t know if he believes in fate, but he does believe it was something cosmic that led him to Sawamura Daichi that one dreary evening in the middle of the pouring July rain.

They had quite literally ran into each other, chest smacking into chest, and Daichi had tipped backwards and Kuroo had reached out to grab him purely out of instinct. That was how they found themselves tangled together, soaking wet in the middle of a desolate street in the city of Tokyo.

“…Sawamura?” Kuroo had murmured, blinking rain out of his eyes, his fingertips feeling fidgety on the small of Daichi’s back.

“…oh my god, Kuroo? I didn’t even recognize you, your hair-”

And that was it, that was all it took for Sawamura Daichi, former captain of their rival team to come back into his life. Kuroo doesn’t want to talk about the next three long years that they spent skirting around each other, both so hopelessly oblivious that it made everyone around them sick, when all of Kuroo’s brain power was spent on reliving the accidental brush of Daichi’s fingers against his and the dimple in Daichi’s left cheek that appears only when he laughs in just the right way. It was three years of that before Daichi had banged on his door in the middle of the night, grabbed Kuroo by the shirt and kissed him like the fate of the world depended on it- and maybe it did, in a way, because if Daichi hadn’t kissed him all those years ago Kuroo thinks the world as he knows it now wouldn’t even exist.

It exists in the form of Daichi, hair mussed from sleep, soft around the edges wearing only Kuroo’s threadbare Nekoma t-shirt. In the way he stirs his coffee as he reviews his papers before an important meeting. In the mole tucked away like a secret in the crease of his eyelid.  

(It’s only visible if he closes his eyes for you, and that only happens when he’s sleeping or leaning in for a kiss.)

In the most straightforward way possible, all that this jargon serves to communicate is that Kuroo is hopelessly, irrevocably, overwhelmingly in love with Sawamura Daichi, and the only reason that it is so is because they had coincidentally bumped into each other two years after they first met in high school. It means that if Kuroo had lingered just a couple of minutes longer at the grocery store, or if he had taken another route home than the one he took, or maybe if he had been stopped at a crosswalk, his life would be wildly different than it is today.

The thought is too scary for Kuroo to think about most days, so it’s all he can do to chalk it up to some sort of cosmic energy and file it away in the back of his head. But sometimes it still manages to worm its way out despite all of Kuroo’s effort to keep it contained, especially when Daichi falls asleep against his chest and he’s running his fingers absentmindedly up and down the curve of Daichi’s spine wondering where he’d be without all of this.

So it was easy, really, one of the easiest decisions that Kuroo has ever made in his 27 years, to stop by the jewellery store on his way home from work and purchase a golden wedding ring with the date that they met again engraved on the inside. What can he say? Kuroo is nothing if not a romantic. That doesn’t mean that proposing wasn’t nerve wracking. Kuroo was so nervous he had spilt his drink all over Daichi’s lap at the restaurant, and then he had tripped and wiped out on the pavement on their way back to the car, and then for the piéce de rèsistance, he went and dropped the ring box when he pulled it out of his pocket as they were stargazing at a scenic lookout just outside of the city. Daichi had laughed, and then he had cried, and then he dove into Kuroo’s arms holding on a bit too tight as he choked out yes you idiot, yes.

The year following that wasn’t as stressful as most newly engaged couples claim it to be because to be quite honest, Kuroo and Daichi had very little to do with the wedding planning. Suga and Yachi looked like they were having a field day with it, and Kuroo can’t say it was the wedding he was looking forward to. It was the marriage, the waking up to Daichi every day for the rest of his life that he couldn’t wait for. He was sure Daichi felt the same, especially when Sugawara would call Daichi with a whirlwind of a meltdown over lilies or peonies for the tabletops? Velvet trim or silk? And Daichi would sigh, give Kuroo a tired look before repeating for the nth time that day that it doesn’t matter, Suga. No, I mean, of course it matters but- yes of course I appreciate your efforts, lilies sound great and silk would be just fine.

Kuroo often thinks about how the smallest decisions can lead to life changing events, be it cosmic energies or the product of a simple coincidence, like when he left the grocery store at just the right time for him to reunite with Daichi all those years ago. Or on this particular day just three months shy of their wedding, the choice to take 5 minutes longer than they usually do in leaving their apartment because Kuroo just had to pull Daichi in for one, or two, or maybe three extra kisses that morning. To decide that he can drop Daichi off at work because he has to pick something up at the post office before going to work himself.

To glance over at Daichi in the passenger seat as they drive through an intersection. To see Daichi quietly singing along to the song on the radio, cheeks pink, tie just a little crooked, fingers intertwined with Kuroo’s own.

To hear the sound of a blaring horn, watch as a car comes barreling towards them over Daichi’s shoulder. To pull Daichi in close just on instinct alone, a yell barely leaving his lips, throwing an arm over Daichi’s head in a desperate act of protection.

To feel the sickening impact, the crushing of glass, the ear shattering screaming of metal twisting against metal.

To open bleary eyes a minute or ten or maybe even years later, disoriented and trying to wipe something warm and sticky out of his vision so that he could see. Calling Daichi’s name with a failing voice.

Somehow every decision had led to them to this, lying broken amidst a smoking wreckage before everything goes dark.

—

“Kuroo. Please, you have to rest.”

