#which like. i too would have blocked the existence of these books from my memory.

[hearts4court]

What it’s like dating The Marauders + Regulus Black!!

18++ Minors DNI!! YOU WILL BE BLOCKED!!

characters: James F. Potter, Sirius O. Black, Remus J. Lupin and, Regulus A. Black.

warnings: smut, cursing, mentions of the black family, kissing. lemme know if i missed anything, Fem! reader^^

Authors note: Hey hey my lovelies!! So this idea came to me when i was scrolling on pinterest and i saw a picture of a couple and it made me sad because i’m single as a dollar. BUT, i decided to share my idea with the class. Voldemort does not exist in this AU, but magic does!

James F. Potter:

Y’all are known as the “Goofy” couple. Y’all are always doing stupid things together, and overall y’all are just the cutest and funniest couple. Sometimes you too will skip your classes to make out in his dorm or to have sex. He’s AMAZING at giving head. You’ll take his glasses off his face and wear them, and it probably turns him on, ngl. Or he takes polaroids of you to save for his little scrapbook he made of y’all, for all of y’all’s memories. yes i said it. fight me. He’s such a praiser, whether it’s giving it or receiving it. he doesn’t care. “Does that feel good, baby? does my pretty girl like that?” he praises you as he thrusts into you. “always such a good girl for me.” he groans. “J-Jamie! fuck.. feels so good!” you moan, digging your nails into his shoulder, that causes him to chuckle

<3

Sirius O. Black:

omfg. Y’all are literally the hottest couple at Hogwarts. Nobody can decide if they wanna be you, or Sirius, or if they wanna be with both of y’all. You two sit together in every single class y’all have together, and his hand is always on your thigh no matter where y’all are. he really couldn’t give a flying fuck. You’re always on his lap, and his arms are always wrapped around you pulling you closer to him. He’s always kissing your neck and leaving hickeys to show you off, which sometimes he gets detention for, for inappropriate behavior. he’s such a rough! dom, when it comes to sex but he’s also a soft!dom at the same time? He will degrade the hell out of you but also praise you at the same time. “Look at you.. drooling and screaming my name.. ya look s’pretty like this.” Sirius coos as he rams into you from behind. “My dumb little slut.” he breathes against your neck. “F-fucking hell.. Siri please go faster- i’ll be good.. p-promise!” you whimper causing him to smirk and speed up. “i know baby.. such a good girl for me.”

:)

Remus J. Lupin:

Oh he’s such a sweetheart. Y’all are Hogwarts’s Cutest couple. If they’re was a Cutest couple of the year contest, y’all would win every time. He loves to read to you, and you take care of him after full moons when he comes back into the castle, like taking care of his wounds, helping him clean himself up, etc. “Are you alright, Remmy?” you coo in worry, running a warm cloth against his forehead and his cheeks.”M’alright, dove.” he mumbled, taking a sip of his water weakly. Y’all love to do study dates, then you two go back to his dorm and do skincare together. :( His kisses are so soft no matter what y’all are doing, and he loves praising you. “Good job on your exam, baby.” he smiles, kissing your head gently. He’s SUCH a soft! Dom. “look at ya.. taking me s’well..c’mon princess… you can a little more.” he says into your ear in a soft tone. “Mm! f-feels so good Remmy!” you whimper, biting your lip slightly. He 100% whispers book lines into your ear. My man is literally William Shakespeare.

Rizzmus Lupin<3

Regulus A. Black:

Reggie:( Oh poor Reg, he never thought anyone would ever love him because of his family, but your just an angel from above, aren’t you? Tbh, people are scared of Regulus so they don’t really give talk about you two. While he studies your always either laying or sitting on his lap. More sitting then laying. All you ever does is complain, and he hates it. “Why are you so harsh on people, Reggie?” you ask in a sweet voice, running your fingers through his curly hair. “I don’t do it on purpose y’know.” he grumbled looking up from his book, before looking back at it, as he leans into you. You shake your head before continuing to play with his hair. Just like his brother, he’s a rough! Dom, and loves to degrade you. Now, All you ever do is complain. Whether it’s about students, teachers, work, yourself, all you ever do upset reggie with your complaining. And every time he shuts you up. “You just don’t know how to shut up, do you?” He says, grabbing onto your hair hard, pulling your head back.”M’sorry!” you cry, which is more like a moan then a cry, continuing to bounce on him, and move your hips in a circular motion.”Yeah, yeah. But since you wanna be a little bitch and complain so bloody much.. i’m not letting you cum.” he whispers in your ear, pulling you off him, as a punishment for pissing him off.

UGH. i want him to ruin me.

[vidavalor]

Jim's Bedroom

I'm really still not over the dollhouse bed in "Jim's Bedroom"-- a bed and a room that seem to exist basically for the possibility that the higher up angels ever show up and demand an embassy tour. Especially Sandalphon and ones like him.

In tone, Aziraphale would be like yes and here's my fake, human-like bedroom, which I never really use, of course, because I'm an angel-- why would I ever need it? It's mainly in case some human has a fainting spell in the shop and needs to lie down. Must be practical and look normal to the humans to maintain my bookselling human cover, of course!

Speaking of human-sized people, this bed is rather tiny, don't you all think? SO VERY TINY! Even beds back in the day weren't all this tiny! Doesn't even fit a human-sized adult human-shaped being! If I sneezed, I'd fall out of it, haha! It definitely couldn't fit, say, a red-headed demon who is six feet something of legs! He's even too long for this thing in snake form-- I mean, I imagine! For sure, it definitely could not fit *both* of us-- why would you even think such a thing?!

No time for lovers, me-- and *never* a demon, that's absurd! Especially that wily one! I live to thwart him, as you can see! Just out here, doing the good work of spreading the ineffable lunacy of The Lord! There is definitely not a room in this shop-- like, say, the one next door at the more convenient spot of the top of the stairs-- that is *actually* my bedroom and which contains a bed that very comfortably fits two adult-sized human-shaped supernatural entities-- why would you even ask?!

Right, down we go, kindly make a right around the back side of the bookshelves that hide the theatrical curtains and practice space for my secret human magic hobby... oh, that room in the back?

That's one of our gigantic storage closets of a room where Crowley and I have been stockpiling furniture and other material objects we like for years out of hope that one day we might have our own home that isn't a bookshop hiding an embassy hiding a house... our little pipe dream, never you mind... and, now we're back at the front door! Kindly hopefully continue to not realize that I designed this place so that you can't see Crowley's couch or our dining table from the entry space in front of the cashwrap threshold and have a heavenly day!

Humorous aspects to this aside? Jim's Bedroom is psychologically really interesting...

With all of Aziraphale's Heavenly angst, it's easy to wonder if he doesn't actually use the room sometimes, either in past nights alone or in that time between Crowley leaving and the sun coming up.

Style-wise, it's extremely unlikely that the oak wall unit against the wall on the left was ever first Aziraphale's; it more than likely was in Crowley's flat at one point. It doesn't go at all with the cherry mahogany bureau pushed up in front of it, which either of them could have owned. The bureau is positioned to block the part of the oak wall unit where a tv would go and just keep open the bookshelves, which is also how Aziraphale is using the shelf space on the wall between the oak unit and the desk. While Aziraphale watches tv, this room isn't built for that kind of cozy lounging, so there's no need for that side of the tv cabinet-- but he always has need for more book storage so that he's using the space for that makes the room feel a little more thought-through and lived-in than it might otherwise. Yet, at the same time? None of this matches the way the downstairs does and it's all just sort of clumped together, indicating he also doesn't value it as much as other spaces in the bookshop.

Since Aziraphale wears the same outer outfit everyday, he needs a bureau more than he needs a closet-- though there is a little closet to the right of the bed. Probably keeps some shirts in there. There's the reddish reading chair and lamp by the window that Crowley moves to when he and Gabriel talk about Gabriel's memory. They are probably used more than the bed. The bed is also small enough that the blanket over it could be used like a throw in the chair without a lot of fuss.

It kind of feels like maybe, on nights when on his own or after Crowley leaves sometime before dawn, Aziraphale might find his real bedroom hard to be in alone and, if feeling a bit angsty, will come into this room to use the fake bedroom as his real bedroom for awhile. I'm not sure that Jim could have made the cluttered mess on the desk that we see in so short a time and the room being painted Crowley's Eyes Yellow and the bed blanket being red and like the pattern of his desk chair downstairs makes it kind of seem that Aziraphale wanted to feel wrapped up in some Crowley in the space to make it more comforting to him, since "Jim's Bedroom"-- part of the shop that Aziraphale himself designed-- represents a lot of conflict for him.

