#t: don't get in my way

[aerialworms-art]

Lifespans.

(ID under cut)

[Image ID: A three-way venn diagram floating against a starfield. The circles are coloured; one yellow, one light blue, one a darker shade of blue. The yellow is the smallest, the two blue ones over double its size, with the darker blue the biggest. The yellow is half covered by the two blue circles, while it takes up a small amount of the two blues. The centre overlap between all three is labelled "the precious few years we three were together".

There is very little overlap between the yellow and the darker blue without the lighter blue.

The work is signed 'aerialworms'./End ID]

[umblrspectrum]

happy solvermas

[booart5]

Thinking I'm gonna atry to do a Star Trek screenshot redraw a week as like,, a fun little exercise,, but we'll see how that goes,, if somebody has any screenshots they want me to consider then I'd love suggestions <3

Posted to Instagram March 12 2025

[voraciousvore]

"I'm not kinkshaming anyone, I'm just trying to distinguish myself from all those gross disgusting degenerate perverts over there!"

Thanks. I really appreciate being excluded and shamed on this app because I'm not a puritan who only enjoys exclusively chaste and fluffy sfw scenarios. You all are such a welcoming and tolerant community for the extremely narrow niche of what you define as "acceptable." Sorry for being such a depraved and disgusting person. Guess I'll fuck off now.

[basket-of-radiants]

Why were you so disappointed by Rhythm of War?

This has been sitting in my askbox for years. I've taken several cracks at answering, only to get frustrated with the subject matter and burn myself out every time. I didn't like Rhythm of War. More than that, I didn't like it in a way that tainted my enjoyment of the entire series. And despite what it may seem, I don't actually enjoy discussing things which I don't like. I always want to talk from a place of good faith. Which is why now that my feelings towards the series are a little more positive, I think I can finally answer this.

I'm going to try to stay away from specific plotpoints and story beats for this post, because my goal isn't to nitpick (if for no other reason than it would take a week to write this post), I'm just looking to talk about my overall impressions. I think that might mean the only spoilers here will be structural? idk, if you haven't read Rhythm of War yourself then you should probably do that before looking for other people's opinions anyway. 

I liked Way of Kings when I first read it. I didn't love it at the time, but I liked it. Certainly enough to keep reading once I'd finished. One thing that made me a bit uncomfy, however, was the war against the Parshendi. They were this unknowable enemy which the book was not interested in knowing. An inhuman army. Their main purpose was to kill Kaladin's friends, or else be killed by Dalinar's armies. And yet the Parshendi, and the parshmen in the form of Shen, did show hints of personhood. And so it bothered me how Dalinar spoke so casually about how the Alethi had decimated their numbers, how the others used the war as a means to amass wealth and power. (It didn't bother me in a "this is a bad book" way but in a "these characters are bad people" way.)

One of my foibles as a reader is that when a book is very clearly treating one side of a conflict with more humanity, I tend to be a bit predisposed towards the other to account for that. And with the Alethi clearly being the invading party and superior military force, there was also some underdog favoritism. I didn't really like how the book treated the Parshendi. This is to say that going forward, the singers would be more important to me than any other through line.

So imagine my delight at reading Words of Radiance and meeting Eshonai, one of the Parshendi, who even gets her own point of view sections! They were no longer being treated as a faceless mass, we were getting to see things from their perspective as well. And it became plain to see the damage the Alethi had done to them. I couldn't really bring myself to root for Dalinar or really any of the humans against the listeners. I couldn't even bring myself to like most of these characters. I still enjoyed the book but once it became clear there wouldn't be a peaceful conclusion, let's just say that I wouldn't have wept for Dalinar and Adolin if Szeth had managed to off them. Like everyone in the book, I assumed that going forward all the parshmen would be turned into evil voidbringers in the everstorm and that the listeners were mostly dead. Except for Rlain, and Eshonai because I'd read or been told that book 4 would be Eshonai's book and thus had assumed she was fine. (Oathbringer spoilers, she was not fine.) So ultimately it was still a bit of a downer way to end the book. 