“How can I- not when Daichi’s- god, Sugawara. Daichi-”

The incessant beeping sounds filling the halls of the hospital is driving Kuroo crazy. He feels crazy, like all of this is a hallucination or maybe a fever dream. Just this morning they were fine. They were happy and engaged and fine and now-

“How could this have happened?” Kuroo croaks, rubbing his face with bandaged hands. “I don’t understand, Sugawara. How-”

“You’re still in shock. You need to stay put and rest. I’ll stay with him, Kuroo. Listen to me. He’s going to wake up.”

It’s hard to allow himself to be comforted by those words when Sugawara is sheet pale, when his eyes are red rimmed from crying and his voice shakes as he speaks. He’d been at Kuroo’s bedside when Kuroo had woken up less than an hour ago, groaning from the immense pain in his head creating starbursts behind his eyelids.

“Kuroo!” Sugawara had cried, before wrapping his arms around Kuroo’s shoulders and squeezing the breath right out from Kuroo’s lungs. The next few minutes were a blur as Sugawara tried to get Kuroo up to speed on the situation, and even though Kuroo could very clearly see Sugawara’s lips moving right there in front of him, the sound of his voice wasn’t processing in Kuroo’s mind. Everything was slowing down around him, the world not feeling real, none of it feeling real. It’s not real.

Accident.

Concussion.

Minor injuries.

Daichi.

He blinked. That was a word he recognized.

Surgery.

Heart stopped.

No oxygen.

Brain damage.

Those weren’t.

“I’m sorry, what?” Kuroo had croaked, feeling his lip split and tasting copper in his mouth.

Tears roll one by one onto Sugawara’s cheeks as he draws his brows together anxiously. He takes Kuroo’s hands in his own, holds them tight, as if trying his best to keep some part of Kuroo together. As if to give him something real to hold on to before his entire world burns down around him and he is left there in the ashes, in the middle of nothing but cinders and what he has lost.

“They don’t know if he’s going to wake up, Kuroo.”

—

It takes another day before the doctors sign his discharge papers and allow him to go home. Not that he does, because home is lying in a hospital bed three floors above his own in the Intensive Care Unit. A nurse wheels him into the elevator, then down the hallway and into Daichi’s room, and as she draws apart the curtains a broken sob manages to escape his lips before Kuroo covers his mouth with his fingers, effectively muffling the agony that’s screaming to get out.

Daichi is lying so still on the bed that Kuroo wouldn’t be able to tell he was breathing if it weren’t for the monitor screen lit up next to him, beeping rhythmically to Daichi’s heart. He’s hooked up to what seems like a hundred different machines all clicking and whirring, working hard to keep Daichi alive through the tube in his mouth. His face is mottled with angry red-purple bruises and bandages, his head wrapped in a stark white gauze.

“Oh, babe.” Kuroo whispers, eyes watery. He slides his hand into Daichi’s, and after five years together it should feel familiar to him but at the moment it just doesn’t. Nothing feels familiar and nothing makes sense.

“Wake up Daichi. Wake up, please. I’m begging you.” He murmurs desperately, pressing his lips to Daichi’s ice cold fingers. Daichi lays silent in front of him and when he thinks about how mere hours ago he had been happily singing along to the radio Kuroo truly can’t tell if Daichi is the one who needs to wake up or if it’s him.

Later that day Sugawara brings Kuroo clothes and toiletries and food, the last of which goes untouched for the first day of his discharge and half of the second.  When Sugawara arrives with more food after he gets off work and discovers the previous meal still full in it’s unopened container, he grabs Kuroo by the back of his collar and shakes him with a frightening glare, tears prickling at the edge of his eyes.

“Listen to me. You can eat by yourself or I can knock you over and force it down your throat, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you do this to yourself when he’s still fighting like hell to come back to us.”

This is the Sugawara that Daichi has loved since they first met in high school nearly a decade ago now, the reason why Daichi chuckles or sometimes sighs in exasperation before inevitably giving in anyways, with a shake of his head and a vague explanation of it’s Suga; you’ll understand his might some day. And Kuroo does now. He’s always known that Sugawara is a beast beneath his layers of beauty, has feared his whip sharp grin that somehow serves as both a reassurance and a warning, often at the same time. But this is different. It’s him waiting all alone as his best friend is taken in for an emergency surgery after a horrible accident, and then coming out the other side strong enough to take care of his best friend’s fiancé as well. It’s a hurricane of a man who won’t take no for an answer, not from him and certainly not from Daichi, and for that Kuroo is grateful.

“He’s going to wake up, right?” Kuroo whispers, unsure if he is asking himself or Sugawara, whose eyes soften as he moves his hand from Kuroo’s collar to his back.

“He will. And when he does he sure as hell won’t be happy to see that you’ve gotten even bonier than you already were before, you damn string bean. Eat.”

—

Kenma arrives on the third day even though he’s struggling through his Master’s degree in a university nearly a 3 hour train ride from Tokyo. He can only stay for a single night, but he hugs Kuroo with trembling arms and doesn’t say much else. He can get Kuroo to eat when even Sugawara’s nagging can’t, knows what will get Kuroo’s appetite going during the direst of situations. He curls up on the recliner next to Daichi’s bed and doesn’t fuss or offer empty reassurances that he knows Kuroo doesn’t want to hear.

“Thanks, Kenma.” Kuroo says later that day, in the middle of their comfortable silence.

