#back to good internet connection

[asgardian--angels]

things I wish I could relive for the first time again:

that magical window where you finish a new piece of media, having watched/read it all by yourself with no fandom contact whatsoever, and you are just so happy about it, and full of interesting theories and takeaways, and just in love with it as a gorgeous piece of art.

because I swear to god as soon as you join the fandom for anything, you're bombarded with how you're supposed to view characters and their arcs, how you're supposed to morally and ethically judge the plot and the ways it apparently failed to present the right message, and if you don't you'll either be shunned for not sharing the popular headcanons or you'll be harassed for not criticizing the source material enough.

like how is it that the fans of a piece of media are also the ones being the most negative about it? If I like a show or a movie or a book, well, I liked it. That's kind of the point. I'm actually not here to tear it apart and talk about how it didn't live up to standards other people had! I enjoyed it for what it was, and forcing myself to find negative things to say about it doesn't actually bring me more enjoyment of it or reap any benefit to me. Fandom's a double-edged sword; you want to join a community to share your love for a piece of art, and the price you pay for a modicum of joy is a mountain of negativity. that's one main reason that I never engage with fandom until I'm completely done with a show, because if I was plugged into all of that commentary and discourse during the process, I'd be completely colored by how I'm expected to interpret everything this piece of art is presenting to me without being able to even form my own opinions.

[timetravelstudies]

a meandering post about transmasculine aesthetics (or lack thereof)

i was thinking about how in both big and small, common and niche/micro ways, when youre transmasc you kind of have to resign yourself to the double bind of both always having to borrow the language of other people and groups to describe yr own experiences and simultaneously being accused (though not always so directly & in so many words) of stealing valor.

this i think applies across the board in a variety of cases but specifically i was thinking about victimization/victimhood, including but not limited to sexual victimization. and ofc victimization is not all there is to being trans &/or queer but as i said a while ago in a post re: that one girl raised by gay dads who was complaining about how lgbt culture is "too focused" on homophobia, victimization (& ostracism, & aggression, & in general adverse social circumstances) is an inescapable part of the queer experience so i feel like this is an especially apt case study.

like (and now im gonna go so micro and niche this probably wont be recognizable outside my very specific sphere of mutuals & inlaws but its the example on my mind rn) i have often seen tboys etc. on here for lack of a better word romanticizing a certain kind of sexual abuse & exploitation that is commonly associated (socially and artistically) with boys and young men who are "too" "feminine" and thus attract the attention of adults esp adult men. and like even once we go past the whole "are you allowed to (fantasize/post/make art/romanticize/jerk off/...) about X thing, do you have the correct trauma, i want an itemized list of everything bad that's happened to you on my desk by tomorrow or i unleash the mob" and we get to people who correctly see that type of thinking as always anti-victim and inherently deleterious (as well as anti-art but thats another post entirely), there are still plenty of instances of in this case transfems who have this...... disdainful and almost condescending tone of "actually what youre sexualizing is MY experience, MY oppression, MY victimization, /I/ and/or people like me were the ones who were abused for being boys who looked like girls, NOT you" which ..... i dont even really want to disprove or anything like that bc im not particularly interested in that, and tbh i get how it can be extremely annoying and frustrating for a general group of people to not give a fuck about your extremely real and continued oppression and/or contribute to it only for some of them to turn around and also aestheticize some aspects of that experience. like i totally get where the girls are coming from on this mostly.

but what i want to draw attention to is something else which....... ok let's say all the guys immediately drop the ganymede/painting of isaac/takemiya bpd shota/whatever posting tomorrow. let's say that is a transfeminine or queer male experience the tboys have no claim over or whatever. the alternate pool of imagery & psychosexual landscape to borrow from is that of female victimhood. which again a lot of guys do draw from. but as soon as a tboy gets on some ldr coquette dollette traumacore shit he gets accused of holding onto his white female privilege of being presumed harmless and ontologically innocent and so on. so what then?

to be clear, im bringing up these criticisms which are most commonly levied at transmascs by transfems not because i want to criticize transfeminine people or transfeminism especially but because i see this stuff as the most poignant and relevant commentary on transmasculinity that exists in the contemporary discourse as of 2025, and im including academic & adjacent writing in that statement. (for instance, a cis feminist critique to the ldr shit would be that trans guys are trying to escape sexist oppression while stealing its valor, as i was saying at the beginning of the post. i think that statement is erroneous and dumb for reasons that should be self evident and if they arent then this post isnt for you.)