So imagine my delight at reading Oathbringer, where for the first time singers were being treated as people, full and real people, and where the human characters could no longer ignore or dismiss them. We met Khen and the others, common singers who were sympathetic and just wanted freedom from bondage. We see Venli grapple with the loss of her home. We see Leshwi and Moash connecting with and understanding one another. We learn of a history where singers were the original inhabitants of the planet. Parallel to this, Dalinar is having a truly excellent character arc about confronting one's past actions and acknowledging them to move forward and do better. I loved Oathbringer, for some years it was my favorite book, and I was excited as hell to see what came next. At the time, it seemed to me that there is a clear direction the story is going. Two books about needless war, and then a third where the main cast is forced to acknowledge the personhood of their enemies. This was so cool, all of my feelings from the previous installments were being validated, the characters were going to have to face what they've done in the past and outgrow their militaristic mindsets, I was so sure of that.

Imagine my disappointment when that does not even remotely resemble the direction the story went in Rhythm of War. RoW presented a clear, straightforward “us vs. them" narrative, where every character was totally fine with killing singers. Characters aligned with the singers were either flattened into wholly evil versions of themselves (Moash) or were expected to turn on their side in favor of the humans (Venli.) Because clearly there was no reason good people would be on the side that's all former slaves trying to stay free. Maybe there's some sort of accord or understanding between Navani and Raboniel that I might have found meaningful if the seeds of mutual understanding weren't already there in Oathbringer and then apparently ignored for a year by all the characters.

I have a lot of issues with how the listeners are handled in these books. (Here's some elaboration.) Following OB, I had thought that all my concerns were going to be addressed. Following RoW, I knew they never would be. 

Which is my main complaint, because that's the thread that matters most to me in this series.

I have a lot of other Things as well. Gonna just talk about a few big ones. 

One outsized source of disappointment that may seem a little petty, and which probably is, is that I felt mislead by the premise of the book. It had been announced that this book would center Venli and Eshonai, and I was unbelievably hyped for that. That did not really turn out to be the case. The purpose for their backstory chapters felt less about exploring them as people and contextualizing their arcs, and more about filling in gaps of world history. In the main plot, Venli was a POV character and she certainly played a role, but honestly not a very important one overall. To me she felt like a side character in her own book. I don't think it's controversial to say that the main character of RoW was Navani. A lot of people really like Navani and are happy about that. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people, and I found it all the more difficult to enjoy her when it felt like it was coming at the expense of some of my favorite characters. 

This particular gripe somewhat comes down to preference, obviously everyone prefers to read about characters they like more than those they don't, and it can go both ways. (For instance, on a craft/technical level RoW is probably the superior book to W&T, but I liked the latter a lot more because of my stupidly outsized attachment to Szeth and Nale.) But I do think there's something of a real criticism in how the book would rather focus on the feelings of a queen rather than those of a genocide survivor, and how the former's are given significantly more weight and import. It ties in with my main criticism, I think. 

And then there's how human/human racism had also been wholly cast aside as a plot point. Jasnah fixed slavery so that's resolved, and the only person who still cares about structural racism is the evil bad bad evil villain Moash/Vyre, who is now wholly irredeemable and who you're allowed to totally write off because he's sold his soul to Odium. I've already talked a lot about this. Other people have already talked about this, probably better than me. The writing was actually on the wall for me in OB, but again, RoW was when I fully accepted that this was never going to be addressed. 

There's something else that probably deserves its own discussion rather than being quickly tacked on at the end here, but here we are. This book changed how the series approaches war. 

In WoK, war was very clearly portrayed as a bad and inglorious thing. It was brutal, it was painful, those at the bottom died cruelly and unceremoniously and pointlessly while those at the top turned a profit. Every day was a new horror. The enemy were never evil, they were always just more people forced to go through the same thing. Through the next couple books, it felt to me that even if the characters had accepted war as necessary, there was still a tragedy to it. Conversely, in RoW (and W&T) war is basically a series of boss battles, in between which our protagonists can kill dozens of footsoldiers with barely a thought in the same way WoK had criticized.

Final note on all this, it sucks how we have no perspectives from the former-slaves-singers demographic. Those guys are really thrown under the bus, and seemingly get no self-determination now or ever. It was a glaring problem to me in RoW. Conscripted and enslaved humans and singers probably have just as much ground to form mutual understanding as a fused and a queen. (In fact they already had. In Oathbringer.)