Kenma’s eyes dart over from the screen of his 3DS, eyebrows tilting up a fraction of a degree. “Stupid Kuro.” He says, and then nothing at all.

Kuroo gets it. He and Kenma have never needed to say what they mean for the other to hear it, and oftentimes it’s more comforting to know what someone wants to communicate before they even utter the words out loud.

Stupid Kuro, get it together.

Stupid Kuro, be strong.

Stupid Kuro, take care of yourself.

“Yea.” Kuroo says quietly, sighing and laying his cheek against the back of Daich’s hand in his own, trying to gather the strength to continue for as long as Daichi needs him to.

—

By the sixth day, the doctors have come in and taken the tube out of Daichi’s throat after confirming that he is breathing on his own, which is a good sign. But they still cannot be certain if he will wake up or even if he does, what kind of deficits he may present with.

Nearly everyone in their social circle has come and gone at least once, offering their heartfelt condolences as if Daichi was already dead and Kuroo is losing his mind. They mean well, but the fridge in the family room can’t possibly hold anymore casseroles and Lev’s sister keeps bringing multiple a day and Kuroo doesn’t even likecasseroles. Daichi used to eat them when she brought them to their meet-ups, but now Daichi can’t eat them and the other patients’ family members are starting to grumble about the sheer number of casseroles occupying the community fridge.

“It’s a disaster,” Kuroo tells Daichi, as he runs an anxious hand through his hair. “She brought a dessert casserole, babe. I googled it because I refused to believe it was actually a thing but apparently it is a thing. This world is a terrifying place.”

He fills in what Daichi would say if he were awake, probably something along the lines of well at least she can make actual meals and not just nachos. Besides, casseroles are really convenient.

“Don’t lie to yourself. You love my nachos.”

I do, but they’re not a meal and you eat them as one way too often. How are you still so damn pointy everywhere with all the junk you eat?

“Hey now, let’s not get all feisty Sawamura-kun. Don’t be hurtful.”

…head…

“Head?” Kuroo blinks, confused. It takes him a moment to realize that it hadn’t been his imaginary Daichi that had spoken, because suddenly the hand in his is curling over his fingertips and Kuroo looks down in alarm, eyes wide.

“…head hurts,” Daichi groans through cracked lips, his voice hoarse.

“Oh my god. Daichi. Somebody, get a nurse, please!”

“Ow. Please don’t yell. My head hurts.”

“Sorry! Sorry.” Kuroo wipes at his watery eyes with the back of his hand, heart pounding. Daichi is awake. He’s awake and he’s talking and he isn’t displaying any obvious signs of brain damage and the world is finally starting to make sense again. “Daichi. It’s Tetsu. I’m here, baby.”

Daichi’s eyes finally flutter open, and he squints around the room before eventually resting his line of sight on Kuroo.

“Tetsu…?” He slurs, sounding dazed.

“Yes. I’m here. I’m here.”

It’s then that Daichi opens his eyes all the way and looks at Kuroo properly for the first time in what feels like an eternity. Kuroo is so relieved to just see those eyes again that he almost misses the way Daichi is looking at him; not happily, not lovingly, but confused.

There’s not a spark of recognition in his eyes as Daichi stares at him, and Kuroo can feel his heart dropping into the pit of his stomach. He knows what’s coming before Daichi even speaks.

“…who are you?”

[mikelumsden]

Interview: ALAN LICHT

We met on the morning of June 4, 2017, after his performance at Montreal’s Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, with Kristin Thora Haraldsdottir and Vicky Mettler.

***

ML: Last night, we talked about your Minimalist Top Ten lists [published in Halana magazine starting in 1996]. You said they had kind of taken on a life of their own.

AL: Yeah. People have done blogs where they post the albums, or links to them on Youtube. It's a little bit different, because I had to do a lot of digging to track those things down. Even when I wrote that article, I probably didn’t own the actual artefact of every album. It was either a CD reissue or someone had taped it. Now, some of them I have been able to track down, and a lot of them get reissued on vinyl too. It's a different era now where you can actually read this thing and actually listen to all the albums, whereas when I wrote it, it would have taken quite a bit of doing to actually hear the stuff. Like the Henry Flynt cassette “You Are My Everlovin” -- it got reissued a few years later, but before that it would have been virtually impossible. I only heard it because Donald Miller, the guitarist in Borbetomagus, had it. He played it and copied it for me. That was really the way I heard a lot of that stuff, someone copying it. Like Tony Conrad's “Outside the Dream Syndicate.” Originally that was a tape of a tape of a tape I got from someone who had gotten it from Phil Milstein, who ran the Velvet Underground Appreciation Society.

ML: Because that only came out on CD after you wrote that list?

AL: It came out maybe the year before, but it was sort of an encouraging sign, the CD reissue. It was a pretty unlikely record to be reissued at all. That was the great thing about CDs when they came out - it's a new format, maybe people will buy it this time around.

ML: You wrote about Tony Conrad. You've interviewed him?

AL: I interviewed Tony - this is kind of a long story. The long version is - I interviewed him but it was sort of after one failed attempt to interview him. That was for the piece I did on Theater of Eternal Music that ran in Forced Exposure in 1990. I was kind of researching that for a couple years. Tony was giving a presentation of his videos in New York and I introduced myself to him. I called him up and had no idea of the whole feud over the tapes between him and La Monte [Young], and that opened a can of worms, and so I didn't end up interviewing him for that article. A year or so later, while I was still in college, I had met this guy Neil Strauss. He later went on to write this book called "The Game".