Is Aziraphale coming into this room a lot in the time before dawn when it's dark enough that Crowley has left but not yet light enough that he can pretend it's morning? When it's too hard to stay in his real bed because it feels too big when Crowley's gone and is just a reminder of what Aziraphale tells himself is his failure to come up with anything better than the bookshop compromise for a way for them to be safe and together? Is the dollhouse bed also a subconscious form of self-punishment in a way? How much time does he spend in here in the pre-dawn hours, telling himself he'll get in some reading time or update his journal or take a little nap in the bed, only to feel more anxious by the minute in there and relieved when it becomes light enough that he feels he can don his daytime house sweater, make his morning tea, and start his day?

[foxglovepng]

Random Headcannons 3 🌼🥀

Requested: naw

Characters: Scarabia + Pomefiore

A/N: I'm getting back into the writing mood yay I'll probably take requests in the future because I am slowly getting over writer's block. I looked up a word in Arabic and if the word is incorrectly translated incorrectly feel free to correct me.

If you liked reblogs and likes are appreciative <3

Kalim

Knock knock who's there? Autism br br br where the hoes at? not here

I love my Autistic headcanon for Kalim. I also saw a headcanon he has ADHD too. (I forgot the word for ADHD and Autism combined help)

When he's unmedicated Jamil is that one meme of Shinji his stress levels are high. He's practically lived with Kalim so he knows he can get hyper although he pushes through it being used to it.

I headcanon Kalim has sensory issues that mainly have to do with touch. (Mine are sound and taste :skull:)

Since he likes parties and is extremely sociable I feel like sometimes he can get overwhelmed he chills in his sensory swing. I also feel like since he plays the drums he does have backup headphones on hand in case it's too loud.

Jamil tends to calm him down with essential oils (Don't ask me what kind he likes I only know Rosemary, and Cherry blossom)

Jamil

Jamil drop the hair routine or I'll break your ankles Sangwoo style so you can't dance anymore. I will even report your music-listening account so you are no longer allowed to play hip hop DROP THE ROUTINE RN JAMIL

This is my no 2 pookie bear I love him sm ANYWAYS

I feel like in his alone time Jamil has his own hobbies he hides from Kalim and will go above and beyond just to have them to himself. One of those I feel like is reading romance books (Not the feral ones booktok gooners read) romance is one of the genres he reads I feel like he also reads fantasy. (He has read Pride and Prejudice)

He'd probably also go to art conventions on his spare time. He has a sketchbook and draws on occasion (I think he draws similar to Hyunjin's style)

Him and Kalim speak Arabic and English although I feel like when Jamil wants to cuss someone out or insult someone he will bring the Arabic out.

*Ace messes up a play*

Ace: so um great play

Jamil: اهبل (Google says this means stupid/idiot)

Ace: HUH?

Vil

*Throws my genderqueer headcannon at you Eminem style*

Gender queer Icon Vil.

If I am correct he is referred to as Queen by Rook?? so I believe Vil doesn't really care for pronouns and just simply exists. So Vil would use any pronouns interchangeably.

Also random headcannon but Vil's father is like..famous right? So I feel like he gets insulted and called a Nepo baby.

Peep Epel and Vil get into a fight and Epel calls him a Nepo baby. Oh all hell is breaking loose.

(I also headcannon he'd make an appearance in Eurovision)

Rook

I need Frenchie to become a slur so I can shout FRENCHIE at Rook 24/7

This man either has a really good memory or a diary in which he keeps info of students. (Their height, weight, UM, etc) its freaky ngl. AND NOT A GOOD FREAKY WAY.

I saw some art of him and Floyd in the bathroom and he was peeking over the urinal. BRO KEEP YA EYES ON YA JUNK.

I can imagine certain NRC students have a group chat dedicated to slandering Rook.

He probably knows about it :Skull:

Epel

Guys this my son <3

I am a firm believer he is an Amish hater.

"I hate the way you talk the way you walk" ahh beat.

From a farmer's perspective I don't think he's 100% vegan, but if you bribe him with bbq he will start foaming at the mouth.

Bro probably listens to Dixon Dallas good looking-

He's also a Dolly Parton and Carrie Underwood fan.

I feel like with people he's close with especially the first years he lets his country accent loose and it will get even looser if someone (or Yuu) has a country accent as well. The rest of the first years will be like "They are speaking in tongues"

[wickedsrest-rp]

Name: Memphis Malik Species: Medium Occupation: Paramedic Age: 27 Years Old Played By: Cody Face Claim: Anirudh Pisharody

"I’m running on about two hours of sleep and last night my little sister told me that I failed her gaming friend’s ‘vibe check’. So as you can imagine, I’m emotionally devastated."

TW: Parental death

Sanjeev and Priya Malik were avid birdwatchers. Star crossed lovers turned lawyers, anytime they could escape the courtroom or paperwork they were traveling - cameras and books in hand, competing to try to capture the best picture of the rarest birds. Once they had their first and only child, the hobby began to slowly die down until they stopped doing it entirely. Memphis Malik never met his grandparents, both had passed long before he had any memories of them. Yet he knew this fact, and so many more about both of them. Mostly because they never shut the hell about it.

Memphis had no clue two people could be so bitter about not being able to birdwatch. Or that their only child had chosen to become a teacher instead of lawyers like they had been. Or really, everything under the sun. But since Memphis was a little kid, he could see both of his grandparents clear as day as if the two of them had never passed. And unfortunately for him, he could hear them too; and all the opinions that came with them.

Unfortunately for Memphis, they weren’t the only ones. His powers had activated earlier than most, or so his mother had told him. The ability to see and speak to the dead, an ability that was apparently not exclusive to their family. What seemed to be exclusive though was the rate at which they became ghosts. For as long as anybody could remember, every single Malik that passed away returned as a ghost. Forced to exist on this Earth until they lost any sense of themselves and were forced to be exorcized. That was apparently a unique Malik family trait. They all wanted something from the remaining Malik’s. Their exact ask changed from ghost to ghost but it all boiled down to one common desire: peace. Everyone wanted to move on, and that wasn’t something Memphis could help them do.

Despite this, growing up wasn’t terrible. Both of his parents supported Memphis and tried to keep the ghosts from bothering him too much. Sure, school was a nightmare when one of his ancestors would show up and scream at him to deliver a letter to a former loved one or to find a box hidden under a mattress and throw it away without looking at what was in it- gross - but overall, he had developed coping mechanisms and had his parents and his younger sister that helped him not only get through school - but medical school and residency too. 

Memphis couldn’t provide his family peace, so he wasn’t sure why he thought he could keep his forever. When his parents were taken from him, everything started falling apart. The worst part? His parents were right there as ghosts, watching him fall to pieces without being able to do anything about it. 

Now it was just Memphis and his little sister Clarissa, who so far hadn’t shown any signs of being a medium herself. Not yet, at least. But whatever his parents had been doing to distract the ghosts didn’t exist anymore, and for now the only person left to bear the brunt of this curse was Memphis. He may already be cursed, but he would be damned if he was going to become some lonely, trapped spirit like the rest of his family did. Most importantly, he refused to make Clary have to deal with it. So now it was on him to find a way to finally put an end to it.

Character Facts:

Personality: Friendly, exhausted, clueless, cautious, scatter-brained, distracted, paranoid

Memphis almost always wears large, noise-canceling headphones. They have become the most reliable way to tune out whatever member of his family had shown up to wreak havoc on his life. Unfortunately this also comes at the cost of him tending to block out the rest of the world as well

Memphis has spent his entire life trying to avoid his family’s spirits. So much so that he’s never really explored the other sides of the supernatural world in White Crest. 

Memphis has taken over sole custody of his twelve year old sister, Clary. She has basically become his entire world now, and he is entirely too dependent on her. She could use some space.

Between the ghosts constantly trying to grab his attention, the hospital, and caring for a twelve year old - Memphis is very tired. 

Something seems to keep his family members from expressing exactly how they died. Memphis is no expert on curses, but he’d say that was definitely suspicious.

While Memphis did finish med school, the death of his parents made things too difficult to continue his residency. He dropped out shortly after to focus on taking care of his sister.

[fuckmeyer]

random! but I absolutely love your interpretation of Bella and Edward and was wondering what you think Bella would gift Edward for his birthday — i know she gifts him her visions as a vampire and compiles them in a lil montage, but I'm more interested in what you think she'd opt for left to her mere human talents

aw, thank you, anon! glad you like my interpretation of Bella & Edward. love your question. tricky! what do you get the rich century-old vampire for a celebration he typically ignores? the perfect gift requires a fundamental understanding of who this man is, what he wants, & what he needs.

i think (& believe this applies to canon too)...