In essence, RoW disappointed me because it left me with the distinct impression that none of the series's most important through lines (well, most important to me) were going to be resolved well. I liked W&T, but I haven't revised my opinion very much about the overall handling of these topics across the series. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to enjoy W&T so much more was because I no longer had such high expectations.

[skunkes]

Bad: mom told me to shave my beard

Good: she has never ever had to tell me this before now because ive never been growing this many visible beard hairs

[iztea]

things ~artistic talent~ does NOT translate well into

-make up

-techincal drawing like scientific diagrams/representations and what have you

-pictionary games

-cartoony figures that kids like

[uncanny-tranny]

I think such a big reason my trans manhood feels almost... bigendered is simply because in the eyes of most people (specifically cis people with whom I interact with most), I straddle this weird line wherein I am a man and often am seen as one, but I am also clearly undefinable insofar as cis theory goes, clearly queer, clearly outside of manhood if one only accepts cishet, patriarchal manhood. This definitely used to be a source of dysphoria for me, but I think now that I've transitioned, it's been interesting to explore this more. Am I wholly a man? Yes. Am I a man of multitudes? Yes. Do these multitudes contradict? Well, that depends on your definition of "contradiction"

[zolo-san]

oh also, for anyone who cares about the continuation of the "Sophia watches Dressrosa and then posts her thought here" saga: I keep just thinking about how Law is the most dramatic depressed bitch I've ever seen how's he gonna be out here like "No! Leave me here (to low-key bleed out) because if he dies I die~" Bitch Shut up That's so gay get the fuck out of here with that shit (don't actually tho because I'm living for it) Then Luffy and Doflamingo's fight moves and Luffy might actually be in danger so Law's gay ass teleports himself there and is like "quick gimme my future husband pls~" like SIR YOU ARE KILLING ME WITH THIS SHIT

[blazingblorbos]

Honkai: Star Rail is becoming more like Honkai Impact 3rd everyday

And no, I don't just mean Phainon or the other character variants, no I don't just mean the parallel Elysian Realm & Amphoreus storylines,

I mean the way these mfers released a MAIN STORY, IN-GAME ANIMATED SHORT WITHIN 3 HOURS OF SAID VERSION UPDATE GOING LIVE 😭

[somerandomdudelmao]

I know you might've been asked this question a lot of times already, but I'm not that often on Tumblr and don't know how to use it properly ^^" So I wanted to ask, what tool do you use to draw with?

I wanted to achieve a similar effect when it comes to your lineart, but I'm just simply inexperienced when it comes to these kinds of things. Would you mind sharing your brush settings or any tips for not only me but also other aspiring artists?

In advance, thank you so much for answering and hope you're having a great day!

Uhhh..you see..

No matter what program, I draw with a basic round brush.

I don't know what effect you're talking about, but it's built into my hand, not my tools.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2025: GHOST OF THE NEON GOD by T. R. Napper.

This caught my eye while browsing idly at the bookstore, but I was Strong and told myself, "no, don't impulse buy that; check reviews and if it's still here next time you're physically in the shop you can MAYBE get it."

Well! The reviews were Intriguing, and the oversaturated bright cover was calling to me, and it was indeed still on the shelf when I went back in for indie bookstore day, so! I yoinked it posthaste, put it in the daisychain lineup, and read it in a day (novella, 112 pages).

It is, delightfully, a weird and funny and fucked up little book. Near future cyberpunk thriller set in Australia, featuring petty criminal Jack Nguyen who trips (literally) into Very Advanced Tech and finds himself on the run from hired killers and dirty cops and a government or two, trapped on a lethal road trip through the outback with a university student he scammed a ride from.

The Very Advanced Tech turns out to be exactly my catnip, and also a HUGE spoiler, but your honor I love Oondiri, and Sally, and Jack, and horrible Quinlan, and poor philosophizing Col. Very violent, but it also had me inflicting dialogue exchanges on my mother (who happened to be sitting nearby) and giggling to myself intermittently--all around a fun horrible time. Four stars!

