#Editor's note

[teyvationalgeographic]

recording upcoming gifs now, but id like to say starting February 12th, 2025 (5.4 release day) this blog will start posting gifs for the new areas including quest locked areas!

they will not be tagged for spoilers, but there will be no overt story spoilers just some lore ones based on visuals and if i end up including quotes on certain sets.

going forward this is how ill handle all new released areas! one extra patch to let people (and myself) explore first and then gifs.

lastly if there is an area i havent gif-ed (or i didn't focus on a specific spot/detail) and you would like to see it, im always open to requests! i absolutely would love to see other people's favorite areas :3

[poems-from-around-the-world]

Editor's note: I am not only aware that sorting poems after countries is problematic, highlighting this is one of the main purposes of this blog. I aim to show the diversity of poetry around the world. Poems written in indigenous languages. Poems written in the same languages halfway across the world. Poems written in the same dialect continuum split across borders. Poets who live in one country but grew up in another. Poets whose parents or grandparents grew up in a different countries. Poets from countries that no longer exist. Poets from countries that are not recognised everywhere and poets from countries that do not recognise those countries.

[yifftwiceplz]

letter from the editor: took me a while to get a feel for what my boundaries were gonna be but i have set up a rules page

for mobile only users please know that daves theme is really good

[hyeahgaku]

SakaDays #135 editor’s closing note: “Heisuke VS Kamihate! The showdown between sniper begins!!”

[poemsforthetmarchives]

First 25 Write-Up

Surprise! Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me \o/

This is a commentary track post, wherein I add some commentary about the poems I’ve posted. (As of writing, there are currently 31! That’s both very few in the sum total of the episodes, and more than I was expecting to do.) I’m going to be addressing them in posting order, oldest to newest, to hopefully keep things a little more organized than if I tried to do newest first. This commentary has my reactions / stories to the first 25 poems, for the very philosophically sound reason of five-ending number good. (/jk)

We begin!

1. ‘Blood-Curdling Story!’, by Shel Silverstein

For the very first post, I wanted to show a ‘proof of concept’ and why I liked TMA so much. This one fit perfectly: both because That’s It, That’s My Reaction To The Podcast and good horror in general; and because even outside of this context, like a lot of Silverstein’s poems, it’s so much fun to read.

Additionally starting with a short, kind of goofy poem helped a lot of the decision-paralysis I got sometimes, especially starting a project. Much like when writing: just get something on the page.

2. For 160: ‘I Felt A Funeral, In My Brain’, by Emily Dickinson

This is one of the poem / episode combinations I had immediately in mind as when I started this project. Generally, the poems I pick fall into three categories: ones that feel like the statements, ones that are adjascent to the statements, or ones that happen in the statements.

“I Felt A Funeral In My Brain” is in the last category: a read into Jon’s head as all of the shit goes down (TM), especially the last stanza. The slow-building dread, the extremely topical emphasis on Knowing in the last stanza, and how it’s open-ended on this horror, like how the season 5 finale was, necessarily, a lead into everything that’s going to happen next.

3. For 114: ‘Symptoms of Prophecy’, by Camille Rankin

I know this poem can be pretty easily read as, like, “technology is evil, fire is bad, Thomas Edison was a witch”, but I don’t feel that that’s how it has to be read. It-- and 114-- is to me about the horror of nothing being the same again, and needing to tell someone something that you’re sure they won’t believe. It’s a hell of a feeling. And a hell of an attempted warning, in both. (Also, I really love the title.) The despairing desperation here and in the episode fit together really well.

4. For 174: ‘Ozymandias’, by Percy Shelley

Already rambled a fair bit in the tags about this one, which I will now transplant here for ease of use: “#Technically Jonny Sims beat me to this one but I'm including it bc the contexts are different enough and also no one cares except me if, #poems or poem references get repeated from the podcast; I realize”.

The imagery of menacing legs standing in a vast nothing around them really struck me here. Sky / open air vs. desert. Also, there’s a more metaphorical connection, of like... this feels like a poem that ‘Simon Fairchild’ (quotations because we know he straight-up stole that dude’s name) would recommend someone. The horrible vastness of time.

5. For 169: ‘Recurring Awake Nightmare #2′, by John Darnielle

Full disclosure, I love John “The Mountain Goats” Darnielle’s band a whole lot, so this is a biased pick. But I also love his non-musical poetry, and this one’s such a simple, elegant illustration to me of part of what makes the Desolation so awful. Building things up to lose and not knowing when you would.

6. For 129: ‘Omen’, by Joseph Campana

Straight-up based this on Jon’s trying-to-drink-the-ocean metaphor; there’s the obvious drowning connection, and the sheer goodness of the line “All night through the woods / rain made the same sullen song”.