anyway. my aim isnt really to debunk these transfeminist criticisms or even put an asterisk next to them and say in which exclusive cases they are applicable. the transfeminist theory answer to these qualms is obviously that there is overlap btw the experiences of cis women, trans men and trans women because they all occupy a minoritary (in the deleuzian way) position in the hierarchy of power founded by and based on cis masculinity. but the point im trying to make, or rather the issue im trying to discuss, isn't one of power politics. it's one of language, or more specifically symbols, or more specifically aesthetics.

there is no such thing as a transmasculine aesthetics, and yes, this is most likely because of discrete sociocultural historical reasons and was probably in no small part spurred by a transmasculine desire for assimilation into one group of cis men or another at all costs or at least for blending into the background as "just a regular guy" (this was a really interesting post touching on this topic. i havent done the reading myself but it's a credible account that makes perfect sense to me). but again, im not interested in a social and historical account. What im interested in is aesthetics: how people internalize, digest, express concepts on a sensorial and pre-verbal (or non-verbal or quasi-verbal) plane.

regardless of the reasons, we are here now: there is no transmasculine imagery of sexual victimization. there is no transmasculine imagery of much anything. this is especially true the more "queer" you get in an academic sense, i.e. the further away you go from a type of (trans)masculinity that is as close to hegemonic as you can get without cisgenderism (strong, in control, buff, facial hair, capable, handy, butch, a top, dating a woman or someone unambiguously more feminine...). there is no transmasculine aesthetics of gender non conformity, of artsiness, of etherealness, of fragility, of madness, of gayness & bisexuality, and yes, of sexual victimization - or rather, there are aesthetic languages for all these things that transmasculine people understand, appreciate and engage in, because we are people in the world like everyone else, but none of them are recognizable as transmasculine.

if youre wondering, why do you really care that much about aesthetics? arent there real, material problems in the world? id say yes, and we face those too. however. i am a big proponent of the importance of aesthetics as a mode of analysis because i believe human beings perceive, interpret and digest the world largely (though ofc not exclusively) through aesthetics. but even if you dont agree with me on the general plane, please look at the world around you. in the 2020s aesthetics are everything. all of our culture, all of our thinking, is done through imagery first and logic and words second, if at all.

in fact, though it is almost certainly just a coincidence due to the unprecedented exposure transgenderism is having right now (which i dont count necessarily as a good thing but not the point rn) a kind of explicitly transmasc aesthetics IS being born through what some have jokingly dubbed the "sweatermuppet industrial complex" - you know, the st sebastian with top surgery scars, png of a syringe, dog poem, richard siken quote collage type shit. ive criticized that stuff before and i'll do it again, not only because i find it corny, but also and especially because i feel that not even a few years since its inception have passed and already it has become a self-referential, sterile vein only good for selling lame sweatshop tshirts. but thats what happens when you scold every other type of expression out of existence: at worst it simply never gets made, or at least shown, again, and so it doesnt get to inspire the next thing, at best its edges get sanded down into something inoffensive if not exactly excellent and you get the doglamb with two heads again. and at this point it feels important to restate that any representation of queer & trans existence, ESPECIALLY the negative aspects of it (which again, are an inevitalbe and intrinsic part of it) will necessarily be offensive or even repulsive and yes, problematic, to some.

anyway. it all pisses me off and makes me sad for so many varied reasons. because i love aesthetic and artistic expression - not even just art, but every kind of utterance that is done on an aesthetic level - and i want to be free to do my own & also i want to see those of other people who are similar to me in some ways but different in others and let that inspire me to create, think and live in new ways (as indeed i already do with stuff mostly made by non-transmasculine people). because those of us (transmasculine people, trans people, gnc people, queer people) who are marginal and specific and weird even within our already small identity-groups deserve to express ourselves and be understood rather than languish in unsayability. because any of these experiences - queerness, transness, sexual abuse - is painful enough already when you CAN talk about it. because transfeminine people are lowkey carrying & saving art, culture and cultural discourse in this century even more than usual and i believe and feel in my bones transmascs as a group can give that much more if not to the mainstream at least to the community. because i believe the only thing that can save us from hurtling past the edge and down into the void is an aesthetic revolution and i also believe that only queer people can bring that about. etcetc. and yes tumblr is a very bad place to have any sort of conversation bc youll get into fights anywhere but tumblr is also soooo irrelevent. but also i feel like this is the only place where we can have this sort of conversation at this (extremely granular, specific, sophisticated) level where you need to have understood a bunch of shit beforehand already. theyre still doing pronoun circle type shit on ig. anyway. that was my post thanks for reading. shuffles off my soapbox

[neverendingline]

lowkey miss omegle

[gloombby]

got my printer to work and i now have stickers YAY

[tiny-tokunaga]

I had no internet over the weekend at the campground we were at, then just had a pretty bad day yesterday, and now it's like. Overwhelming trying to come back to social media? It was kinda nice just being away but at the same time, I miss my fwiends...

