#watching. taking.

[residentsofhollowville]

[After some mimicry shenanigans and some weird thoughts ever since she got up and left, Cass(?) arrived in Hollowvile. She assumed the first cabin hidden away in the woods was Marc’s and just knocked on it, mask hiding a smile that was just a bit too wide.]

(@vapor-web)

And, true enough, it was. He might not know her face or her name, but he'd know it was her if he were blind. He'd know her by the sound of creaking metal, the bitter scent of oil and rust that always lingers with him long after she's gone. He'd know her, and know that she's a friend.

"Welcome back, rust bucket. Why don't you head on in? I'm grilling for us."

[laertesthelocalstranger]

[Pandora had been lumbering her way towards some place. Some place that felt like home. Or something familiar, something safe. She can find others, and maybe this energy in her will be soothed.]

[She reached the cabin. It felt old, but at least this was something familiar. She began whining outside, circling the cabin as she tried to figure out what to do.]

(@vapor-web)

[Laertes freezes. He shouldn’t be in here. He shouldn’t be in here, and she knows it. She needs to move on. But…twenty minutes can’t hurt, can they?]

[Apparently, they can. Something is outside, and something big.]

[child-of-the-vast]

Hey Ori, I gotta get rid of a bunch of spider silk fabric. Is there anything you want to be made? Anything at all?

- Pandora (@vapor-web)

Uhh, I dunno. How melt-able is it? Although I guess something like a blanket would be nice? I’m not really sure..

[spitblaze]

[guy who doesnt watch shows voice] yeah ive been meaning to watch that show

[residentsofhollowville]

[Andromeda slowly wakes up from her rest. It was actually rather nice, especially after just reading a horror story. But she wasn’t pleased with how she was stuck in bed.]

Shrike? You there? Help…

[This was so humiliating.]

- Andromeda (@vapor-web)

Shrike hears her calling out from the guest bedroom, and remembers mid-writing session what he was supposed to do today. He gets to his feet, rubbing sleepiness from his eyes, and hurries to the guest bedroom, picking the phone up from under the covers as gently as he can manage.

"Good morning, Andromeda. I've got something for you," he says in a highly enthusiastic singsong tone that does not match his visibly exhausted state.

He grins as he hurries towards the newly furnished computer room.

[wuntrum]

ripley :)

[inbabylontheywept]

I was walking out of the Walmart today, and a car passed me, and I got this incredibly vivid impression. It wasn't really in words, but if I had to put it into words, the two key points would be

a). I needed to watch that car and

b). That I needed to be careful, because the driver of the car was a massive bitch.

It kind of took me by surprise, because I really had no reason to be beefing with that car, and I also hadn't really had an impression like that since I was religious, which was in my teen years. Right? It'd been a decade since I had a little voice whisper in my ear, and I'd basically written it off as nonsense.

Anyway, I watched the car, because The Spirits or whatever were very insistent that I did. Car drove fine, went into the parking spot, inched forward, and right when it should've just stopped, the driver gunned it for some reason and it ran into the curb and cracked its bumper.

So, the driver got out, and she went to the front of the car to check that yes, she had cracked her bumper, and then she turned to look at me. The parking lot wasn't empty, but we were the only two people standing in that row, and I'd probably been staring at her for tenish seconds now.

She demanded very angrily to know why I hadn't warned her of the curb. And I could have said I didn't know you were about to gun it or is it my job to help every stranger park, or even could you have even heard me, inside your car?

And all of those would have been fine, but I was really, really busy digesting that I had somehow communed with Mormon Jesus again for the first time in fifteen years, and that the communion had mostly been there to let me watch someone park badly (?), so what I responded with was:

"Because it was foretold."

And I can't tell which would be funnier, if she went silent because there's not much to be said to that, or if she went silent because in Utah, she might actually believe me, but we parted ways without more words.

I'm still kind of digesting this myself, actually.