Edward has a contradiction within him that leads to his suffering. he reads others' minds; no one can do the same, yet he hears everyone's judgments about him. most are projections, but what they all instinctively know is also what he fears: he's a monster. this skews his perception of himself because it "confirms" what he "knows." being a monster makes him inherently bad. selfish. cruel. violent. unworthy. soulless. his opinion isn't all negative: he knows he's curious, intelligent, musical, etc., but these traits all stem from or are influenced by his vampirism...meaning all his positive traits are shadowed by his "evilness"

by virtue of trying to be a better person, some part of him knows this is not who he truly is. deep down, he wants to be seen— the parts of him he's forgotten, denied, or ignored but exist nonetheless. he wants to be seen as good. worthy. deserving. human. lovable. soulful. he wants someone to see the suffering, the contradiction. he wants someone to see he's lonely. that his needs aren't met. that he's misunderstood.

part of why he's drawn to Bella is her "goodness" &, more importantly, her silent mind. not only does she draw the best out of him, but he can't see the worst of himself through her eyes. as annoying as he says it is, being blocked from her mind is a relief.

which leads us to another thing Edward wants: Edward wants to see Bella's mind. canon Bella kinda understands this by the end with the lil vampire montage, but as a human, she lacks self confidence & self awareness to understand Edward truly is interested in knowing her.

ok, so say she has more self-confidence & enough self-awareness & knows Edward well enough to understand what he wants and needs... here's how the birthday goes:

she would take him someplace where he can't hear anyone's thoughts (e.g. the meadow, but tbh it'd be fun if she took him someplace he's never been. he can enjoy the surprise & mystery.)

she would plan activities he's typically excluded from. e.g., a game of chess/cards, maybe a picnic (even if he can't eat, he can enjoy a human experience)

she would wear an outfit he loves on her (NO green sweater. sorry folks)

she might make a mixtape of songs she loved as a child & details the memories behind them, OR a mixtape of songs from their relationship showcasing her favorite memories together. i.e., giving him a peek into her mind through something they have in common

fucking CUTE ASS HOMEMADE CARD drawn/painted by her. if she was brave, all her mushy feelings she would never say out loud would go into this (or in an accompanying letter). i could also see her making a collage: she would cut out quotes about love from his favorite books, put in some pressed flowers he's given her, maybe mementos from their time together (ticket stubs, fave lyrics, scraps from their Bio homework with their flirty notes written in the margins, photos, etc). if she journals, maybe she cuts out some sections where she's writing about him. something that shows him that, just as he's grateful for every second of their time together, she values that time just as much

straight up she might ask him if there's anything he wants to do with her. if he wants to take her to a bookstore or record store & drop a cool thousand on her, she will grin & bear it. if he wants to slowdance with her for hours, great. if he wants her to go to Mike Newton's & kick him in the balls...well, maybe they can compromise & egg his house or sth

ok this idea won't leave my brain so here ya go: taking a favorite date of theirs but making it totally solo. thinking particularly of going to the drive-in theater. except instead of going to the drive-in, she would roll that Chevy out to the woods, there's a projector & screen all set up, the truckbed is filled with blankets & pillows & snacks, & they watch his favorite movie together

she would touch him. not sexually because that would put him on edge. but she would play with his hair & rub his back & touch his skin & cuddle & hold his hand etc., because LORD KNOWS this man is touch-starved after decades of being alone & this lack of contact has contributed to his low self esteem

ultimately, she would give him what he wants (her) while showing him that she understands what he needs (to be seen). THAT, to me, would be the ultimate gift for the man who seemingly has everything.

[localcryptidsteg]

Tracing, Style Theft, and the need to be Unique

A comment chain on Instagram got me thinking about these things earlier. Someone asked what common art advice is actually bad advice, and I left a short list that Ive heard, among which is "dont trace."

Naturally, this ruffled some feathers, but heres the deal: so long as you arent line-for-line copying the majority of someone elses work and passing it off as yours? Theres absolutely nothing wrong with tracing. Copying and tracing are two different things; think back to the old "how to draw" books. How they blocked out anatomy and taught you the relative distance of things with lines and joints. Tracing... is essentially doing the same thing. As a learning tool for personal use, being able to take a picture and draw the skeletal frame over it helps you with perpesctive and anatomy immensely! It even helps in stylization. Tracing develops the skills you need in order to replicate something, replication develops the skills you need in order to stylize.

Which brings us to our next issue.... style theft isnt a thing. It doesnt exist. Unless youre forging paintings and passing them off as the real deal, there is absolutely zero reason not to look at the techniques and stylization your favorite artists use and replicate that. Again, it helps you develop skills like shading and coloring and lineart. And having your own "style"? One that has to be completely different from anyone elses? Thats bullshit! Most artists dont just have ONE style. The best artists have several and go out of their way to continue learning more!

Think of it this way: we wouldnt have 2d animation if actual artists gave a flying fuck about their "style" being copied. The Renaissance artists would never have risen to prominence if their teachers hadnt sat them down and told to paint how they did. Bob Ross would never have had a tv show if mimicking how someone else creates mattered in any way at all.

The way you develop your own style is simply this: you look at your favorite artists, you analyze what elements of their work make your brain happy and what are enjoyable for you to do, you mash them all together and voila. Your very own (not really at all) "unique" style.

I think this frankly terrible and counterintuitive art advice trend is killing artists. When you go online as an artist and preach to a bunch of younger aspiring artists that invaluable tools for growth are inherently bad and wrong and theyre evil for using them, you do three things at once:

First, you make them fear creation. "I want to draw or sculpt or knit or what have you, but what if I accidentally copy someone? Then Id be a bad person!"

Second: you kill the joy of creation. They become too focused on the end result and never really learn how to make for the sake of making.

Third: you block their avenues of progress. In order to get better at your craft, you really do have to try everything. Trying to make certain techniques into something "off limits" only serves to hinder that progression. It causes stagnation which in turn causes frustration, which leads us back to issue 2.

When I was a kid, my grandma would drive two hours to my city every year for my birthday, and every year she would take me to the art museum. My grandma loved art with every fiber of her being. She was thrilled when my mom went to art school. She was estatic when my sibling and I took up drawing. But she never, EVER tried to make anything herself. See, when she was in school, her art teacher had told her she wasnt very good. And she, being a kid, believed it. And she stopped trying. She would never color with me and my sibling, would never try drawing with us when we begged her to join in. Shed chuckle and say "oh, I couldnt draw a straight line with a ruler!" And sit and watch us work and rave over how good we were at it instead.

When she hit about 80 or so, her memory started going. But she still loved the museum and she still loved art. One of my aunts talked her into taking one of those "how to paint" classes at a little studio near her house. She painted a cake. And you know what? It was a really friggin good painting! Itd be hanging in my room right now if my aunt hadnt called dibs!

My point is this: anyone of any skill level can learn to draw or paint or whatever. Im a major proponent of this; I always have been. But shaming creatives for how they do it, for how they learn it, for what they make? That destroys the drive to create, and it can last a lifetime. Who knows what my grandma could have made if not for that teacher? Who knows how many young artists felt nothing but shame and guilt over their work and quit because of bad-faith art advice?

[purplesurveys]

1755

Millennial survey In which a Gen Z-er takes over a survey meant for millennials 😜

What year were you born in? 1998.

Do you remember a time before smartphones and social media? Yeah, of course. I'd talk to friends mostly through landline or text; memorizing the program schedules per channel was the norm because streaming and on-demand stuff were pretty much nonexistent then; and playing outside was the best way to have fun with friends. There was also still the element of surprise when watching...well, pretty much anything, because there was no concept of spoilers unless you had access to the (early days of the) internet, which had been damn near impossible to use anyway because of how expensive it used to be.

I remember when Friendster, Multiply, YouTube, and Facebook all started getting popular and it being very exciting because the concept of social media didn't exist til then and it was like discovering a new world that I thought I'd never get tired of, lol.

Were you part of the generation that experienced the transition from dial-up internet to broadband? Yes. We had dial-up up til the early 2000s and didn't get a taste of broadband until around 2008 - 15 years ago. That noisy dial-up sound is permanently etched in my brain.

Did you grow up watching Saturday morning cartoons? I absolutely did. For some reason they kept the actual entertaining shows in the early morning, so that's how I learned to want to wake up early even on the weekends to catch them. I hated the Nick Jr block they had on in the morning and always skipped over it unless Hi-5, my only favorite, was airing.

Do you have any memories of using floppy disks or cassette tapes? Not floppy disks, but I am very familiar with cassettes since our first family car had a cassette player. My first Beyoncé album is a cassette and I wasn't able to get the CD version til, like, well into the 2010s because it was the first time I saw the CD in the wild haha.

How did you communicate with your friends before the advent of text messaging? Landline.

Were you a fan of any particular boy band or girl group during your teenage years? Ok this is 100% where my Gen Z card would show because my answer to this would be One Direction hahaha.

Did you ever own a portable CD player or a Walkman? I had a CD player and my own radio.

What was your favorite video game console when you were growing up? PlayStation 1 and 2. I had always wanted to try playing on the GameCube but we never had one.

Did you ever use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) or MSN Messenger to chat with friends? Not those, but I did have Yahoo! Messenger for a time.