ML: The same Neil Strauss?

AL: The same Neil Strauss who wrote this bestselling book about, like, picking up chicks. I met him in college. He turned out to be an experimental music enthusiast and he was getting involved in starting to write for magazines. In 1989, he pitched an idea of doing an article about minimalist composers now, and "where are they now," to Option magazine, which was the big experimental music magazine of the day, and they went for it. We split it up. I interviewed Charlemagne Palestine and Tony Conrad, and he interviewed Phill Niblock and Glenn Branca.

My interview with Charlemagne was kind of a disaster. That's one that lives on on the web, because he was kind of drunk, and went off on this whole rant about being excluded from the "big four" of minimalism, or whatever.

But then Tony - I had a very long conversation with. He was a little more amenable to talking about his own music than talking about La Monte. And that was right when he was starting to do Early Minimalism, kind of around the time of the first performances of that. He was doing it in New Music America and some festivals in Europe. Neil had seen him do it in, I think, Ars Electronica. He had taped part of it and played the tape for me. I was totally blown away by it. This was years before the CD of Early Minimalism came out.

I had heard that Charlemagne was getting back into music at that point too, which he was, but it was still very sporadic. Because of CDs he got more into it in the mid-90s than he was at that point. You gotta say, in 1989, hardly anybody remembered these guys as musicians. Charlemagne had his heyday in New York in the seventies, and in the eighties he didn't do music at all. Sort of the same with Tony, he had done the stuff with La Monte and John Cale in the sixties, and in the seventies he was doing a little bit, but not a lot.

ML: Because he was mostly doing film?

AL: He was teaching film, and that was mostly what he was working on. Although it seems he was kind of working on music on his own, there was just no public outlet for it.

ML: You mentioned Phill Niblock, who's also been featured on a Minimalist Top Ten list. Did you work with him?

AL: I've played Phill's music a number of different times. He has one piece for e-bowed guitars, and I'm on the recording [“G2,44+/x2,” Moikai, 2002] that Jim O'Rourke's label put out, and I've done it live a number of times. And I've played at Experimental Intermedia. I know him pretty well actually.

ML: When you were writing that article, you were working in film distribution?

AL: I was a film student at this point, when I'm talking to all these guys. After I got out of college, I got a job at a film distribution company. Film was an interest but music was always the main interest. I'd contemplated majoring in music, and could never get my head around music theory. Most of the stuff I was working on didn't need to be notated in that way. Actually, the composition teacher I had as a freshman in college was Annea Lockwood, who does a lot of experimental music. Funnily enough, she was actually very strict about rules of harmony.

ML: We were also talking about Kelly Reichardt. You said that you introduced her to Will Oldham. I love his acting in her film “Old Joy.”

AL: I had a number of friends in common with Kelly. She knows a lot of people in the music scene. I got to know her that way, and in fact, I even got her a job at the film distribution company I was working at at one point. I think after I left, she actually worked there full time for a while. Will was living in New York at one point in the late nineties, around when “I See a Darkness” [Palace Records, 1999] came out. I think I introduced them. We'd done this film series at Tonic and we showed “River of Grass.” I don't think Will knew it, and at the screening I introduced the two of them. Then he did the score for “Ode,” this Super 8 movie Kelly did because she had one script that was in turnaround for years and years. She said, forget it, I'll make this shorter movie on my own. Will did the score for that, and then she cast him in “Old Joy.”

ML: And then Yo La Tengo did the score for “Old Joy.”

AL: Kelly is pretty good friends with all of them. And this guy Smokey Hormel is sitting in with Yo La Tengo on that score. Smokey is married to this woman who did lights for Sonic Youth and Nirvana and lots of bands, who is also a good friend of mine. It's one circle of people.

ML: We were also talking last night about “Calvin Johnson Has Ruined Rock for an Entire Generation,” [1994] your solo record on Tom Scharpling’s label 18 Wheeler. With that, and the Love Child and Run On records, how did you fit with the whole New Jersey/New York scene in the nineties? How did you end up dedicating one of the tracks on “Rabbi Sky” [Siltbreeze, 1999] to James McNew of Yo La Tengo?

AL:  I think the dedication to James is because that track is using an MXR Blue Box, which is an octave fuzz pedal, and James really liked that pedal. I guess it just reminded me of Phill [Niblock]'s music, so that's probably why.

ML: That kind of thick sound.

AL: Yeah. Now, the music scene… Tom [Scharpling] and I, and this guy named Jim Romeo, were all from New Jersey. They were from a little different part of NJ than I was. Jim Romeo - this is funny because it does all kind of tie together - was my roommate when I first moved to Hoboken.

He moved into a place in Hoboken that had been lived in by these guys that were friends with a guy named Ken Katkin, who put out the first Love Child single [“Know It’s Alright,” Trash Flow, 1989]. These friends of his kind of abandoned this apartment, I think, and Jim moved in. It was super cheap rent. The total rent of the apartment was four hundred fifty dollars, and there were two of us. Even in 1990 that was unheard of.

