#working title: dream blunt rotation

[nilllaaz]

ଘ꒰jjk masterlist꒱

titles with '🍨' are reqs!

SMAU SERIES!!

BUTTERFLIES - choso (discontinued)

HAUNTED - y. okkotsu (s2u)

MULTI CHARACTER SMAUS!!

I MISSED YOU

SILLY TYPOS

LETS LISTEN TO...

JUST A PEEK

COVERING THE PROBLEM

YOU UP

ACCIDENTAL CONFESSIONS (PART 2 🍨)(PART 3 🍨)

SOAKING WET

STRIP TEASE

YOU REEK

CELEBRITY CRUSHES

DREAM BLUNT ROTATION

YOU SO HAVE A CRUSH ON ME (🍨)

DITCH THE BITCH (🍨)

SO YOU HATE ME (🍨)

GHOSTINGS SO NOT COOL (🍨)

SINGLE CHARACTER TEXTS!!

BRING BACK MOB - m. fushiguro.

MISSING MY MOB - m. fushiguro.

all works belong to nilllaaz ! any rewrites / plagiarism is strictly prohibited!

[ftmforestfae]

Intro and pinned post

Hii shape-shifting forest nymph here 😝

You can call me Ro or Fawn I'm 20 He/They. I'm Queer and Poly

Asks are always open to nsfw. Dms open but ask first for nsfw because I might be at work.

I love the forest, mountains, mythology, literature, most types of music, and copious different fandoms try something it's a hit or miss but I'll check it out if it sounds cool.

DNI: Minors, Pedophilia, Racism, Sexism, Transphobia/ Misgendering/ Detrans, Homophobia, Fatphobia, Cis Het Men. Thank you, do not come again.

I also live on @plantdadftm but I have been hidden by the mist

/!\ This is mostly a ns/fw writing account. /!\

/!\ 18 plus only /!\

Current things on the blog

Ask games

Other current things

K!nk info below the line

Bottom leaning but no pref as Dom or Sub depends on person

I use cunt/tdick/tcock holes/ass chest/tits for my parts

Favorites

Orgasm control -Overstim / Denial

Praise and Degradation

Pet play

Intox

Hunter / Prey Primal play

Group sex

Body Worship / Marking

Gentle dominantion

Oral

I enjoy a lot

Toys

Free use / Group free use

Bondage

Breeding

Voyeurism

Exploration

Light cnc / Somno

Monster fucking / Teratophilia

Titles I'm okay with giving

Sir/ma'am

Master/Mistress

Lord/Lady/majesty

Goddess/divine

Daddy/Mommy (titles causually not as a kink)

Mutt/handler (not owner unless actually owned)

Hun, sweetheart, pretty(insert gender preference)

Pet/puppy/kitten/bunny/cub

Baby(insert gender preference)

Slut/whore

Ask if you have a unlisted preference)

Titles I'm okay with receiving

Sir/Master

Mutt/handler

Lord

Hun, sweetheart, pretty boy

Pet/puppy/cub

Slut/toy

Negotiable kinks as dom (trust based but enjoyed)

Exhibition

Humiliation

Knife play

Feminization

Forcemasc / Androphilia

Hard domination

Negotiable as sub ( trust based but enjoy)

Breeding

Breath play

Sensory deprivation

Impact pain play

Force masc Androphilia / Autoandrophilia

Exhibition

Hard limit

Detrans

Age regression

Piss/scat

Water sports

Gun play

Pregnancy kink

Necrophila

Beastality (pet play and actual animals are two different things guys leave those non-consenting creatures alone please)

Mummification

Genital clamping

Drugging (like the date r*pe kind)

Feederism

Exterme cnc

Electrocution

[ao3feed-tf2ships]

i'm pickin' up good vibrations

read it on the AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/58503700

by homefreakingrun

9 mercs get an on base therapist, ooooh what happens next

title from Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys

Words: 2542, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Team Fortress 2

Rating: Not Rated

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: Multi, Other

Characters: Miss Pauling (Team Fortress 2), Scout (Team Fortress 2), Sniper (Team Fortress 2), Soldier (Team Fortress 2), Demoman (Team Fortress 2), Engineer (Team Fortress 2), Spy (Team Fortress 2), Heavy (Team Fortress 2), Medic (Team Fortress 2), Pyro (Team Fortress 2), Reader