Were you aware of the Y2K bug and the associated concerns leading up to the year 2000? No, I had been too young for that whole thing.

Did you ever rent movies from a physical video rental store like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video? I didn't.

Were you into MySpace or LiveJournal during the early days of social networking? I made a Myspace because I had heard of its popularity, but quickly realized that it was only popular in the west because what was big here instead were Friendster and Multiply. LiveJournal yes, I did do a few attempts to start blogs and stuff but I always ended up abandoning them after 1 or 2 posts.

What was your first experience with online shopping? I only started online shopping in like 2017 - the Philippines caught on pretty late. Before that I would either have to go to an actual store to get something, or ask my dad to buy something for me whenever he was in the US.

Did you ever participate in a flash mob or witness one in person? I've done neither.

How did you discover new music before the rise of streaming platforms like Spotify? It was mostly through either recommendations of my favorite celebrities or word of mouth in school.

Were you a fan of the "Harry Potter" book series or the "Twilight" saga? I was never into Harry Potter but I was obsessed with Twilight (still am, lol). I caught on to the hype in 2008 when the first movie came out – quickly breezed through all the books and got to watch New Moon up to Breaking Dawn Part 2 in the cinema.

Did you ever have a MySpace profile and customize it with HTML and CSS? I didn't do HTML on Myspace but I definitely did on Tumblr. This is where I learned all my website customization knowledge tbh.

What was your favorite TV show or cartoon during your childhood? In early childhood, my favorite was without a doubt Hi-5. I was hooked and I remember feeling so distraught when I graduated preschool and realized I was never gonna get to watch Hi-5 again once I'd start grade school and have full-day classes.

Growing up more I started to gravitate towards shows like Drake and Josh, The Suite Life, and That's So Raven. Apart from those, Spongebob also remains a favorite no matter what age I get.

How did you feel about the transition from traditional television to streaming services? It was hard to grasp at first. I remember in 2020 when my dad was asking us if we can get rid of cable and I felt genuinely scandalized lol like why would we ever get rid of cable when it's been part of our everyday lives since even before I was born??? Anyway, my siblings and I eventually gave in when we too realized that we never even went through the cable channels anymore.

Streaming services are definitely the 'new' way of consumption now and my family has fully eased into it - we're subscribed to Netflix, Disney+, and Prime Video. I don't have too many strong feelings about this topic, but if anything it does feel extremely bittersweet whenever we'd hear a channel permanently sign off for good – recently it had been NatGeo.

[fourseasonsfigs]

Orange Peel Sister and Mountain Egg Girl

For something a little different, today we have fandom figs - of the fans! Yep, that's us fans there looking so cute!

These were sold separately, but I decided to post them together because they go together so well, and because they're really very specific figs.

This fig maker is incredible - she's an artist who originally designed and sold Junzhe jewelry, who then branched out into making figs and now, all other kinds of merch! These are her own designs, and she has a lot more figs she wants to make, which I really hope become reality. As you can tell from these figs, all of her art is beautifully detailed and just delightful.

For these figs, you could pick if you wanted multicolored eyes (one blue, one orange). I did not myself, but it was a cool option!

Unfortunately, there was a known issue on the earlier figs that shipped, where the custom indent in the polystyrene was too big, leading to this unfortunate result! The factory fixed subsequent shipments by packing with cotton, but mine had already shipped.

Something out of my fig nightmares! (BY the way, my friend asked me, if by any chance, the ghost story books that I read as a young, impressionable, and very sensitive child was by any chance Scary Stories to Read in the Dark. And YES, they sure were. I had blocked them from my memory. I also blocked the stacks and stacks of lurid pulp horror/ghost story comic books populating the kids (?!?!) section of the library out of my mind, but I'm sure I'd recognize them again if I saw them.)

Despite how overly dramatic I made it sound, it was a super easy fix. Just put some glue in the neck socket (ugh) and good as new!

She's adorable! Frankly, the accidental loosening of the head from the body really wasn't bad at all, I'd far rather that happen, than have the leaf or a pigtail or lollipop break, for instance.

Her ponytails act as a brace to keep her standing! It's fantastic. I will, however, have to put her on one of my bigger fig stands so the hair can remain level with the base.

You can see the gardenias in her hair, the symbol for Zhehan, turn into oranges in the back of her hair. What cute ponytail holders! I'm sure a version of these exist out there in the fandom world, I know the fan merch makers are too clever not to have one or more versions of this out there. This is also a nice angle to see the leaf on her orange head!

She's of course wearing Gong Jun's signature color Jifeng Blue, and I'm assuming her sweatshirt is from his 361 endorsement brand that we all know and love (I must say I really do, I've been super happy with everything I've bought from them!). This however, has our two faves' initials!

You can really see how her hair serves to brace her, which is good because, as you'll see later, those cute little tennis shoes on her feet are TINY.

They don't look very small here, the whole fig just looks adorable and cute. I love how she modeled oversized hoodie. The rounded edges is very distinctive in her style, it gives her art a very sweet look.

A great view of the gardenia in her hair from this angle, as well as the really beautifully detailed shoes. Also a perfect angle of the lollipop in her hand - she, like many of her orange sisters, is enjoying some candy! Her eyes are beautiful and her whole expression is super cute. I love her!

Hmm, I guess her feet don't look that tiny from this bottoms-up angle, if I don't max out on my 30-photo limit I'll compare them to another fig. They were actually so small I was going to cut a fig sticker in half to accommodate before I realized that her hair would help hold her up.

The top of her very cute head!

I mentioned the fig maker started off as a jewelry maker, right? I have my eye on this earring set of hers right now (and by "eye" I mean, it's hanging out in my Weidian cart)

She had an extremely inexpensive optional add-on to include a pair of matching orange earrings, which of course I sure added on.

And the earrings in action. It's surprisingly hard to take a selfie picture of your ear, I'm just saying.

Alright! On to our precious little mountain egg!

No travel damage here! She arrived with no issues at all.

This dandan represents the particularly sweet and innocent fans, and is big eyed and cute indeed! She's holding blue and red hearts for Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing, respectively, emblazoned with the initials for langlangding, the CP side of the fandom.

This fig is tiny! The zoom on the pictures are a bit deceptive that way in that it's so blown up it's hard to tell how small she is. I'll make sure to do a comparison post at the end!

Her little blue puff of a dress is too cute. Look at the little puff detailing at her sleeves, and the little white collar. Adorable.

Her hair is the rich yellow of a fluffy new chick!

You can see more pintuck detailing on her little blue dress, which is also Jifeng Blue.

The paint job on the eggshell hat is absolutely pristine - I imagine it was a separate piece that was glued on the figure.

The little baby chick elements are SO CUTE. She did such a nice job on this fig!

Aww, you can really see the faces on the baby chicks here, as well as the enormous heart eyes of his slightly bigger baby chick! You could also have opted for different colored eyes for her, but I did not. When the remainders post and other folks who want them have a chance to get them first, if there's any left of the multi-colored eyes I think I'll pick them up. I like variants and different colorways of things a lot. It's the collector's bug in me, I think.

Her little legs are so, so small. Stay tuned for the comparison fig!

Ooops, I didn't think this shot through by having a white-on-white effect! I put some shadow in there in a desperate attempt to make it work. Oh well, you can see the little chick, that's what's important here.

And here's the two sisters! Looking adorable.

WHY is this pic so blurry? 😢 You guys deserve better than my rudimentary iPhone skills, I am sorry. If you squint past the blur, you can see how tiny their little legs and feet are, especially with the little Mountain Egg sister there.

Oh, you can see the different color eyes on the box photo! That's excellent, especially since I am out of pic space (30 pics go so quickly).

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 342

Scene Count: 24

Rating: We fans are so cute!

[link back to Master Fig Index for more posts]

[kai-skai]

Somehow multiple people on my dash have gotten into Tamsyn Muir's The Locked Tomb, and it's been recommended to me as well. Having read the first two books, I ... can't really get into it. Here's my review (with some spoilers for those two books). (Also, this turned out more negative than I intended. Sorry about that if you like it, no offense intended, maybe just skip reading it.)

Gideon the Ninth was mostly fun. The writing is a bit too slow for me sometimes (detailed descriptions of settings/fabric/other stuff that I don't really care about), the worldbuilding a bit too vague/little, but okay. Gideon doesn't have much going on spends most of the time ambling around somewhere beside the plot being unhelpful, and since this fits her character perfectly and we get plenty of snarky commentary out of it, this is fine by me. The plot itself starts off very slowly and then kind of happens all at once at random. Maybe I've missed clues or important details - I guessed that Dulcinea was not all she seemed, but not much else. The characters' actions don't have much effect either: pretty much everything except for the final standoff would have happened more or less like it did with a completely different set of characters as well. This fits with Cytherea's powers and (apparent) agenda, so alright, but it also means that I spent a lot of the time just going "huh? well... alright, I guess this might as well happen" in slightly confused tones. The character or perhaps rather relationship development of Gideon and Harrowhark was savory and delicious, very nice, no notes (except maybe for “more of this pls”). The rest of the characters stayed somewhat flat for me (in some cases due to dying off early), with a few notable exceptions (Palamedes and Camilla, but... that's basically it). Overall I'd give it something like 3.5/5 stars, finished it fairly entertained and with both curiosity and some reservations for the next book.