[brainrot-yumm]

fucked up in the crib at 7:30 am coping with the fact that I just wrote 6k words of springtrap porn and i'm apparently not done being on this year old bullshit yet

(also I figured out my workaround for the fact that the crack written seriously became kiiinda nonconsensual by just making a choose-your-own-ending where the second ending is actually super consensual so don't worry about it guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

[phagodyke]

sorry for not posting much on tumblr lately I've been trying this thing called "having a life" have any of u guys heard of it idk it's kind of niche....

[the-overanalyzer]

First night in a new place!

[auslanderka]

If you're asking how I'm doing, I'm fine. I'm resting somewhere by the sea and trying to regenerate and enjoing time with one of the most important people in life 🤍

[mia-can-yap-too]

ok enough of HIM but i miss my shaylas sm💔 (a b and c) a and b moved schools last year and the last time i met c was literally november... i miss them all sm but we're gonna meet this week hopefully 😇

i need to learn to answer asks in order but anyways

YEAH HE AINT SHIT

that sucks so much im sorry

long distance friendships are very hard to keep BUT not impossible

it seems like you all live close enough to meet up every once in a while so thats very good too!! i hope you have (or had) fun!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[micamone]

my touch screen is going out on my phone. everything else works just fine and there's no damage to the screen or pixels out, it's just not taking input as consistently anymore. I'll have to put it down for a while and just... wait it out until the ability to use it comes back. except in one area towards the top, where it's always dead.

and it's making me hate technology even more. not cause of the... inconvenience per se, i don't even get calls often and if i did i still have visibility on my screen for caller ID and could use my husbands phone to call them back. if i want to message people or read stories i can go to my desktop.

but it's frustrating because the knowledge of like if my old cell phone's screens went out and nothing else i could still use them as a phone. i could still dial people in emergencies and accept incoming calls without problems, because there were real buttons i could use. I can't use the basic fuckin function of a phone. I can't even restart my current phone without using the touch screen.

[beloveds-embrace]

Thinking about designationless reader...

Imagine how alone she must've been for all her life. It started since she was young, her parents pushing her to the corner of the home, away from the family, and naturally, her siblings would follow their parents' lead, pointedly ignoring her, and finding any excuse available to be out of her presence. She wouldn't understand them anyway, she can't tell the difference between noises nor could she even recognize scents. It just wouldn't work.

Reader thinks that maybe she could find someone, anyone in school, but kids are like sharks, except instead of smelling blood, they smell the lack of all scents on her. Most kids have a combination of their own and their family members' scents. Reader has nothing, so everyone continues the pattern, but now with more stares and jeers and hushed giggles. Reader knows that bullying is bad, but anything would be better than simply not existing to anyone. That's what the others say, at least, that she's nothing, nobody. Never to her face, though, just in the whispers shared between friends.

She eventually tries to find others like her through the wonders of the internet. There's maybe a handful more scattered in her country, but none are her age, and all have their own families who care about them. Was it just her who wasn't deserving of love, of connection? Reader reaches out to them, and they talk a little, but before long, through no one's fault, it falls through. She was bad at talking anyway, even if she doesn't have to worry about scents or sounds that aren't there, she never knew much about context or connotation. She never had the opportunity to learn about the intricacies in communication. Reader is back alone.

The military eventually scouts her, and it's the first time anyone has ever really looked at her. Sure, they look at her like a valuable tool, but a tool is better than nothing. Reader obviously joins, desperate for crumbs. She climbs the ranks, gets the job done. She is good at her job, so people respect her. She learns how to talk professionally, emails, texts, and so one, but no one talks to her on leave. No one invites her to the pub after a good mission. No one even talks to her in the mess. But people do talk to her when they have to, and that's enough. Maybe she even gets a callsign. Doe. After Jane Doe, the placeholder name for unknown individuals, and insult if anything.