If you have a favorite fictional AI, you should definitely check this out.

[pynkhues]

Speaking of Louis, Lestat and masculinity, I think a point that people always ignore is that Louis' masculinity is important to him and he's attached to gender roles/preconceptions far more than Lestat/the way Lestat is not. I think it's communicated in the show pretty well. It's why he feels comfortable in the role of the successful businessman to Lestat's supporting spouse, but not when the power dynamic is flipped, and why Lestat feels comfortable to be the supporting spouse as well. Your recent post reminded me of the "Come to me" lyrics, and I think Lestat placing himself in the feminine role of Mélisande is another example of that. Plus the Marie Antoinette dress (note Louis being kind of uncomfortable with the camp of it all lol).

I totally agree, anon. I think the show's pretty deliberate with the fact that Louis' at his most comfortable in his relationships with both Lestat and Armand when he's acting as the businessman / breadwinner and they're acting as the supportive spouse. I mention it in the post I think you're replying to, but Lestat playing host at The Azaelia and helping to manage the staff - presumably without being paid - very much plays into that sort of dynamic, and it's one Louis seems to be repeating with Armand in Dubai given Armand's helping to effectively administrate the sales of Louis' art investments. It's a form of unpaid domestic labour which in a loving relationship, can be completely fine, but does often come with (perceived or real) connotations of roles and a certain power dynamic.

A huge part of that I think is tied to Louis' sense of masculinity and the role he wants to take in his relationships, but I also think it comes from a genuine place of wanting to be the provider, which has likely been borne out of the role he took with his mother and siblings as a young man. I talk about that more here, but I do think he needs to feel like he can look after those he cares about, and I actually do think it comes from a pure place even though it can be and is often corrupted by the fact that he's capable of real cruelty and vindictiveness when he feels scorned (i.e. he wants to provide for Grace because he loves her, and he buys her that holiday for her honeymoon, and he wants her to have the house to raise her family in, but when she disowns him, he doubles down on that out of spite not because he's letting her go and moving on, but because he's holding her to it. He knows she and Levi could never afford it without him, and he really rubs that in her face at their mother's wake. She'll always be living in his house, and that once meant something pure and good and loving, albeit paternalistic, and now it fundamentally does not).

I didn't really go into it in that last post, but I also think Louis being a voracious reader is something that gets misread a bit sometimes. Like these days, it can feel like being well-read is more common with women, particularly in online spaces, but I absolutely see the connotations on the show of it being partially a performance of class and masculinity. That's not to say I don't think he genuinely loves reading - I really think he does, and I love that about him - but this is the 1910s through 1930s when hypermasculinity and wealth was very much tied to being well-read, and a lot of contemporary authors from William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway to Joseph Conrad, were both depicting and exploring manhood in ways that were pretty formative for a generation of men.

On top of that, reading was a symbol of class because the only people who had the time or capacity to do it were people who were both educated and had money. Louis sitting on a park bench in a three piece suit reading Charles Darwin of all people is absolutely a show of class and masculinity, and the fact that it dovetails into a conversation about diet, again, is a broadcast of wealth and status. Sure, we're talking about eating people, but if you're looking at it as a metaphor, it's symbolic of Louis having' choices about what he eats when, which is inherently about having the means and status to do so.

Plus I feel it's pretty important context for Louis and Lestat's bickering in 1.05 when Louis' reading Madame Bovary - Lestat calls Louis a snob, and Louis goes in by basically calling Lestat shallow and uncultured, which is a) very funny to me, personally, I love it when they're mean to each other, haha, but also b) I think very much evident of Louis' feelings of masculinity, particularly given it happens directly after he cites Claudia calling him the unhappy housewife. Again, Louis' rejecting that role - the house is a mess (so they've either fired their staff, or they've quit), Louis' not going to do it and neither is Lestat, and Louis' sprawled on the couch reading from his husband's library and dragging him for being too frivolous to read them.