Harrow seemed like a driven, systematic, and fiercely intelligent character in the first book, not to mention a necromancer with (necessarily) a good grip on the mechanics of this essential aspect of the world. I expected this to mean that the second book would have a stronger (tighter, more coherent) plot influenced heavily by the main character's actions, that it would contain more explanations of necromancy's abilities and restrictions and more analysis on what the various necromancers were doing, and that it would probably be more my usual speed in terms of how the main character thinks (albeit less funny).

Given these expectations, Harrow the Ninth was disappointing.

* Harrow's internal voice, to the extent it even existed, was bland. She seemed to sleepwalk through the first two acts completely, with no more emotional reactions than some dislike for basically anyone and anything around her and no discernible thoughts. To some extent that was to be expected given the traumatizing ending of the first book, but it just went on for waaaay too long. If she had any particular kind of feeling about her past self locking away some of her memories, if she ever sat down to think through whether to trust her past self or not, we didn't get to see it. If she ever suspected that the memory block was involved in her difficulties with her Lyctoral abilities, and perhaps even re-evaluated whether to follow her past self's wishes in light of this information (which her past self could not have had!), there was nothing of that in the book (including the later acts). I kept waiting for her to wake up, only to be frustrated chapter after chapter. This got somewhat better in/after the third act, with at least some thoroughly satisfying soupy (heh) action, but... honestly never to the extent I had hoped.

* Characters: ugh. Everybody is assholes. Mercy? Asshole. Augustine? I wasn't entirely sure about him for a second there, but yep, asshole. Gideon the First? Asshole from the start, a hot second of maaaaybe in the middle, oh and then he's dead. Ianthe? Asshole, relationship with Harrow seems to develop for a while, except then apparently she deliberately gaslights Harrow about something important (maybe! unless Gideon is wrong about Cytherea's body beneath Harrow's bed being real! which is a distinct possibility, given that Gideon only has Harrow's eyes to look through, but this is never resolved and potentially irrelevant anyway and this is immensely frustrating to me.) Harrow desperately needs a hug, but is surrounded by assholes, so that only seems even remotely possible for like five sentences spread out through the book. God actually had me rooting for him and hoping for a bit, but proves to be Actually An Asshole Too around the start of act three. Oh, and then at the end all of them turn out to be a slightly different shade of asshole than they seemed to be for most of the book. Which I genuinely cannot bring myself to care about, at all. And I actually really hate all of this, because... these are near-immortal beings who have spent ten thousand years more or less with each other, through high-stakes situations, set apart from the rest of their universe, and there are these tantalizing glimpses of genuinely complex and deep relationships and an interesting view of the world, but they fizzle out in assholery and are also mostly ruined by/at the ending. So yeah. Then there are also the dead characters, which are actually not completely dead, but most of what they do happens in that space of "this might be an elaborate false memory, although it's probably something else, but I have no way of knowing what" which puts a real damper on getting invested (at least for me, YMMV).

* Plot: in all the frustrating sleepwalking of the first two acts, Resurrection Beasts are set up as the Big Bad for later, one of them coming for God with potentially Houses-ending consequences. Then there's also a mystery threat that may or may not even be real in any meaningful way throughout the Canaan house parts. Then, the Resurrection Beast happens (and turns tail) offscreen while characters are busy doing Other Stuff (e.g. going “no u want Harrow to like you more than she does” at each other, eavesdropping on assholes), the mystery threat is explained but mostly after it's been made irrelevant by killing (and also is part of a whole other group of baddies we don't really know anything about but that are mentioned here and there throughout the book), and also Harrow - you know, the main character - spends most of the actual action sitting around watching/listening to other people doing things, and so does Gideon. The potentially House-ending consequence of God's death turns out to be no biggie because he can't die anyway, right before he's put into a completely different danger (let's call it superhell) that was kind of offhandedly introduced along the way, and then he gets away anyway. I just... look, I can't care about any of this. Nothing has been set up in such a way as to make me care. I don't care whether Mercy and Augustine are traitorous assholes in addition to regular assholes, because they're assholes either way, and because the asshole they betrayed is someone I also don't really care about. The Houses ending seems sort of vaguely bad in a "there were characters from there that seemed nice" way, but they’re offscreen and the on-screen characters don’t seem to care all that much about them, so the emotional impact is limited. The New Group of Maybe-Baddies is pretty much a complete unknown - they apparently toss around nuclear weapons and try assassinations but also a couple of non-dead characters are there now for some unexplained reason? (Which we learn in a completely random encounter that sooort of drops a clue or two about later happenings, but that stays... jarringly random.) Once again, most of this is - as far as I can tell - impossible to figure out or anticipate in advance. While I got the Ortus/Gideon switch, that wasn't much of a mystery given that we already knew Harrow had altered her memories. The River's possibilities are not really clear early enough that I could guess at what's going on with Canaan house, and they are disjointed from the main narrative (with no indication that Harrow is reliving/dreaming/thinking about any of it). Harrow's existence doesn't make much - if any - difference to the plot at any point, only Gideon’s eyes are important for Betrayal Reasons. I suppose there are some things I've learned (Gideon's parentage, a bit about Alecto's wards), but these were... not actually questions I was all that curious about, and learning it almost incidentally from assholes yelling at each other doesn't feel very satisfying. A mystery that I thought was getting solved when Abigail brought up Harrow being haunted (namely, What The Fuck Is Up With The Body Following Her) was un-solved again when the haunting turned out to be a new character. Another mystery (why God would lie about how to become a Lyctor) doesn't get solved because somehow nobody asks.

* There are some meme references sprinkled throughout the book (I caught none pizza with left beef, jail for mother, and... I think another one?), which some people like, but I mostly found them incongruous with the rest of the tone. Which makes me wonder if uncaught and slightly-incongruous references are further negatively affecting my opinion here. I was promised that the Cool S would be important somehow, but as far as I can tell it was just randomly on a piece of paper beneath a Harrow hallucination and irrelevant otherwise.

I dunno. Maybe these books are better at a second reading, when you already know what's going on and can pick up more clues? Maybe there is some actual content in Harrow's hallucinated notes that I didn't get because I didn't have enough context yet? At least it would put some of the soundbites that are just unintelligible due to missing context at the first read in, well, context. But I don’t really want to reread them.

Aaanyway. Might get curious about the other books via fanfic/fanart, but at this point I’m leaning more towards reading synopsis (synopsises? synopses?) online than towards reading the actual books. I don’t really trust that the payoff from reading the actual books would be worth the effort for me.

[re-readingcomics]

Comics Read 10/14-11/02/2023

I recently read the first two volumes of The Nice House on the Lake written by James Tyrion IV, with art by Álvaro Martínez Bueno and colors by Jordie Bellaire. I have been reading Tyrion for a while, and Bellaire’s colors are familiar, the work of Martínez Bueno is new to me. I decided to read it based on liking Tyrion’s other work, which was good decision!

The Nice House on the Lake is about a bunch of people who all share a friend in a guy named Walter. Only it turns out that Walter is an alien from a species that has decided to wipe out most of humanity, except for some segregated groups of ten, who will prove that they can live in harmony unlike the rest. Here it is important to note that we do not see any of the other groups of ten that other members of Walter’s species selected in this volume, and also there are more than ten in this group. Walter invited his hand selected favorite people to survive the destruction of the world in a cabin near Milwaukee. These friends are from various phases in life, high school, college, and just hanging around New York City. They don’t know each other well and between that and the shock of that’s happened they are doomed from the start. Helpfully, both volumes come with a not quite complete character guide in their back matter.

Each issue is introduced by one of the characters narrating directly to reader, some time after the main narrative, when the idyllic isolation of the house has ended and the apocalypse has become a regular part of their lives. The two volumes presented here do not bring us to that point yet, but I am interested in getting there. What I have read reminds me a  bit of Tyrion’s earlier comic book, The Woods, which I liked, and I am willing to say that this is better. Early on, it also reminded me of the Vertigo series Unfollowed, but considering what a misanthropic mess that turned into, it is probably for the best that I stoped being reminded of it. 

The speaker at the beginning of the issue also shares flashbacks illuminating their one-on-one personal relationships with Walter. These always involve multi-panel two page spreads. I bring this up because the multi-panel two page spreads in comics are pretty unusual. Having them become a regular part of this comic’s formula is destabilizing, like the characters existence.