Now there's the 141. They invite her to things. They talk to her. They touch her. Reader exists for them. She isn't just an unknown person stuck in the background and invisible to everyone else, and Reader doesn't know what to do. Her speech is awkward and overly professional, even in personal settings. How is she supposed to be friends with someone, multiple someones? How is she supposed to move? To act? To express? She doesn't know, but she really wants to learn. At least now she has good teachers.

ANON YOU GENIUSSSS okay but this? Perfect. AHHHH I ADORE THIS IDEA!! Esp the jane doe callsign omg yes

You weren’t used to being seen.

Growing up, you learned quickly how to make yourself small- how to exist quietly, without taking up space, without asking for too much. Because the few times you had asked- asked for a hug, asked to be let into the nest, asked why you felt so different- the answers had all been the same.

No.

Not now.

Not you.

It wasn’t that your parents didn’t love you. You were sure they did, in their own way. But love was hard to feel when your mother flinched at your touch like you were something disgusting, when your father sighed like he was tired every time you entered the room as if you were taking up space he was saving for his other children. When your siblings built their nests without you, curling into piles of warmth and safety while you sat outside the door, knees pulled to your chest and hands balled into fists to keep them from knocking, a cold ache burrowing itself in your chest.

You stopped knocking eventually.

You stopped trying.

You used to wonder if you’d done something wrong- if maybe you could fix yourself and everything would go back to normal. But it wasn’t something you could fix. It was just… you.

Scentless.

Designationless.

Invisible.

School had been worse, perhaps the worst. At least your family had pretended not to notice how different you were. The other kids didn’t bother pretending. They stared openly, whispered behind your back, laughed when you walked by. You’d caught bits and pieces of what they said- weird, wrong, broken, as if they hoped by having you hear their words, they’d convince you to leave at last.

You’d started keeping your head down after that, slipping through the halls like a shadow. No one talked to you unless they had to, and even then they either did it with a mocking, jeering tone that echoes in your nightmares or with a meek tone; as if your lack of everything is contagious. No one sat next to you at lunch, either. When partners were assigned, you always ended up working alone per your teachers’ instructions.

It was easier that way.

At least, that’s what you told yourself.

By the time you joined the military, you’d gotten good at being alone. You didn’t need friends. Didn’t need packmates. You had work, and work didn’t care if you were quiet or awkward or too stiff to laugh at the right jokes. Work didn’t care if you flinched when people got too close or froze when someone raised their voice. Work demanded to be done, and you had nothing and no one to stop you from that.

But the military also has the same teens who used to bully you so consistently. Rookies all to ready and happy to lord over you. It’s how you get your despised callsign, Doe. Jane Doe. A cruel mockery, comedy wherein you are the joke that has the world laughing.

Still, you wear it. It’s still an acknowledgment and that will always be better than never being seen. You flit from team to team, unit to unit, always an observer from afar, watching everyone around you speak a language you can’t.

But the 141 was different, when you eventually end up working for them.

They cared.

They cared in ways you weren’t ready for.

Soap was relentless, dragging you into conversations even when you barely knew what to say. He filled the silences like it didn’t bother him, kept talking for the both of you, lounging against you unbothered, until you started talking back. Gaz was gentlest, steadier. He never pushed, just lingered close enough to remind you he was there, waiting, whenever you were ready. Quiet, silent acceptance you’d never been given before, and you were yet far too afraid to so easily cling to it.

And the Alphas- Price and Ghost- were worse.

Price had a way of looking at you that made your chest ache, like he saw you, really saw you, and didn’t mind what he found. Scentless, with no designation and all. Ghost was quieter, sharper, but his eyes tracked you everywhere, presence wrapping around you like he was staking a claim you didn’t understand, like he was teying to etch every part of you behind his eyelids.

You didn’t know what to do with it.

They didn’t give you space. They sat next to you at meals, tugged you along when they went out for drinks, called you over during breaks like it was the most natural thing in the world. And it felt natural- until it didn’t, because sometimes you still felt like an outsider.

Like you didn’t belong.

You tried to hide it, but they saw through you. They always did, and they never shied away.

When you started avoiding the mess hall, it was Gaz who caught you, shoving a plate of food into your hands and dragging you to sit with him like it wasn’t a big deal. When you hung back during missions, letting the others fall into their pack dynamics without you, Soap was the one who looped an arm around your shoulders and pulled.