Again, I think Louis genuinely loves reading, but I also do think for him it's fundamentally a part of his identity as a Cultured, Intellectual Man. It's why he doesn't take to the campiness of the Theatres des Vampires, or as you said, get involved in lestat's Mardi Gras performance (I'm always sooo fascinated by the fact that we don't get a reaction shot of Louis to that sequence at all - again! It feels loaded!) I think his sense of masculinity is, well, pretty traditionally masculine, and I think it's pretty vital to his self-image.

[a-most-beloved-fool]

If Spock and Jim merged into one being (no euphemism here lol) like Tuvix, what do you think the personality of the new being would be like? What impact do you think that would have had on the lives of both of them after they separated again? I love your headcanons, thanks for the answers!

thanks for the question!! <3

Hmmm... I think they would work pretty well as one being, actually. I'm thinking about all of those quotes from Roddenberry about how Kirk and Spock were supposed to represent two halves of a whole person, so I have to assume that they would be quite content. Though, disclaimer as I continue: I have not yet seen any of Voyager - there might be aspects of Tuvix's combination that I don't take into account because I don't know they exist. If so, uh, sorry. My bad.

For the sake of avoiding confusion, I'll call the merge Kirok (after the name Kirk chose when he lost his memories in The Paradise Syndrome). (Also, I fear that calling him "Kock" would have... deleterious effects on the readability of this post... for no reason at all...)

I do think that Kirok would, overall, have the best parts of Kirk and Spock. Combined, they are tactically fearsome. With Kirk's intuition and understanding of people and Spock's knowledge of statistics and science, Kirok is brilliant. However, I do think that Kirok would be a worse captain in practice than if Kirk and Spock simply had a mental bond. Part of the brilliance of Kirk and Spock as a command team is that, while they very much respect one another and take the other's opinion into account, they do also. regularly ignore each other's advice. And this is usually to their benefit! They each take risks that the other wouldn't, and, often, it saves them (in part because they always back each other up, even when doing things they don't agree with. Spock will be like "this is unwise" and Kirk will say "maybe, but I'm doing it anyways" and Spock will just... go with it.). But, if they were one person, I think that impulsiveness would be tempered. The Kirk part would have a brilliant idea, the Spock part would say "wait, there is too much risk, we can make a better plan," and then Kirok would lose his chance to act. When they're separate people Spock is ride-or-die for all of Kirk's decisions, but when they're one person, the Spock half won't always allow those decisions to be made at all (and also won't necessarily be able to tell when he does need to rein things in a bit). (Also Kirk and Spock both tend to be reckless, and then rely on the other to save them - as Kirok, who would back him up when he needed it? Bones would, but he's a medical officer. He simply can't do everything they would have. And, no matter how good of a first officer Kirok got (probably Sulu?), they couldn't be that good.)

I also think that Kirok wouldn't be quite as at ease with his position on the ship as Spock and Kirk individually were. The Spock part of him loves science far too much to just abandon it. He wants to spend time in the labs! He wants to make discoveries! Likewise the Kirk part of him can't truly be anything but a Captain. So, Kirok stays a captain, but he's less passionate about it (or, rather, more passionate about things that aren't it). This doesn't actually affect Kirok's satisfaction - it just affects his performance and relationships with others. He might spend off-duty time working on science experiments (which he can no longer do during shift, due to captaining) and neglect forming bonds with his crew, and he might place more focus than usual on scientific discovery missions.

As for the crew... Well, it's not as weird of a change as they expected. As expected, Kirok is less outwardly friendly than Kirk, and more outwardly friendly than Spock, but he's - cohesive. He still feels like their commanding officers. His humor tends to be a bit drier than Kirk's was, but he's a very compassionate and reasonable captain. (Tbh I tend to think that Kirk is actually more of a hardass than Spock (people just assume Spock is worse due to being Vulcan), so some crewmembers are surprised when Kirok is more lenient about certain things than Kirk would have been. Not lenient about cruelty or anything genuinely important to the safety of the ship, but about other things.) But, he's still not as good at making personal connections as Kirk was, and he's still inclined to spend too much time in the labs, so things aren't perfect.