One of the guys that lived there, Eric [Fischer], went on to become the road manager for the Stooges. He also shot a video of Love Child, the only real video we made, for the song “Sofa,” using Pixelvision.

Jim moved in there and was looking for a roommate. He had just started working at this booking agency that Bob Lawton ran. They booked Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, and so forth. The way he got that job was because he somehow knew somebody in Big Dipper, and I think they were booking Big Dipper at that point. Bob would have known them from the New England scene. Anyway, I was Jim’s roommate, and Tom was Jim’s best friend from New Jersey. Tom actually worked at this weird music store in Summit, which was the town next to the town I grew up in. Once or twice I kind of stopped in and said hi.

ML: I’ve heard him talk about that sheet music store. I think that’s where he and Jon Wurster would do these telephone calls to each other before they had “The Best Show” on WFMU.

AL: So that was kind of the connection. He would go see Love Child. He was a fan. He did the fanzine 18 Wheeler and was starting to put out some records. I don’t remember the genesis of it, whether he said, “if you want to do something let me know.” I was kind of fooling around in the rehearsal space with the guitar cable through distortion pedals and getting feedback, but also with the delay pedal getting this rhythm to it too. That’s actually what Tom liked. He said, “It’s got the pulse.” I think Suicide was probably the influence, like Martin Rev’s drum machine.

ML: We were talking about the new record [“Currents,” VDSQ, 2015]. This is the first of yours I’ve heard that is acoustic.

AL: It’s the only one that’s acoustic. I’ve played acoustic in my house a little bit. I started off playing a Yamaha classical guitar and then I didn’t own an acoustic guitar until 2009 or so. It’s a pretty big gap. The guitar I was playing last night, I bought before I had an actual acoustic. It’s an acoustic-electric that I bought in 2005.

It was something I only really did at home. All the stuff I played last night was originally worked up in my bedroom, not really knowing what I would do with it. Over the years I realized I had enough things to make an album. I started thinking about the things I could rework. The third piece I played last night was an example of that, something I wrote towards the end of Run On. I had post-rock in mind when I was writing it, but I never did anything with it then. Then I reworked it as a solo guitar piece for this. Some of the other ones –- I started playing guitar like that more once I started playing in Lee Ranaldo and the Dust. We were touring a lot, and then I would spend more time at home just playing guitar because I was more used to playing guitar everday from touring, and also I wasn’t so concerned about finding other ways to make money in between.

ML: You’ve mentioned Keith Richards as an influence on some of the new songs. I was wondering about Steve Gunn.

AL: I know him. In fact, he toured a little bit on a bill with the Lee Ranaldo band. We did a bunch of shows together and I guess I had met him a little before that. There was one bill with [John] Truscinski – their duo played. Apparently we were both at this talent show at somebody’s house, which I remember doing but don’t really remember him. He’s been up in Brooklyn for a while. He and Steve Shelley and I just played as a trio at this benefit concert for Bruce Langhorne. We did one piece from the soundtrack to the Hired Hand and one from the Dylan soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

The other influence is Michael Hedges. He was on Windham Hill in the 80s. He was one of these guys who would do tapping stuff. There was one record called “Aerial Boundaries,” the second album. I heard that when I was a teenager and really liked it. He was a really great guitarist at that point. I listened to him again and some of the stuff on “Currents” is kind of from listening to Michael Hedges again, and translating that into more of the Steve Reich thing.

ML: The percussive pulse that comes through.

AL: Right, and the piece “Aerial Boundaries” really sounds like Steve Reich. Kristin [Thora Haraldsdottir]’s piece “Currents” is a little like that too. I don’t know if she’s listened to Michael Hedges. I sent the music to Steve Lowenthal from [record label] VDSQ and we met up to talk about doing a release, and he got the Steve Reich influence right away. I was really encouraged by that.

ML: Earlier, we were talking about Will Oldham, which made me think of his frequent collaborator Emmett Kelly. Have you heard the record Emmett put out with Jim White as the Double [“Dawn of the Double”, In the Red, 2016]?

AL: I wrote the liner notes for it! (Laughs.) So I’ve heard it, and heard them play live before I heard the record.

ML: My first thought was it could grab a spot in the next top ten list.

AL: It’s definitely within that. It was amazing to see it live when I didn’t know what to expect. I was talking to Jim beforehand and he said it was dance music. I didn’t really understand what that would mean coming from those two guys. I think they actually did it for a choreographer. Setting a groove, and keeping the groove going as long as possible. I’ve met Emmett a number of times and talked about doing something together, but it hasn’t happened yet. I sat in on one secret show Will was playing with Jim and played a couple of songs. Maybe “Cinnamon Girl”. That was a long time ago, maybe around 2000.

ML: One of the things your writing pointed me to was connecting the blues with minimalism. I was thinking of how you collaborated with Tetuzi Akiyama [“Tomorrow Outside Tomorrow,” Editions Mego, 2016], who really explores those genres on “Don’t Forget to Boogie” [Idea, 2003]. How did you come to collaborate?

AL: There’s probably two parts to that. Tetuzi, I met in New York. He came and played at Tonic and this guy – Toshio Kajiwara – was DJing the basement of Tonic every week, and I guess he knew Tetuzi. He was like, you should really play with this guy, and that was unusual for him – ordinarily he wouldn't suggest people to play with. I took it pretty seriously and saw him play, around 2004. I forget if “Don’t Forget to Boogie” was out then or not. He gave me a CD-R of it, so maybe it hadn’t quite come out yet. There’s one track, “Fast Machine”, and he said, “that track is dedicated to you”. He said that he and Taku Sugimoto used to listen to “Sink the Aging Process” which probably inspired the dedication. On the track he’s just playing one chord for ten minutes.