Near the end of the first volume it’s revealed that Walter is capable of altering his friends’ memories, and has been doing so for a while. It turns out, some of them have had more to do with building this cabin and it’s rules than they are comfortable with consciously knowing. This leads to the second volume having something of a reset. The format is slightly tweaked and things rush toward a scenario where maybe the characters will have more control over their lives.

As I said earlier, I was unfamiliar with Martínez Bueno’s work coming into this, but now I can say that I am a fan. His work is sharp, but with a sense of wash giving an easy to read sense of movement. It could be water color, but in an almost impossibly controlled way. He designed  Walter to wears glasses that block the view of his eyes, even in his shifty alien form. However, there are other characters who also wear glasses where their eyes are clearly visible behind them. A great way to constantly remind the readers that he’s not quite who he says he is. My only complaint about the character design is that two of the female characters, Norah and Sarah, are a little too similar in appearance, a fact not helped by both characters being chain smokers.  But most importantly the house of the title really does look like it would be an awesome place. That is, If it weren’t for the circumstances surrounding everything. 

[lindsaywesker]

Good morning! I hope you slept well and feel rested? Currently sitting at my desk, in my study, attired only in my blue towelling robe, enjoying my first cuppa of the day.

Welcome to Too Much Information Tuesday. (Although this could have been Too Much Misinformation Tuesday!)

In New York, adultery is illegal.

A fart travels about eight inches per minute.

In Texas, you can’t own more than six dildos.

One species of African crocodile moos like a cow.

In Haddon Township, New Jersey, flirting is illegal.

Tequila heated to 800ºC can be made into diamonds.

In Iowa, kisses may last for no more than five minutes.

In Utah, you cannot marry your first cousin until the age of 65.

The first high-speed train project in Indonesia is called WHOOSH.

Sleep deprivation will kill you more quickly than food deprivation.

60% of the requests to ban books in US schools come from just 11 people.

In Michigan, you get five years in prison for seducing an unmarried woman.

41% of the French public is in favour of a limit of four flights per lifetime.

Having books or plants in your Zoom background makes you seem more trustworthy.

Older people who eat cheese have higher cognitive functioning than those who do not.

Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he isn’t wearing any pants.

The English word ‘set’ holds the Guinness World Records for having the most definitions.

Murphy's law: What can go wrong will go wrong. Cole's law: finely shredded raw cabbage with a salad dressing.

Married couples whose first child is a girl are more likely to get divorced than those whose first child is a boy.

Unlike most Western homes, the value of houses in Japan depreciates by an average of half every ten years.

Nearly 70% of Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings accounts, 34% of those people have no savings at all.

A 2019 study found that tree-planting is 40-times less effective at carbon-removal as letting existing forests regenerate.

There are so many different types of apples, if you were to eat a new one every day, it would take almost 20 years to try them all.

Beaver College, Pennsylvania, changed its name to Arcadia in 2001 because anti-porn filters blocked access to the school's website.

Studies show that walking through a doorway causes memory lapses, which is why we often walk into another room, only to forget why.

In 2009, a South African family won the right to stay in British Columbia because it was the cloudiest place they could find and they were allergic to bright sunlight.

In 1999, a man bought a shipping container for $400 to use as a bridge. Ten years later, he opened it and found a $2,000,000 Canadian warship engine inside.

In the Middle Ages, Oxford students were so violent that they made the city England’s ‘murder capital’. The murder rate was about 50 times higher than in English cities today.

The start of the theme tune from ‘Mission: Impossible’ starts with two beats followed by two half-beats. If translated into Morse Code — two dashes, two dots — it spells out the letters M and I.

After sex, the male rat emits a series of low-frequency calls that is thought to signal to the female rat that he is not yet ready to have sex again. It is called a ‘postejaculatory song’. (I know that tune!)

Stalin's guards were so afraid of him that no one called a doctor for over ten hours after he had the stroke that killed him. They feared that he might recover and execute anyone who acted outside of his orders.

Thomas Coke (1754-1842) spent six years travelling Europe and sent treasures back to his estate using acorns as packing material. The resulting oak trees produce leaves that are now fed to London Zoo's giraffes.

The Japanese water scavenger beetle can survive being eaten alive by a frog. Once the beetle is in the digestive system, it stimulates the anus so it can be excreted and escape unharmed. This can take as little as six minutes.

The Marshall Islands is the only country on Earth without a national football team. The Marshall Islands are a sprawling chain of volcanic islands and coral atolls in the central Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and the Philippines.

In a 2016 survey Americans were asked which famous non-presidential figure they would like to see added as the fifth face on Mount Rushmore. Donald Trump was ranked fifth, below Jesus Christ but above Mickey Mouse.

In 2016 the remote Japanese train station of Kami-Shirataki was scheduled to close, until the authorities realised that a single student was still using it for their commute to school. They rescheduled the closure until after she graduated.

Okay, that’s enough information for one day. Have a tremendous and tumultuous Tuesday! I love you all.

[pcttrailsidereader]

Seven Summers

In his forthcoming book about completing the PCT in the course of seven summers with his brother-in-law, Glenn, author Bob Welch recounts the ups and downs of their quest. It was not without serious challenges . . . from injury to fire to snow and family needs . . . but they did finish the trail.

I selected this excerpt not because it touched on one of those challenges but because it reflects on a very real part of life on the trail. When walking the trail becomes tedious, how do you spend those long hours of walking?

And the trail angel story is nice too.

I will review the book in a subsequent post.

THE MORNING broke damp and dreary. Though I’d fixed my broken trekking pole, my feet were blistered and hurting. And it felt as if we were trapped in a rain forest over which the sky no longer existed. The woods were dark, wet, and cold.

With nineteen miles to hike on this next-to-last day, one challenge was physical, the other mental; how could I find a “happy place” for my mind on a day that looked anything but that? Over the years, I’d prided myself in being able to do this—use my imagination to take me away from a pursuit that sometimes could be monotonous.

I credit that to two jobs I had as a teenager involving mindless work—raking beans onto a conveyor belt at a cannery and mowing lawns. They forced me to mentally detach. I would put together lists, add numbers, do anything to not think about bean-raking or mowing: Top 10 Crosby, Stills & Nash songs. Quarter-mile splits needed to run a sub-five-minute mile. Number of swaths my mower took to do the Sigma Alpha Epsilon lawn. Now, however, my cupboard of mental detachment was bare. Then, I found a morsel in the far corner of the top shelf.

“Glenny,” I said, “I’m going to interview you today about your entire life.”

“That’ll be good for five minutes. What then?”

“Hey, I’m a journalist. I got paid very average sums of money to draw out people’s innermost stories. I think I can get at least ten. So, what’s your earliest memory?”

He paused, then began. “A few: Reading comic books and playing football, our neighborhood guys against a bunch of kids down the street. My Uncle George lived next door and taught at South Eugene High and would come home with these castoff football helmets and pads, way too big, but we wore them anyway. We thought we were pretty cool.”

Hey, this was working.

“So, what was it like growing up with all your Lutheran cousins, aunts, and uncles on Royal Avenue?”

“Wonderful. I’d walk a block down to my grandmother’s house to have her read stories to me. I was probably five or six. Relatives all around the neighborhood.

We’d gather often, especially for Christmas. My uncles were always giving one another useless gifts. One year one of them put a couple of chickens in a box, wrapped them up and put them under the tree.”

“Like live chickens?”

“Of course! What kind of weirdo gives someone dead chickens for Christmas?”

I rocked the forest with laughter. Alas, all good things must come to an end and after a few hours of this exchange, Glenn’s life had pretty much been reviewed. We both returned to our regularly scheduled mindless hiking.

Click. Click. Click. My trekking poles tapped their way down the trail. Drip. Drip. Drip. The rain continued, my blister pain made worse by wet feet, which increased friction. Don’t think about them, I told myself, which, of course, made me think about them.

Every mile felt like five, every minute like an hour. We’d been on the trail for nearly 200 miles and nines day. As we crossed a Forest Service road at Tacoma Pass, a voice startled me to my left.

“Hey, mates, how about a hot dog?”

What? The words came from an Australian thru-hiker with a bushy red beard, a guy who seemed to pop out of nowhere like a bridge troll. He nodded to a royal blue canopy about 100 feet down the road, where half a dozen hikers were sitting on—oh, my gosh!—lawn chairs. Steam rose from a Coleman stove where a guy our vintage was joyfully grilling dogs and heating water for cocoa. Beyond him: tables of hot coffee, Oreos, chips, breakfast pastries, oranges, apples, pop, orange juice, a virtual PCT smorgasbord of fantasy foods.

“Are you kidding me?” I said, glancing back at Glenn.

“Trail Magic, Bobby!”

We’d encountered a few other people offering similar gestures, among them the Mount Adams Buddhists and a former PCT hiker trail-named Coppertone. But this was the most lavish Trail Magic spread I’d seen.