7. For 042: ‘Fear Of Dying To The Wrong Song’, by Amanda Lamarche

Required clarification note here that Grifter’s Bone isn’t a band so bad it makes you die, it’s a band so good you start to kill everyone else around you to hear it. As such, a poem about music and violent death, though not caused by person to person violence in the poem’s case. I like the narrator ‘joining the song’ in the last a lot, too.

8. For 160 (again): “So Much Happiness”, by Naomi Shihab Nye

For all that this is a horror drama podcast and nothing is going to end well, they did have a few long moments of happiness, and I wanted to reflect that (/or “as we say in our Wiccan circles., ‘honoured’”). This is one of my favourite love poems, and I liked how it both kind of shares and mirrors its end line with “I Felt A Funeral”; the emphasis on Knowing through terror vs. being known through happiness. It’s a really warm, lovely piece.

9. For 150: ‘‘I Will Learn How To Love A Person And Then I Will Teach You And Then We Will Know��, by Tao Lin

The only poe so far with a title too long to include it in the formatted title section!

A lot of the Lonely statements are either ghost stories or love stories, and ‘Cul-de-Sac’ was both! This poem is both to me as well. “when i cried in your room” is fairly literally what I think happened between the end the statement.

The poem definitely crosses over into Vast territory, but I think it’s more about loneliness than endlessness. The narrator is afraid of no one (including themselves) trying hard enough to connect with people they love, and how much they feel that emptiness; not the expanding universe they’re in itself.

10. For 094: ‘Corpse Song’, by Margaret Atwood

I feel like I have a backwards relationship with Margaret Atwood’s work than a lot of people: she’s one of my favourite poets, but I don’t like her novels very much. This is one of my favourite horror-type poems of hers; it’s part of a sequence called ‘Songs Of The Transformed’ (which you can check out here, though, content warnings for... everything).

This poem feels like Georgie’s statement from the opposite direction.

11. For 135: ‘Night In Day’, by Joseph Shroud

Manuela’s manic devotion to eternal night, night being ever-present in different ways. I liked how benign it seems in the poem and how-- if you will-- dark the context makes it.

12. ‘Tea In A Space-Ship’, by James Kirkup

The second unaffiliated poem in the bunch! In all honesty I flipped past this one while I was looking through one of my eigth-grade ELA books (which I stole by accident at first but then didn’t give back, on purpose, so YMMV) for other fitting poetry. As the note says, it immediately put Manuela into my head, in a much more... lighter (again if you will) situation than the previous poem.

Also, I just really like this poem; it’s silly and light-hearted while still Feeling fairly true. You gotta find joy where you can sometimes.

13. For 144: ‘The Extinction Of The Dinosaurs’, by David Baker

Aaand we go right back down to planetwide extinction. \o/ I picked this one for mood and visuals more than content, although I think the looming numbers are still there. This is a very rusted, dry heat, season-spent-waiting poem. The last two lines (“It’s like that. / Nobody’s going anywhere. Nothing’s coming back.”) especially; which feeds into the poor statement-giver’s feelings of restlessness, and inevitability.

14. For 009: ‘Kids’, by John A. Williams

No joke, I read this poem when I was myself a pretty young kid (though I wouldn’t’ve said so; I think I was like, twelve?), and it is now inscribed on the inside of my skull. I picked it for its punchiness and also for it’s dramatic irony. Given what Julia becomes.

15. For 103: ‘View Of A Pig’, by Ted Hughes

There’s only so many poems about pigs, and this is the most powerful one I know. I think the ways of seeing animals as, anything less or more than animals; a monster vs. “a sack of wheat”, are interesting to think about comparatively. Especially in how like... an animal that’s a monster is horrible, while an animal that’s just an object, a chunk of flesh, isn’t even pitiable anymore. It’s wild how far our range of experience goes.

16. For 127: ‘Scientific Method (ocean)’, by James Tadd Adcox

Jon’s “Drinking the ocean” moment in poetry form. He really wasn’t prepared. (And, likely, won’t be in the future.)

17. For 077: “A Stranger”, by Saeed Jones

The theme with this poem and statement match almost exactly; though it’s much kinder to the person and their mother than the episode.

18. For 013: ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, by Stevie Smith

This poem is about the Lonely even though in pure text-face it’s about the Vast, at the same way that drowning is also a Buried domain. Everything can mean a lot of things! “Much too far out / all of my life”.

Eric and Naomi’s story is extremely sad, particularly since it starts being about hope and love, and how much affection I have for both of them despite not knowing them at all except secondhand / not for very long. For me this describes them both, despite the pronouns. I wish I had a nicer poem for them. (Unfortunately, as we all know, The Magnus Archives.)