That record came out, and Oren Ambarchi put out “Triste” [Idea, 2003] on the same label, and the record that became “YMCA” [Family Vineyard, 2009] was also originally going to be on that label before it stopped production. I suggested to the two guys that we do a tour of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, where we would each organize one country. Both those guys dropped the ball, but I did get a tour of New Zealand together – four shows for the trio, then Oren left and Tetuzi and I did a few other pick-up shows for another week. We got one recording from the tour that was really good, which became a 3” CD called “Willow Weep and Moan” [Antiopic, 2006]. That name, “Blues Deceiver”, that’s Tetuzi’s. I can definitely hear the blues influence in there, but it’s probably a little more his thing than mine.

La Monte always talks about the blues being a big influence in this kind of thing -– like the dominant seventh, which is an interval he favors, comes out of the blues, to him. A lot of his pieces from the early sixties are called “Sunday Morning Blues”, “Tuesday Morning Blues”, which he claims are extremely slow moving blues chord progressions. It’s a little hard to actually ascertain when you listen to them, but I'll take his word for it. I know he did one sound installation where he had a chords made with sine tones in the room. It was a twelve-day thing that was structured as a  twelve bar blues, and each day was equivalent to one bar-- the chord only changed (or not) each day. A mind-blowing idea.

Maybe I mentioned Junior Kimbrough [in the Minimalist Top Ten lists]. There was a movie of the book “Deep Blues”, a documentary. That was, I think, before he had records out, but he’s in the movie. It’s a ten-minute drone thing. I remember seeing it and thinking, wow, who was that guy? I realized he was the same guy when his records started to come out.

ML: Now, Taku Sugimoto -- I love some of his recordings, like “Saritote” [Saritote Disk, 2007] and “Opposite” [hatNOIR, 1998].

AL: I don’t know his records very well, but I saw him play live in Switzerland with [trombonist] Radu Malfatti. It was this venue where I was playing the next night. I was hanging out backstage and Taku and Radu were playing a game of chess. One of them would make a move, and five minutes later the other would make a move. Then, they go out on stage, and of course, one guy would play one note, and five minutes later the other guy would play one note. I was like, okay, I get it now. It was almost like the Cage 4’33” piece, where the focus shifts from what’s going on onstage to becoming more conscious of every other sound in the room.

ML: And then as far as New Zealand…

AL: Bruce Russell put out that CD of mine, “The Evan Dando of Noise?” [Corpus Hermeticum, 1997]. I contacted him and got the names of people to set things up. The first show was in Auckland on a bill with the Dead C. They were amazing. I had seen them in the US but they were so incredible down there, in their element, using their own amps. Lawrence English was on that bill, who at that point was starting out, but has since become a big figure in that music scene. I’ve played with Bruce a little bit. Maybe he sat in on one show with the trio. We did at least one duo thing at this funny bar near his house. He lives in a small town on the South Island.

ML: So many of your works have been collaborations. Is there anyone who’s still on your list?

AL: There’s people like Emmett [Kelly] where we talk about trying to do something someday, and who knows where it’ll go. Now, the CD I did with Henry [Kaiser], “Skip to the Solo” [Public Eyesore, 2016], which came out last year – I studied with him. He did a summer workshop in improvisation guitar when I was about nineteen. I’d been a fan of his from reading this article he did in Guitar Player. They had this whole column called “Essential Listening” where guitarists would talk about records that were significant to them. Henry did a pretty long article and a lot of it was non-guitar stuff, and I probably wouldn’t have paid attention except I noticed he had “Trout Mask Replica” and “Live/Dead,” and I liked those. His list had Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Terry Riley, Masayuki Takayanagi, all the stuff that has since become pretty crucial to my development. I went and bought his current record “It’s a Wonderful Life” [Metalanguage, 1984]. The first side is this sidelong improvisation that he says is inspired by Terry Riley and Evan Parker. That in turn became a big inspiration to me.

In that course he really showed me how to listen to free improvisation. Then I could start to think about doing it as a musician. That was extremely valuable and I’ve stayed in touch with him ever since. Jim O’Rourke met Henry at the same time and had a similar mentor/mentee relationship with him, and that was common ground I had when I met Jim. Once Jim produced “Hoffman Estates” [Drag City, 1998] with Loren [Connors] – it might have been around that time that Henry called me up and proposed doing a record together. We talked about it from time to time for years after that.

We did a gig at the Stone in New York as a duo. At one point, he said, “play two chords so I can fuzz solo over them”. I remembered on this other record of his, “Outside Pleasure” [Metalanguage, 1980], there’s one section where he’s doing a fuzz solo over two chords he has looped behind him, just A minor and G – a rock move in the middle of free improv. So I said, I’ll play the two chords from “Outside Pleasure”. After the show he told me it was the chords from [the Seeds’] “Pushing Too Hard” which I’d never realized.