And when you flinched, once, at the sharp sound of someone’s voice echoing down the hall- when you tensed so hard it made your fingers tremble- it was Price who closed the distance, standing in front of you like a wall and letting Ghost linger at your back. Neither of them said a word.

They didn’t have to.

You weren’t used to being protected. You weren’t used to belonging.

But they made it hard not to.

[badjokesbyjeff]

So an engineer dies and finds him self in hell, the devil welcomes him and sends him to his spot, the he starts feeling to hot…. 

….. “it’s to damn hot in here” he says, he starts looking around and finds the air conditioning box, after a few minutes he manages to fix it and hell now has air conditioning, satisfied the engineer checks his phone only to discover there no cellphone service or internet connection, he looks around and finds the antena and proceeds to fix it as well and other stuff around in hell.

A week later God comes down to check on hell, and he can’t believe his eyes, “what is going on here???” He asks, the the devil appears, “oh hey dad, you won’t believe it we got an engineer down here, he’s been fixing stuff around here and everything is great!!”, “wait what?!?!, how can this be? All Engineers go to heaven! It’s in their contract!, if you don’t give him back I’ll sue you!!!” Says god angrily, and the devils shouts “ha! Good luck finding a lawyer”

[skullsfiction]

two people that matched each others freak | max verstappen

pairing: max verstappen x teammate!reader

summary: max verstappen and y/n l/n love to match each others freak.

liked by, carlossainz, maxverstappen1, redbullracing and 692,028 others!

yourusername: what an unfortunate series of events. first crash kinda nervous 🥰🥰@/carlossainz kill yourself for what you did to me.

view comments below!

user1: LMAO THE CASUAL SELFIE AFTER THAT BIG ASS CRASH ??

user2: carlos deserves way more then a 5 place penalty after that…

user3: no literally ??? y/n is literally BLEEDING !!

maxverstappen1: yeah @/carlossainz. KILL YOURSELF.

user4: you tell ‘em max 🗣️🗣️

user5: queens first crash and it’s not even her fault 😞😞

user6: queens first crash and she almost DIES

user7: carlos hate club reunite !!!

user8: oh let’s not…

user9: to quote y/n: “accidents happen. i know carlos didn’t get into his car with the intention of hurting me. there’s no hard feelings whatsoever.”

carlossainz: IM SO SORRY Y/N.

yourusername: i only take apologies in cash and gift cards xx.

maxverstappen: i only take apologies in cash.

carlossainz: why would i apologize to you?

maxverstappen1: because you almost killed my bestfriend.

carlossainz: do you accept venmo?

user8: max still calling y/n his bestfriend even tho they’ve been dating for two years now is so ??

user9: they were bestfriends for 6 years before that so..

charles_leclerc: give us a big scare there l/n 😬 happy you’re okay!

yourusername: thank you charles ❤️ but because you are carlos teammate, i feel like i am also owed compensation from you as well.

maxverstappen1: yeah leclerc! pay up!!

charles_leclerc: text me the amount 😞

user10: i love how max just goes along with everything y/n says???

user11: we love a man who matches his gfs freak ❤️❤️

liked by charles_leclerc, carlossainz, redbullracing, and 720,629 others!

maxverstappen1: thank you to @/charles_leclerc and @/carlossainz for funding our date night 💙

view comments below!

user12: NO WAY

user13: CARLOS AND CHARLES ACTUALLY SENT THEM THE MONEY ???

user14: this is so cute 🥹

user15: yns so pretty 🙁

maxverstappen1: the prettiest 💙💙

user16: i just looked at my bf and sighed

charles_leclerc: ofc!! cute couple 🥰🥰

user17: charles definitely has a favorite couple

user18: y/n, my favorite nerd

user19: max, my favorite nerd lover

user20: perfect couple

user21: i have a theory that y/n and max are so happy together because they genuinely compliment each other so well

user21: they literally clicked as soon as they met, and they have said that “they feel at home” with each other, they can be their true selves when they’re together

user21: conclusion; i’m lonely and i wish i had a relationship like this

carlossainz: you’re welcome ig. am i forgiven now?

yourusername: we’ll see!

liked by 284,029 others!

f1gossip: throwback thursday!!! throwback to when max and y/n broke the internet, by announcing they were both no longer virgins..through cake.

view comments below!