19. For 089: ‘Figs from Thistles: First Fig’, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

As I left in the tags, “Ik this one is a bit on the nose & over-referenced but consider: 1) it's still very good and 2) Jude was not a particularly subtle character. Also 3): I like it”.

Which remains true! What’s also is I feel like linking this poem to the statement is almost a disservice to the poem. It’s such a short piece that’s been used so wonderfully in other contexts, and I’m handing it to the backstory of a woman who literally causes as much cruelty as possible for eldritch funsies. Still: Jude and her ever-unending energy fits it well.

20. For 168: ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’, by William Butler Yeats

You can’t have an episode about the fear of death in this archives without a poem explicitly thinking about death! This is one of my favourites. (Shoutout to ‘In The Flesh’ and also my tenth grade English class.) I picked it because I think it echoed Oliver’s mindset and voice so much: detached, hopeless in a fatalist way, and melancholy.

Oliver was one of the only avatars I actively felt sympathy for, before this episode. To me, it all comes back to how The Fears Are Bad and literal definitions of evil, and actively inflicting evils on others with no thoughts or regrets, or at worse enjoying evil actively, is Also Very Bad. Before the apocalypse, Oliver had done terrible things-- actively murdering a couple people and intentionally causing the death of a literal boatload of people, most notably--, and he was trying to help warn people. Those don’t cancel each other out but they both matter. Caring matters. Oliver doesn’t care at all anymore. “Brought all to mind” ... “This life, this death”.

21. For 045: ‘Mosquitoes’, by Katherine Hauth

Listen. If they hadn’t been testing on human-eating mosquitoes, this whole episode wouldn’t’ve been a problem.

22. For 030: ‘Implications for Modern Life’, by Matthea Harvey

Weird hope for a deeply visceral poem, for an episode with deeply and literally visceral episode.

23. For 173: ‘Darkness Starts‘, by Christian Wiman

This entire poem is an excellent one, but I really chose it for the last stanza. “Children become their cries”.

24. For 165: “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!” (Cover), performed by Jennifer Ann.

This one, I admit, is pretty pretentious! Perfect for using a Beatles song, badumchh, no. I genuinely like and am creeped out by this song in equal measures. But nonetheless. It’s a song about a circus that sounds like a haunted circus, and I felt like it was a good companion to the episode, since we already got a poem.

25. For 144 (again): ‘The Increasing Frequency Of Black Swans’, by Camille Rankine

This is the second poem I used for this episode; the first was “[LINK]The Extinction Of The Dinosaurs”. Both expressed the “dry summer of defeated, exhausted hope” that the statement stank of so well. ‘Extinction Of The Dinosaurs’ was for the statement giver himself, and how I imagined it must’ve looked like in his head.

“The Increasing Frequency Of Black Swans” I read more like Martin’s headspace while reading the statement, and to a degree his mindset for most of the season. Talk about a way to reorient everything you thought about in your life.

I especially like how the last line foreshadows his last act of season 4, in terms of secret and somewhat-awful-for-you motivations. “[...] that’s been changing the way my body moves this whole time”.

Thank you.

[mystix-moon]

From the Editors

Hello, this is the editing manager of Apex Media and we are sorry to announce that The Onyx World Saga debut will be put on hiatus until further notice. We are still working hard with the Creator to finish the content, but it has been a slower process then we were expecting. Please keep an eye out for updates and other posts, so you may stay informed. We are very thankful for your patience and support!!

[sixeyesonathiel]

no because satoru would 100% rest his chin on your shoulder and sway you side to side when you’re brushing your teeth together.

you’re both standing in front of the sink like a couple in a toothpaste commercial—except it’s nothing like that. because satoru won’t stay on his side. won’t stay still. he’s brushing his teeth and somehow also wrapped around you like an oversized koala.

he’s got his stupid long arms slung around your waist, chin on your shoulder, toothbrush dangling from his mouth while he sways you gently from left to right. you’re trying to focus on your brushing form. he is not.

he starts humming around the toothbrush like it's a kazoo. the vibrations tickle your neck. you elbow him. he takes it as encouragement. now he's full-on doing choreographed sways like you're ballroom dancing to the theme song of your shared toothpaste tube. the worst part? he’s smiling through it. foamy toothpaste grin and everything.

“mmnff luff you,” he mumbles into your shoulder.

“what?”

he lifts his head, leans in dramatically with paste still in his mouth: "i said: i love you, toothbrush edition."

you try to rinse your mouth. he tries to spit in the sink at the same time. it’s chaos. it’s routine. you think you might actually kill him someday and he’ll die grinning with mint breath and a heart full of stupid domestic joy. he’s such a clingy housecat of a boyfriend. affectionate and annoying in equal measure.