A record I really like is “Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar” [1977-1980] by [Frank] Zappa, that series where he takes out guitar solos from some of his songs, gives them a new name, and calls them a new composition. I suggested doing a record like that to Henry, I booked the plane ticket, and we did it in two days – one of recording and one of mixing. But that’s an example of someone I really wanted to do a record with for a long time and finally got around to doing it two years ago. I didn’t want to just to a guitar duo record, since he’s done that with other people. I wanted to go deeper because I had this longstanding relationship with him and wanted the full Henry treatment, with him producing, designing the cover – things I would ordinarily want to control myself.

Because most of it is rock-oriented, it’s also the path not taken, in a way. This is the road I was on until I discovered this article that Henry wrote in Guitar Player and discovered Derek Bailey. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t. Would I have been a famous rock guitarist or just lost interest after I was out of my teens?

***

[reversed-hierophant-blog]

35 facts about velvet!

buckle in lads because this got long

velvet welch is, if you haven’t guessed, not japanese! wow, surprising, i know. they were born in the united states, and moved to tokyo about a year and a half ago. they’re of white, syrian, and libyan descent— mostly syrian, though, although i don’t have the exact percentages figured out. 

their family is christian— southern baptist, specifically.  velvet is not, even though they were raised baptist. however, they are extremely spiritual. 

(velvet welch isn’t their birth name btw, but it is the name they have listed on all of their official japanese papers. they’d really prefer if you don’t try to pry and figure out what their dead name is.)

fun fact: i got their name from an old 90s instructional video teaching old people how to use the internet. i’m not joking. this was yuro’s idea.

they’re from myrtle beach, south carolina! as the name suggests, it’s a beach town. and as that implies, they love the ocean? it’s like home to them. i could go on and on with this fact alone because i may or may not have been self indulgent and plopped them in a city i’ve visited multiple times a year for like, the past ten years of my life, but. 

velvet’s family consists of their parents and their eleven-year-old sister, rachel! she really looks up to them, and they used to babysit her when she was younger. they’re really good with kids, which is surprising for a lex character.

velvet makes friendship bracelets when they’re bored, anxious, or trying to relax. it’s something they picked up when they were fourteen— their sister wanted to try it out, and velvet (as her babysitter) ended up getting into it as well. she eventually grew out of it (after like, a couple months), but velvet still enjoys it. they usually wear a bunch of bracelets, and will carry around half-finished ones. it calms them down. they will make bracelets for your oc. 

this is the important one, guys: they have a pet cockatoo. she’s going into the game with them because she’s kind of a handful and they didn’t feel right leaving her with their flatmates. her name is felt. she’s basically a small child and velvet adores her. good birb. 

oh yeah, they’re sharing an apartment with some friends, i may or may not make a separate post about them at a later date. 

they love animals in general (and i mean looooooove), and have always grown up around them. their parents have two dogs, their other friends have a bunch of cats, they had a hamster growing up, and they’d really like getting more pets in the future once they have a bigger living space.

velvet is a huge furry, and their fursona is a goat! one of these days i’ll draw it. also hashtag kinfeels. this is why you’ll see me calling them the goat kid a lot, btw. 

their first job was working at a candy store! they love sugar tbh. they’re especially fond of things like sour gummi worms and ring pops, but they like most sweets in general.

they also really love soft serve ice cream! like, a lot. there’s a place on the boardwalk that boasts over 100 flavors of soft serve, and it’s their aesthetic. they especially like chocolate soft serve dipped in a cherry shell!

they wear those LED light up sneakers. like. these

they’re a capricorn! i’m planning on filling out a natal chart for them soon. i associate them with the hierophant card, followed by the devil, the high priestess, and the star! 

they fucking love cool ass rocks. they’re also a steven universe fan. i think their favorite rocks are bismuth, any kind of quartz (especially aura quartzes), opal, and amethyst? i have no idea what their gemsona is yet.

they have four piercings— both ears, a septum, and a medusa! they’ve considered getting more. if they were to get more, they’d probably want a bridge piercing, a labret (maybe? that or snake bites, but not both), and/or probably some extra ear piercings. not sure if they’d go for an industrial bar there but [shrugs]

they've recently been trying to learn how to cook, with varying degrees of success. they’re not bad just..... still in the process of learning. and they’re fairly forgetful

[ear trauma implied?] velvet suffers hearing loss in their left ear and wears a hearing aid! 

they love glitter. especially in their makeup. they’re also the kind of person that’ll wear cute little stickers on their face for fun. they also like rainbow sprinkles and confetti

they follow a bunch of stimming accounts on instagram? they’ve made slime for themself before, and really like that kind of stuff in general. they like slime and frosting stuff more than kinetic sand and paints, though.

they own a bunch of decks, including:

the starchild tarot (which i desperately want)

the 1980s tarot deck 

the hardy tarot deck

the golden thread tarot

tbh i can’t decide between this, this, or this so i might just say they have all three

they also have the food fortunes deck but that one isn’t an actual tarot deck. it was a holiday gift

their hogwarts house is hufflepuff, and their god tier is the seer of light! yeah, they’re rose lalonde. they’re also an ESFP, a chaotic good, sanguine, and enneagram 2w3 (the giver)! they’re right-handed, type B blood, and yes i’m throwing all of the cheap facts together in one slot.

they know english and japanese! their japanese isn’t perfect, and sometimes they don’t make sense, but they’re trying. they also know ASL, but don’t practice it often, so they’re not that great at it. 