“Greetings,” said the man at the grill, white-haired and white-bearded.

“The name’s ‘Not Phil’s Dad.’ And you are?”

“The Oregon Boys, Bob and Glenn,” I said. “Thanks so much. This is awesome.”

“Happy to do it.”

Glenn stayed back, apparently not wanting to appear discourteous in accepting this random act of kindness. Me? Before his pack was off I had downed my first hot dog and was reaching for a second.

“So, what’s behind your trail name—‘Not Phil’s Dad?’” I asked.

“My son Brian completed the PCT in 2009. Because other hikers said he looked like Phil Collins and he had to keep telling them he wasn’t the musician, they dubbed him ‘Not Phil.’ So I decided to be ‘Not Phil’s Dad.’ I do this every year to honor him—to pay forward all the Trail Magic he got along the way.”

“That’s awesome. And where’s home?”

“Bellevue,” he said, referring to a city just east, across Lake Washington, from Seattle,.

“No kidding. I lived there the ’80s; I was a columnist at The Journal-American.”

“Small world. I’m retired now, but I was an administrator at Highland Middle School then.”

“On Bel-Red Road, right? My wife worked at Highland Christian Preschool across the street!”

“Sure! Saw it five days a week!”

Glenn soon joined the feast and the fun. Nothing enlivened PCT hikers more than Trail Magic, not only because of its spontaneity but because, deep down, it offered us “undeserved favor.” Grace. Goodness. The best of humanity, in this case wrapped in a hot dog bun and served by a heart-of-gold father in honor of his PCT son. What a cool gesture.

In the next half hour, I supplemented the dogs with a Pepsi, four Double-Stuffed Oreos, an orange, and a cup of hot chocolate. The stop energized me for the rest of the day.

[grantairezee]

why is every single tutorial a video now I'm going to scream

[daenerys-targaryen]

Thank you for being so open to listening (jkr discourse). The amount of ppl (mostly cis) who have victimized themselves, acted as though they’re being attacked when really we’re just trying to take down jkr’s massive platform, is shameful. No one is denying the nostalgia we all feel for HP but is it really worth endorsing someone so hateful? You’re so right about the best thing to do is to physically move on. I tried explaining this to another blogger and she and all her followers then accused me of acting like I thought I was better than her for not being emotionally attached even though I explained that i too had an emotional attachment to HP. Still, the best thing to do is block it out, engage in other media. Let the nostalgia exist in your brain but then just, let it go. It becomes a easier over time, I promise. Hope you’re well and thank you once again for not shutting out all the ppl who have been hurt by JKR for the sake of nostalgia ❤️

I don't know how to reply because I... wasn't an ally when this discussion was first brought to my blog. Obviously, for anyone who saw the discussion I had about this a few nights ago, you know that at first, I didn't really understand the issue in reblogging / engaging with hp content itself. That is what started it on this blog, I got an anon telling me to stop reblogging hp content because it supports JKR and I was confused and didn't understand that and I think I was on the defense because 1) I didn't know the full horrific deplorable extent of her actions and was just like, "you can separate the artist from the art," but to be honest 1) I'm not sure if I really believe that anymore and 2) even if that's possible for other artists / their work, I'm not sure if that's possible for hp / JKR at this point. I said that me reblogging hp didn't have any effect on people because everyone knows it at this point, and I won't give it any more exposure than it already has. I was also on the defense because I felt that people were saying you can't love Harry Potter and be an ally at the same time, which at the time I obviously felt like was too much. I felt like that was possible because I felt that I was a good ally. I saw other cis people express this same idea and felt comforted that I wasn't wrong. I was being a good ally. I knew I supported trans people, I donated to them, I signal boosted them any time I was given the opportunity to do so. I also was annoyed because there were people who were acting like they were better than me because they don't like hp which really annoyed me. I was also annoyed because I was told that it was 'fucked up' that I grew up on it as if I can change what I watched and was exposed to as a child, my mom single handily raised me and she loves high fantasy including star wars, star trek, lord of the rings and harry potter. Not to mention that we had no idea JKR would be this way when the books and then movies came out, but that's beside the point. I saw being a hp fan and engaging with it the same as keeping the water running when I brush my teeth or turning my car on a few minutes before I leave for work (aka, grey and not black and white as people make it seem) but it's not the same at all. So yeah, I was on the defense. I didn't quite understand the ramifications of engaging with hp and felt annoyed that someone was just telling me what I can and can't do on my own blog rather explain to me how me engaging with the content supports JKR.

Then... I saw trans people I follow and care about express how they understand that people are attached to the series, it still made them feel unsafe, unwelcome, and unloved. I can't tell you the overbearing amount of shame and guilt I felt at that moment. They felt unsafe because I was prioritizing a fictional universe and fond memories over their own well-being, their mental health, their safe space - whether I meant to or not, that's what I was doing. Whether I felt like I was doing that or not, that's what they felt I was doing. It's different when you just have an anonymous person in your inbox demanding you to stop reblogging something because x y z is happening and then when you personally see the effects your actions have caused someone. It's real easy to remove yourself from the problem when you feel like what you're doing isn't part of the problem.

I'm so sorry to hear that you were targeted. I was speaking with a friend who also loves Harry Potter about this and we both just kind of had a little therapy session and really grieved the love that we once had for the series and I've just come to the conclusion that the best thing to do for me personally to move on from it is to just not engage with it anymore. It will still exist and be there. I'll forever be fond of my childhood and being in a harry potter club and literally being on a quidditch team in high school, but at this point, I can't separate the art from the artist. I can't change my past, I can't change that I loved it once in my life, I can't change what JKR has done, but I can change how I engage with it now and in the future. Not to mention how I've heard that the books are even more transphobic, are racist, and misogynist, I haven't read them but I have no doubt that it's true. So it overall just leaves a nasty and bitter taste in my mouth.

Being a woman, being queer myself, and being autistic, I know that when a group that is discriminated against tells you that you shouldn't do this because x y z, you probably should listen to them. I didn't at first. I had to be told that I was wrong. I had to look that in the face and understand that engaging with hp meant that I was actively engaging with her anti-trans rhetoric and agenda even if I was vehemently against it in my heart and head.

So no, I don't want to be thanked, I want to thank you for allowing me to be wrong and allowing me to grow and change my opinion when presented with a new perspective. Thank you. Thank you for not immediately assuming I was this or that and just letting me be wrong and letting me learn from my mistakes. I'm not perfect and while I of course know that, I think sometimes it's really easy to just blast people for this and that online because this isn't real life. It's easy to blast someone online, even if you're mutuals or were friends, it's really easy to take what they're saying at face value and I think that allowing people to gain the full perspective and change and grow as people is so important because otherwise, what's the point?

It absolutely will become easier with time. Thankfully I'm more emotionally attached to the likes of Lord of the Rings, but yes, everyone will grieve and let go in their own time but what matters is that they eventually stop engaging with it altogether. It's ok to be fond of it. It's ok to have nostalgia for it. However, it's more important to support trans people and help them feel safe today than support someone who actively hates them and funds the pockets of transphobic politicians.

[transmasc-wizard]

Would you like to talk about mack?? :D

i WOULD

unfortunately, this will not be :D . this will be D:

tw : familial abandonment, drug use & dealing (doesnt go into huge detail but its mentioned), manipulation/shitty friends, depression, self-worth issues, self-destructive behaviour

so mack (it/any btw) is a character who is very convinced he has already gone through his Character Arc(TM) and doesn't need any more help with his issues. and like, he absolutely got over a lot of issues he used to have, but a lot of other ones were just... pushed down to a place where it can pretend those problems don't exist anymore.

mack was shunned by its whole family when they were turned into a vampire at 15 by their manipulative and shitty vampire "friends", and ran away shortly after. they almost immediately fell into a group of shady people, since that was what it was used to. mostly, these people broke a lot of laws to have a lot of quite-dangerous-in-retrospect parties. illegal fireworks, irresponsible drug use, dares like "play chicken but with cars instead of swings", that sorta thing. mack knew at least 2 people who died at these things and it was not uncommon for them to wake up six blocks away with a memory gap of several hours

this went on for 2-3 years, im not quite sure, until one day mack watched One More person die at a party and was like . hey . maybe this isn't a good use of my life. and he just... ran away again? not in the same way, but he just ghosted everyone she knew and had to start over. it had a lot of shady/sneaky skills from times it used to help w drug dealing, so it put those skills into working on not-super-legal issues but in a significantly safer context (essentially scamming billionaires).