[midnight-coffee94]

No single line has ever wrecked me as hard as this one from the Good Place and I think about it constantly

[o0kawaii0o]

Family

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

do you even remember the lives that you threw away like trash

continuation of this

[windwenn]

Hey....james t kirk and mister spock kind of act like theyre in love sometimes.....has anyone looked into this.....

[talaricula]

Things I've seen tumblr memeing about James Somerton doing à la "How did no one see how bigoted he was!" as if those things haven't been a significant part of tumblr culture for over a decade :

Presenting untrue and bordering on conspiratorial versions of (queer or otherwise marginalised) history without any sources

Completely disregarding and disrespecting any expertise on socio-cultural topics/humanities and distrusting academics and historians (incl. acting as if no academics or historians could be queer or marginalised)

Downplaying the role misogyny played in the historical oppression of queer women and concluding that queer men must have been more oppressed than queer women

Bi women are, at best, not as queer as "real" queer ppl, and at worst, simply equivalent to straight women

Despite nominal trans inclusivity, transmasculine ppl are functionally women when convenient (combined with the above, bi transmascs are functionally straight women)

Despite nominal trans inclusivity (bis), shamelessly attacking, threatening and actively endangering any trans woman who questions them or smth they find important (often by unfairly presenting her as violent or as a threat)

Having absolutely fucking wild and reductive takes about ace ppl, the oppression they face and their place in the queer community

Stating that marriage equality is an assimilationist fight while completely ignoring its direct roots in the horrifying consequences of the AIDS crisis for partners of ppl who died of AIDS

Praising western media creators from the past for queer coding even under censure and in the same breath condemning current non western media creators for being homophobic bc their representation isn't explicit enough

Blaming China for all existing homophobic censoring in western media

Assuming all queer media would be better told by western creators and by western standards

Only out queer ppl get to tell queer stories

Heavily criticising almost all queer media created by women or ppl they see as such (see above points about trans ppl) or involving/starring a significant amount of women for any perceived or real amount of "problematicness", but fawning over and praising and negating criticism of queer media created by and starring mostly or even functionally exclusively men (even when it could be argued that, you know, not involving/seriously sidelining women is a pretty clear example of misogyny which should probably be considered "problematic")

And I'm probably forgetting stuff or there's stuff I have internalised myself and don't recognise as an issue

Like idk but I feel like the takeaway from Hbomberguy and Toddintheshadow's videos should maybe be "be aware of such patterns in your communities bc they definitely exist" and not "this guy is uniquely awful" and I feel like a lot of the discussion I've seen surrounding this has been severely failing at that. Most ppl who've spent any significant amount of time on tumblr prob either have internalised at least one of those thought patterns, have had to de-internalise them, or have had to be extremely vigilant to not internalise them (which is done by, you know, seeking out other sources, which also seemed like an important takeaway from the videos)

[hussyknee]

Trying to explain what the fuck just happened in Lankan politics today.

The leftist party has won 159 seats out of 218 in the Parliamentary elections. The single biggest landslide win since we broke from the British and achieved universal franchise in 1948.

Any party achieving a super majority in the executive and legislative is, objectively speaking, bad. It disables checks and balances, which is a catastrophic thing for any democracy, and the only two other times it's happened for us has irrevocably eroded the fabric of civic rights and democratic freedom. Also, the reason the NPP won the North and East is that the colonized, genocided and subjugated people there have no faith in electoralism anymore. The way this government has engaged minority issues has been utterly abysmal and now they've been rewarded for it.

On the other hand:

The winners. Are all. Grassroots. Candidates.¹

We have voted out every single career criminal that's been barnacled into the Lankan political arena since before I've been alive. The fascist party has only three seats.² The other fascists didn't win a single seat. The neoliberal legacy party won none. There are only forty people in Parliament that represent any sort of dynastic political legacy. After 76 solid years of nothing but political dynasties.

This is barely five years after the Rajapaksas swept in and absolutely glutted the Parliament with their family members and cronies end to end.