i feel like their handwriting would be similar to the woodlands? in english, they write in cursive! 

they love sweet tea. i don’t get it. i live in the south and i fucking hate sweet tea. but, in general, tea is their drink of choice? whether its iced or hot! herbal teas are super nice too, but you gotta be in the right mood for them, y’know? otherwise, they like strawberry lemonade.

alright lets break out the musical aus because you know i love them:

in hamilton, they’d be john laurens

in heathers, they keep accidentally being JD when I AU with sieves, but in all honesty they’d probably be ms fleming

reefer madness? jimmy harper

(”what musical do you associate the most with them, lex?” ha ha, well, that’s a secret)

i mentioned this in my earlier post, but they currently live in ikebukuro! they love the city aesthetic, almost as much as they love the boardwalk aesthetic. 

they’re also a huge fan of like.... idk how to describe it but? they like kitschy cheap tourist-trap souvenir shops with bright neon hoodies advertising the city (side note— they fucking hate that tan / pale blue “life is better at the beach” style of home decor. hate it. their parents love it.). on this note, the gay dolphin. it’s legendary. truly a landmark in myrtle beach. 

and they like... i don’t know how to describe this flavor of psychic advertisement. they also really love miss cleo commercials. because i love miss cleo. they also binge watch old 90s commercials sometimes. because i binge watch old 90s commercials sometimes. they also like that old VHS tape aesthetic. and neons. 

they prefer animated movies and tv shows tbh, and cry over them a lot. their favorite movies include howl’s moving castle, song of the sea, zootopia, and bee movie finding nemo? all animation is good tho. they also really love pokemon!

they’re kinda lowkey goth. on the inside. they went through a (closeted, as best as they could do when their parents would kill them if they get scenekid hair) scene phase when they were younger (it was kind of embarrassing in hindsight), and a lot of their friends are goth, so they still really appreciate the subculture, even if their everyday style is more colorful and floral and obnoxiously neon at times. on occasion, they’ll get dressed up in something trad, but...

they absolutely hate feeling stuffy and restricted in their clothes— you’d be hard pressed to catch them dead in a button-up shirt and trousers and a sportcoat. not happening unless the suit is bright pink or otherwise fun. 

they keep a dream journal! i hate that this became a popular meme.

they’re gay  (...pansexual and very polyamorous, to be exact, and prone to getting crushes on their friends and being super affectionate in general but. gay)

[tripistanbul]

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Circular analies

Mingled amongst these slippers may be seen quite a lot of round analies, or hand-mirrors, with quick handles, mounted in gold or silver embroidery, and often enriched with seed pearls. These fairly toys are indispensable to the Turkish women, as they’re the companions, not solely of their bathrooms however of their voyages up and down the Bosphorus, the place, reclining on their cushions, they restore, because the swift caique shoots alongside, the disarray which the sharp sea-breezes create within the folds of their snowy veils and ample mantles.

However decidedly essentially the most glittering avenue within the Tcharchi, is that appropriated to the embroiderers; the place silks, stiff with essentially the most elaborate needle-work, wrought in gold and silver threads; virtually impalpable muslin, homosexual with clusters of bright-coloured silken flowers; tobacco luggage of cachemirc, which seem to have price the maker years of labour; and dear scarfs from Persia, with golden borders fashioned of verses from the Koran, or love-ballads from Hafiz, are to be seen on all sides. All of the embroidery wrought in Constantinople, with only a few exceptions, is the work of the Armenian girls, who, secluded much more strictly than the truthful Turks inside the recesses of the harem, emulate their thrifty and pains-taking husbands in tbeir untiring business; however a lot of the costliest, notably that which is labored on cacheinire, is imported from Persia.

The Fruit Bazar stands near the water’s edge, and abounds with dried fruits of each description—figs and dates from Smyrna; raisins, plums, the small candy currant of Corinth, and each different selection able to preservation ; the one inconsistency being the sale of cheese, and Russian butter, packed in calf-skins, and most disagreeable in look, among the many extra enticing articles already enumerated.

Sample and texture

The Broussa silks occupy a really appreciable avenue, because the produce of the celebrated looms of that metropolis is vastly esteemed by the Turks, each for sample and texture. The staple commerce of the traditional capital of Bithynia being uncooked silk, two-thirds of the homes are colonized by the “ spinning-worm ;” and the silk is consequently utilized by the weavers with a profusion which renders the standard of the manufacture so strong, that many people have been deluded into the assumption that it was blended with cotton—a fabric which is to them far more costly and diflicult of entry. The colors are seldom vibrant; for the waters about Broussa arc so extremely mineralized, as to uninteresting the silk very materially within the strategy of spinning; but it surely in all probability derives from the identical circumstance its uncommon power and sturdiness. The workmen of town are extraordinarily skilled in interweaving gold and silver threads within the warp; and the silks so woven are vastly esteemed within the harems. The plainer patterns are utilized by each sexes indiscriminately; and practically the entire costume of each respectable Turk or Armenian consists of Broussa silk. The demand is therefore very nice, and the availability commensurate with it; and there are few busier localities within the Tcharchi than this. Just a few Genoa velvets and European satins could also be discovered within the bales of the retailers; however as they’re comparatively unsaleable, the Frank girl who seeks them has no alternative of being fastidious in her choice.