Really, I think that the person having the worst time of things would be Bones, lmao. He'd have to deal with his Best Friend suddenly being the same person as The Guy He Affectionately Antagonizes (totally not a friend no how could you even think that). I think he'd be more lost than anyone else about how to address Kirok. Is this Kirk, his old friend, who he can be truly comfortable with, or is this Spock, who he snipes at and who snipes at him in turn? Who can he turn to, when the man he normally approaches for comfort is now the same being as one he doesn't want to seem too weak in front of? Does he turn to anyone else, in the meantime, or does he weather it alone?

Kirok himself, though, is actually pretty okay with the change. The different parts of himself simply - mesh well together. It's very satisfying for him, if not for his career and those around him. There's some minor bits of tension, especially regarding changes in biology and telepathic status, but, for the most part, he's doing well. The things you might expect to be major points of tension somehow... aren't. They compromise remarkably easily. (No meat, yes logic, no emotional suppression, yes casual touching, no casual relationships, yes meditation, etc.) And the Kirk and Spock parts of him both enjoy the closeness, the sense of knowing they now have for one another. They're one person, and know themself completely as they've always longed to know each other completely. (he does miss playing chess against someone who could beat him, though!)

Now, because I am Spirk-brained, I also think there's potential for Kirok to have Very Confused Feelings about discovering that the two parts of himself each had secret feelings for the other prior to the merge. There could be this odd sense of loss - like, yes, they are now technically one with one another, but they also completely missed out on their shot at a romantic relationship. They mourn what they could have had. The Spock part, especially, mourns the potentially for a telepathic bond (because with how smoothly they've integrated with one another, it surely would have been a strong one). So, as much as Kirok does enjoy existing as Kirok, I think he might be more willing to attempt separating back into two parts than I believe Tuvix was.

And, when they're two separate people again, they both feel like they're missing some part of themself, even once they've begun their new romantic relationship - but quickly discover that a mental link between them fills that hole. (And then, of course, because they are hopeless and in love, the "medicinal mental link" very quickly just becomes a marriage bond. They're like "well, we've already been one person and liked that well enough... a marriage bond is hardly anything different!" To Spock's endless pleasure, they are highly compatible and have a remarkably strong bond.) The mental link also allows them to have the same quick reaction times and combined brilliance of Kirok without the negative side effects of their own individual strengths being tempered. (they're also like. annoyingly codependent for a bit after Kirok's separation. oh boy are they always touching. "it gives them emotional security." bones looks at them in disgust (he loves it).)

Or, if we wanted to be McSpirk-brained... I'm enjoying the imagery of Kirok (who both had crushes on Bones as well as on one another) just directing all of that missed romantic potential onto Bones, who is... like, he's not not into it (Kirk was hot, Spock was hot, ergo Kirok is hot), but he also misses and loved his Original friends, and so he is very torn between accepting Kirok's advances and trying to find a way to split them apart again. (Flustered Bones, flustered Bones!! I do love flustered Bones!! He is blushing and stammering and having multiple ethical crises all at once. They never covered this in Starfleet Medical...) He also doesn't quite know whether Kirok's feelings truly belonged to both Kirk and Spock or not, and doesn't think that Kirk or Spock would truly act on it if they were in their normal state, so a small selfish part of him wonders if that's the only chance he has to be with them (even if it's not quite the same 'them' he fell in love with). And then, of course, there's the fear that trying to get back the original Kirk and Spock will actually just kill them! Yeah, poor Bones has a rough time of things. But, when everything is fixed, he does still wind up getting two boyfriends out of it. It all works out in the end?

[cluzi]

I'm still watching Doctor Who to catch up mostly out of love, but in my early twenties this show held me in such a chokehold and I used to be like the biggest Steven Moffat apologist that ever existed (I still fondly remember some of the episodes he wrote like the Eleventh doctor's stories, my favourite ones) but I've just watched Lux and I have to say RTD did him sooooooooo dirty oh my God, he outshined the shit out of him! That's a once in a lifetime experience as a fan, like, there I am at 33 yo giggling, clapping and screaming THEY'RE ACTUALLY COMING OUT THE TV!!!!

It took me back for one night, like, I'm sure he'll come back to be his cautious self in the next one but I will forever remember the night RTD drank the shiny potion and stole the spotlight.

[angelsdean]

don't know how people multi-fandom. dipped my toe into another one and immediately backed out bc everyone there was insufferable.