This is the illegitimate interim government we had for most of the last 18 months. We literally, physically, chased the Rajapaksas out of the country and this fucking demon set up a puppet government just so he could finally sit in that goddamn chair and be the despot he'd always dreamed of in exchange for letting them all come back. He's now gone. His entire circle is gone.

THEY ARE ALL FUCKING GONE.

In US terms, just imagine that, five years from now, when Trump's GOP has control of everything, the entire GOP and the worst of the Dems are all purged from Congress and Senate, the Green Party in control of all three branches of government under a pro-union left-wing President and an unmarried female LGBT rights activist Vice President, and the Dems reduced to barely 20% of the House.

This is my anthropology professor. She joined politics from the small nascent leftist coalition to help keep the government accountable. She's now the Prime Minister and the most popular Parliamentary candidate in the nation's history. (Edit: She was knocked off first place by a dude in the final result. Boo.)

(On the other hand— the woman who helped make me a radical anarchist and literally helped write a book on political dissent and resistance...now is the state. Uh.)

But there are so many women in Parliament! We had the lowest female representation in a South Asian Parliament and some of them were from the list of seats reserved for parties rather than elected ones. Most were either anti-feminist conservative embarrassments, widows and daughters of elite politicians and neoliberal shills. It's still only an increase of a few percentage points (Edit: from the previous 5% to 10% in the final result!) but now we have elected academics, feminist advocates, activists! There Is a representative for Malaiyaha Tamils in the Central Province for the first time in history and it's a young woman! (Edit: now it's two female Malaiyaha MPS!!) This is the plantation community that still live in conditions closest to the slavery the British forced upon them two hundred years ago!

I'm like. Completely mindfucked. To be very very clear, the NPP coalition formed around the nucleus of the JVP that used to be communist but haven't been in 30 years, they're now just social democrats who are left of places like the US and UK, whose "left" is now center-right. They're only threatening to the Western mainstream media for some reason who can't stop bleating about how we have a "Marxist" government now. In reality, the actual chances for radical reform are still quite low, and the opportunity for further erosion is quite high with a super majority government regardless of affiliation.

On the other hand:

What the fuck.

Sometimes living through historical events is really damn amazing.

---

¹ Well, nearly. There are a few career politicians and a nepo baby but they aren't so bad either.

² Goddamn it, Baby Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka's answer to JD Vance have wormed their way in using the list of Constitutionally reserved party seats for non-elected members. FUCK the National List.

[residentsofhollowville]

[Pandora stepped through the forest once again, weaving through the bear traps, walking past the trees she personally fell. She didn’t remember how far she walked for until she found the giant slab covering the crack in the clearing.]

[She crouched down by the slab once more, hesitating. Should she? Wouldn’t this be a bad idea? Not like she hasn’t made enough of them already. It was in her blood. She pushed the slab away and peered in.]

Hello?

[She could hear her own voice echo all the way down. Just a remnant of the real thing.]

(@vapor-web)

She hears thumping, a thousand hearts pulsing in tandem, a thousand pickaxes beating against the earth. She can almost see the bottom of this thing, and there's light down there, real light, but not the light of the sun.

Someone is stomping. Or perhaps many someones, their boots slamming into the ground one by one, making the walls shake and the ceiling crack and crumble.

Someone is singing.

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho, Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down...

[utilitycaster]

"why should I get invested in shows if they'll just get canceled" I was deeply invested in Heroes (2006) and it was not canceled, it just got really terrible. I also got really invested in the sandwich I had a few weeks ago despite it only lasting like 15 minutes. You must embrace the ephemeral. You must be willing to love things that may not love you back, that might betray you, or that may die an untimely death. As the great philosopher Mr. Mitchell Lee Hedberg said "I'm not gonna stop doing something because of what happens at the end."

[egophiliac]

buckle up lads we're going BACK INTO THE BOOK