at this time, around age 18 or so, Mack was also loitering a lot at a cafe frequented by university students. at this spot was where Mack met the then-20 and extremely optimistic (lmao) James, a first-year theoretical physics major. when James (Sufferinf w/ rent) realized mack was homeless, he offered to let it stay with him, and mack then officially had a living space ! hurrah. this was the point where mack went "okay so clearly i am now okay. i have a house, food, a less-illegal-than-before job, and am not actively and dangerously using drugs or doing horrifically reckless things. im normal!" and shoved all their issues under the rug

those issues included the fact that by this point mack was just. incapable of showing negative emotions, bc they thought no one would love them if they did bc they'd be too much of a burden. (this is heightened by the fact their chronic pain started at 17.) then there's also the insistence that their constant exhaustion, apathetic feelings, and deep fear of getting close to people is Normal And Fine, their fear of any person who presents themself as a parental or otherwise familial figure, their feelings that it's not worth anything if it can't make others constantly happy, and her inability to cope with anything that she doesn't know how to bullshit through.

by the time the story starts, Mack and James have collected 2 more roommates (Leah and Spacey) (and they will get Val next ofc). James is... significantly more tired and significantly less optimistic, which also makes Mack feel more like she's in control (like, see, even JAMES is doing bad! so surely it's just the average stress of life. i'm ok. never once does he consider James is just also crumbling till like halfway through the book, and that is actually a tense side of their friendship). mack is very very convinced that since it's not actively putting itself in danger twice a week, it's FINE, and no one has to WORRY, and--

then val comes along and kinda. forcibly makes him realize he is not ok. and funky story things ensue :3

[liriostigre]

hey! I wanted to ask what your favorite poetry books are? I have a few but I want to read new and interesting stuff, and I trust your taste :D

hiii ♡

tbh i only started reading poetry collections like,, last year. i'm subscribed to poetryfoundation's newsletter (poem of the day) so i usually just read random poems

anyway, i'm not sure my recs could be considered new (cause i'm gonna start with Mary Oliver ♡) but feel free to message me if you want to know the themes, style, feeling (vibes, if you will) or anything you want to know about these collections. for now, i'm linking my favorite poems in each collection, i hope this helps you choose! ♡

here you go:

Dream Work —Mary Oliver (“Wild Geese.” “Dogfish.”)

Red Bird —Mary Oliver (“Summer Morning.” “Love Sorrow.”)

Blue Horses —Mary Oliver (“To Be Human Is to Sing Your Own Song.” “Loneliness.” “Little Crazy Love Song.”)

The Wild Iris —Louise Glück (“Sunset.” “Retreating Light.”)

Haruko/Love Poems —June Jordan (“On a New Year’s Eve.” “Mendocino Memory.” “Toward a City That Sings.” *under the cut)

Extracting the Stone of Madness —Alejandra Pizarnik (“Primitive Eyes.” “Summer Goodbyes.” *under the cut)

Ariel —Sylvia Plath (“Tulips.” “The Rival.”)

Prelude to Bruise —Saeed Jones (“Postapocalyptic Heartbeat.” *under the cut)

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth —Alice Walker (“Coming Back from Seeing Your People.” *under the cut)

I Must Be Living Twice —Eileen Myles (“Edward the Confessor.” *under the cut)

Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth —Warsan Shire (“Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre.”)

The Black Unicorn —Audre Lorde (“Hanging Fire.” “Sister Outsider.”)

Bright Dead Things —Ada Limón (“The Riveter.” “Glow.”)

Night Sky With Exit Wounds —Ocean Vuong (“Thanksgiving 2006.” “Logophobia.”)

Postcolonial Love Poem —Natalie Diaz (“Manhattan Is a Lenape Word.”)

Crush —Richard Siken (“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out.”)

Once —Alice Walker (“So We've Come at Last to Freud.”)

“Toward a City That Sings” by June Jordan

Into the topaz the crystalline signals of Manhattan the nightplane lowers my body scintillate with longing to lie positive beside the electric waters of your flesh and I will never tell you the meaning of this poem: Just say, ‘She wrote it and I recognize the reference.’ Please let it go at that. Although it is all the willingness you lend the world as when you picked it up the garbage scattering the cool formalities of Madison Avenue after midnight (where we walked for miles as though we knew the woods well enough to ignore the darkness) although it is all the willingness you lend the world that makes me want to clean up everything in sight (myself included)

for your possible discovery

“Primitive Eyes” by Alejandra Pizarnik

Where fear neither speaks in stories or poems, nor gives shape to terrors or triumphs.

My name, my pronoun — a grey void.

I’m familiar with the full range of fear. I know what it’s like to start singing and to set off slowly through the narrow mountain pass that leads back to the stranger in me, to my own emigrant.

I write to ward off fear and the clawing wind that lodges in my throat.

And in the morning, when you are afraid of finding yourself dead (of there being no more images): the silence of compression, the silence of existence itself. This is how the years fly by. This is how we lost that beautiful animal happiness.

“Summer Goodbyes” by Alejandra Pizarnik

The soft rumor of spreading weeds. The sound of things ruined by the wind. They come to me as if I were the heart of all that exists. I would like to be dead, and also to go inside another heart.

“Postapocalyptic Heartbeat” by Saeed Jones

I. Drugged, I dreamed you a plume of ash, great rush of wrecked air through the towns of my stupor. And when the ocean in your blood went toxic, I thought fire was what we needed: serrated light through the skin, grenade in the chest—pulled linchpin. I saw us breathing on the other side of after. But a blackout is not night; orange-bottled dreams are not sleep. II. I was a cross-legged boy in the third lifetime, empire of blocks in my lap while you walked through the door of your silence, hunting knife in one hand, flask in the other. I waited for you until I forgot to breathe, my want turning me colors only tongues of amaryllis could answer for. It owned me, that hunger, tendriled its way into my name for you. III. In a city made of rain each door, a silence; each lock, a mouth, I walked daily through the spit-slick streets, harbingers on my hands in henna: there will be no after Black-and-blue-garbed strangers, they called me Cassandra. (I had such a body then.) Umbrellas in hand, they listened while they unlistened. there will be no no. after

the world will end no.

you are the reason it no. ends

you no. IV. I didn’t exactly mean to survive myself. Half this life I’ve spent falling out of fourth-story windows. Pigeons for hair, wind for feet. Sometimes I sing “Stormy Weather” on the way down. Today, “Strange Fruit.” Each time, strangers find me drawing my own chalk outline on the sidewalk, cursing with a mouth full of iron, furious at my pulse. V. After ruin, after shards of glass like misplaced stars, after dredge, after the black bite of frost:        you are the after, you are the first hour in a life without clocks; the name of whatever falls from the clouds now is you (it is not rain), a song in a dead language, an unlit earth, a coast broken— how was I to know every word was your name?

“Coming Back from Seeing Your People” by Alice Walker

Coming back From seeing your people You were So wonderfully Full Of yourself.

But now You have supped With vampires They have fed Feasted On you.

They arise Bright-eyed Fit.

You alone have lost Not only Your sleep But also Your glow The luster of Affection Heart welcome Your people Sent home With you.

Beloved You must learn To walk alone To hold The precious Silence To bring home And keep the precious Little That is left Of yourself.

“Edward the Confessor” by Eileen Myles

I have a confession to make I wish there were some role in society I could fulfill I could be a confessor I have a confession to make I have this way when I step into the bakery on 2nd Ave. of wanting to be the only really nice person in the store so the harried sales woman with several toned hair will like me. I do this in all kinds of stores, coffee shops xerox shops, everywhere I go. And invariably I leave my keys, xeroxing, my coffee from the last place I am being so nice. I try so hard to make a great impression on these neutral strangers right down to the perfect warm smile I get entirely lost and stagger back out onto the street, bereft of something major. It’s really leaning too hard on the everyday. My mother was the kind of woman who dragging us into stores always seemed to charm the pants off the cashier. She was such a great person, so human though at home she was such a bitch, I mean really distant. I imitate her and I don’t do it well. She didn’t leave her wallet or us in a store. I’m just a pale imitation it is simply not my style to open the hearts of strangers to my true personhood. I hope you accept this tiny confession of what I am currently going through. And if you are experiencing something of a similar nature tell someone, not me, but tell someone. It’s the new human program to be in. It would be nice for at least these final moments if we could sigh with the relief of being in the same program with all the other humans whispering in school. I can’t quite locate the terror, but I am trying to be my mother or Edward the Confessor smiling down on you with up-praying hands. I am looking down at the tips of my boots as I step across the balcony of the church excited to be allowed to say these things. Outside my church is a relationship. On 11th street this guy and this woman are selling the woman so they can get more dope. All their things are there, rags and loaves of bread and make-up. And there was— this was incredible. Two men lying by the door of the church giving each other blow-jobs. They were sort of street guys, one black one white. I said hey you can’t do that here. They jumped up, one spit come out of his mouth. If you don’t get out of here I’ll call the cops. Don’t call the cops we’ll go, we’ll leave. That was a shock. That was more than I expected to see in a day. Something about seeing the guy spit come out of his mouth. He didn’t have to do that. I guess I scared him. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was scared too.