user22: oh yes the good old days

user23: been matching each others freak since DAY ONE

user24: back when ynstappen was still not OFFICIALLY confirmed

user25: you should throwback to when max refused to resign with red bull until they gave y/n a multi-year contract ☺️☺️

user26: this was a CRAZY day for f1

user27: this connected the dots for all the ynstappen shippers because they basically confirmed they lost their virginity to EACHOTHER!!

user28: did we ever find out who’s idea this was?

user29: a couple months ago it was brought up and max spoke: “i know lots of people think it was yns idea..but it was actually mine. i guess i was just tired to hiding our relationship, so i brought it up, and y/n thought it was hilarious.”

user30: my parents ☝️☝️

user31: from teammates, to friends, to bestfriends, to lovers. living my dream.

user32: them.

user33: if they breakup i will genuinely never believe in love ever again.

user34: them becoming bestfriends was so unexpected, but made so much sense.

user35: if it weren’t for the ice cream shop they never would have happened ☹️

user36: pls explain?

user35: this is when y/n and max had just started the season as teammates, max hadnt performed his best at one of the races, coming in at 6th with y/n behind in 7th

user35: after the race, y/n had unexpectedly asked max to go get ice cream with her at a ice cream shop nearby

user35: max, feeling like he didn’t deserve to celebrate in anyway, declined. but y/n persisted, basically pulling him into that ice cream shop

user35: that’s when max said he truly had the time of his life, he felt happy, even though his race went horrible, he said that he has so much fun with yn and that he has never laughed so hard; the start of ynstappen ☹️

liked by maxverstappen1, redbullracing, landonorris, and 729,624 others!

yourusername: siri, play nasty by tinahe.

view comments below!

maxverstappen1: listening to it right now!

maxverstappen1: oh wow

maxverstappen1: i like this liefde!! 💙💙

maxverstappen1: come to the room so we can listen together!!

yourusername: coming!! 💙💙

landonorris: you are aware you can text privately right?

user36: THE ICE CREAM SHOP PICTURE

user37: he looks so happy 😭😭😭😭

user38: sobs

user39: y/n healing maxs inner child is something i KNEW i needed.

user40: power couple !!!

danielricciardo: i been a nasty girl, i been a nasty girl

user41: i need someone to love me like max loves y/n

landonorris: whos gonna match my freak 😣

user58: ME I WILL PLS LANDO I WILL

user42: the first picture?? 😭😭

user43: omg the second picture. i’m going to throw up with joy. i love you guys.

user44: ynstappen ships used to PRAY for days like these.

liked by, yourusername, redbullracing, danielricciardo, and 829,924 others!

maxverstappen1: i’ll match her freak!!! i will !!!

view comments below!

user45: yes max, we know

user46: i just looked at my boyfriend and sighed

user47: the shirt???

maxverstappen1: @/danielricciardo thank you for the shirt :D i love it 💙

user48: i’m totally ready for max to wear that shirt on race day…

yourusername: the perfect photographer 🥰

maxverstappen1: it’s easy when my muse is perfect ☺️☺️

user49: that SHOULD BE ME.

user50: con🥹gra🥹tula🥹tions

user51: no one will ever understand how much i love this couple

user52: we love a man who matches his gfs energy ❗️❗️❗️

user53: so happy for you guys! haha. ha. ha. so happy.

charles_leclerc: beautiful shirt mate!

user54: the way charles and max still don’t follow each other but this is charles every time max post:

user55: oh! such a cute shirt! haha, ha, i’m so lonely.

user56: max could do better

maxverstappen1: kill yourself you worthless piece of garbage

user57: y’all saying you miss mad max but he makes an appearance every time someone says something negative about y/n 😭

. . .

notes: took a small break to enjoy my summer break start!! but i’m back, request are open !!

[meadowsofmay]

i reeeally shouldn't have read the comments on those early eps of vox machina campaign because the amount of people not understanding the fucking reality of stressful situations, piling of factors — such as morals, beliefs, previous experiences that make you either resistant or prone to more explosive reactions, — and actual need of diverse characters and hence, their diverse way of coping with/after traumatizing events... it's astonishing. everyone has their own breaking point, everyone has their own moral line that they would not overstep. and just because one character acts stupid or impulsive or explosive — just fucking irrational, doesn't mean its bad. it means that it's humane because humans tend to act irrational. why? because all of us have their own level of sanity preserved for stressful situations and me and my friends would act in completly different ways pre-during-post emergency happening.

and yes, humans do act fucking cringe. deal with that as you wish but don't be disgusting pile of shit towards a person doing a role playing for a tabletop game.