“why do you always do this?”

“‘cause you're cuter in the mirror next to me.”

[laudaddysmitten]

Thanks ghostrat/ bilvy for all you gave to us the past year. Have to follow your heart and whatever muse strikes you, go with where your passion lies. Grateful for the wrap up chapter/ end of Streamers AU. And endlessly grateful for all the amazing writing and art you gave the fandom. You'll be sorely missed.

On a more personal note, I'm just hella sad so IDK if this is bad Tumblr etiquette or something (sorry if so, I'm just inept, hoping this isn't anything negative to anyone), but I wanted my thoughts/ feelings to have somewhere to go, out into the ether I suppose...

In someone's comment on the last chapter/author notes mrghostrat just put up on AO3 for the now abandoned Streamers fic, they wrote "goodbye from the Good Omens fandom" and my heart broke with how real and....final... that made it. Even though, duh, my favorite writer and artist literally saying "my Good Omens muse is officially dried up and I have no desire to write any more with them" should've done it. I mean, it did, but I was still letting myself be in denial I guess.

Ghostrat was the first fanfic writer whose username I paid enough attention to to remember. Because I LOVE those fics. It was the first time I visited an author's works page, devoured every other thing he wrote, they were the first fics I adored and reread (a LOT), and all those works gave me the inspiration/ aspiration to attempt to write, hoping I'd be able to write maybe 10% as well as bilvy if I worked very very hard at it.

Just....the feels. I'm not sure if being on a mid-WIP hiatus myself, spawned by writing issues, imposter syndrome, insecurity, and health issues/ IRL stuff makes my feelings even worse. Probably. But man, just gonna have to give myself a forced and very rare "shut up and feel your feelings" day, because it's real and ignoring them won't make them go away.

🥺 😭 ❤️‍🩹

hi I really love ur art and writing stuff but I was curious if u were ever gonna update the streamer fic? It’s been a minute since I checked but idk I really liked it and ur other good omens works :)

hi, thank you!!

it's been on my mind a LOT these last few weeks-- i think i've decided to officially abandon it, and post one last chapter with all of my notes that show where the story was going to go. i'm not sure how that fits in with ao3 etiquette, but i feel so bad abt the idea of leaving it in limbo where no one knows what's happening with it

i'm sorry about the silence, but it's been easier to just kinda hide instead of come out and admit that my good omens muse is officially dried up and i have no desire to write any more series with them.

[rosamundpkes]

THE X FILES 1.20 "Darkness Falls"

[ephotosphere]

update on the link situation: figured out why the links weren't working- i'm using earth pro and i get the link to the browser google earth via a fun little button in the corner called "View in Google Earth on the web" and copy & paste the link.. except when i do that it turns into a mailto: link and no matter what i do, no matter how i edit the link it turns back into a mailto: once you open it ... and i am too stupid to figure it out so no links for now. NO MORE LINKS. Have a good evening, xoxo.

[teyvationalgeographic]

ur gifs are very cool and I like that you focus on the scenery in this game <3 thanks for sharing them with everyone!!

tysm!! the scenery is my favorite part of the game and im glad people enjoy it as much as i do <3

[poems-from-around-the-world]

counting posts in the queue right now, I have collected poems from roughly 60 different countries already

[yifftwiceplz]

sup im dave and i beat that dipshit game so don't ask me anything about it, my pronouns are he/him or whatever's funny

due to circumstances such as not legally existing in my current OR home universe as well as constant time travel and universe jumps i don't know precisely how old i am at any given point so you could be talking to me as a teen while also talking to me as an old man in a different tab, welcome to interdimensional twitter where the metrics are inflated and time don't matter

i like pretty much anything that is cool or catches my attention for longer than 3 seconds but in particular i like dead shit in jars, photography, movies that are so bad they're good, and recently housecleaning and organizing tips which i admit is lame except having a clean kitchen is not lame

clowns/juggalos DNFI

view more here

letter from the editor:

dave strider rp blog; takes place over a period of several years. mostly SFW but not always. anything after act 7 isn't real to me he's just living a regular life now. please don't assume same universe without asking he owns the interdimensional rights to interdimensional twitter so he trolls people across the omniverse

"but this is tumblr" it IS but he is using twitter and sometimes his posts get filtered through to different sites in different universes in doomed twitter timelines (like this one)

ooc info | rules page | relationships (wip) | tag nav

[hyeahgaku]

SakaDays #139 editor’s preview: “The muzzle of a gun is now pointed at him! Kamihate appears, but what happens next is...?!”

[zekuto]

i was obsessed the first time i saw someone post leon on that stupid panda rocker but i was never able to find raw footage of it lol, so i decided to compile leon with all the playground interactions because i love him <3