Relationships: Engineer/Spy (Team Fortress 2), Heavy/Medic (Team Fortress 2), Demoman/Soldier (Team Fortress 2), Scout & Sniper (Team Fortress 2), Miss Pauling & Scout (Team Fortress 2), Scout's Mother/Spy (Team Fortress 2)

Additional Tags: MISS PAULING AND SCOUT ARE NOT DATING AND NEVER WILL BE, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Hurt No Comfort, no angst in early chapters, The Human Centipede (Movies) References, Venom (Movies) References, They/Them Pronouns for Pyro (Team Fortress 2), Married Heavy and Medic (Team Fortress 2), Dyslexic Scout (Team Fortress 2), Scout Knows Spy Is Scout's Parent (Team Fortress 2), Trans Engineer (Team Fortress 2), Canon Trans Character, engi is canonically trans and it makes me very happy to be in this fandom, Movie Night, theyre my dream blunt rotation

read it on the AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/58503700

[alxanderturners]

You're not exactly the poster boy for sanity either, brother. Why'd you reckon we get on so well? I 'onestly can't work out if you, me, the Gallaghers, Ozzy and David Attenborough would be a dream or a nightmare blunt rotation. If anything even remotely like that happened again I'd sign up straight away, but everything's about either the money or exposure nowadays. If something were for charity you can bet it'd be plastered bloody everywhere, because apparently it's not a good deed until you can gloat about it online. Let's make it a Thursday so they have the pub quiz on? Just wanna prove to you once again that I hold the title of both beauty and the brains in this friendship.

to be fair, you are a bit peculiar, so he's not exactly spewing lies, although he isn't projecting sanity himself. yeah, should i anticipate a series of tweets from him now? wicked. but seriously, the entire concert was free of charge. hell, even metallica did it for the cause, and it turned out to be one of their most monumental concerts ever. that's when you know it's all about the music. ten-year-old daniel woulda smacked you for saying that, but i can't deny solid facts, especially when the people i talk to hardly know who radiohead is. pint at the kings head.

[hellichk]

And they all live happily ever after The End

[caveatauditor]

My favorite albums, days 1-10

Friends have requested that I share my favorite albums on social media, preferably with vaguely autobiographical blurbs accompanying them, so to avoid polluting the wholesomeness of my Facebook timeline with music geekery, these are they until I change my mind. I excluded albums from this decade because the decade isn’t over, so the ten gems that follow represent an attempt to make history conform to me.

1. Lil Wayne, Da Drought 3

Two discs of Wayne freestyling, bloviating, and holding a conversation over a bunch of sampled and/or stolen and/or obscure music, arranged randomly because in theory the mixtape goes on forever in both directions, a gorgeous tapestry whose details happen to consist of delectable beats and wild free-associative blather. Wayne raps like a child in a candy store, eschewing parsable semantic content in favor of puns and stray impulses and improvised phonetic twaddle and whatever he feels like saying in the moment; likewise, the beats don’t cohere, sonically or in sequence, instead sticking as many hooks as possible wherever possible as often as possible; the overall result comes off like a transmission from the filthiest corner of the id. The ultimate triumph of mid-‘00s mixtape culture, Da Drought 3 is fabulous aural wallpaper and hardly an album at all, so of course it’s my favorite album.

2. Joni Mitchell, Hejira

Given how beloved this album is among a surprisingly large number of my friends, I almost went with the equally astonishing Hissing of Summer Lawns, but let’s be real now--Hejira is flawlessly, magnificently beautiful like nothing else I’ve ever heard. The guitar lines lap and peal over breathtakingly wide, sweeping expanses of empty space--space like the open road, like the southwestern desert in the winter, like the urge to travel and stay on the move, like the empty human heart. The lyrics use the familiar musicianly trope of going on tour as a springboard for a set of travelogue meditations on solitude and perpetual motion, a condition imposed partially by circumstance and partially by internal existential need; she’s moving before the ringing opening chords of “Coyote” and she’s moving after “Refuge of the Roads” pensively winds down. The latter song in particular contains several moments that always, always make me cry, especially during the first verse (“We laughed at how our perfection would always be denied”) and the third (“A thunderhead of judgment was gathering in my gaze”). I’ll never use “relate” as a verb, but I’ve often taken refuge in the road. I always take this album with me, though.

3. Jandek, Blue Corpse

I’m cheating here: Jandek is a relatively new discovery for me, and I’m still working through his ridiculously massive catalog, but I’ve listened to him with sufficient fascination enough over the past year and a half that he deserves a spot. Fans say that Blue Corpse is a good starting point because it’s his most accessible album, but accessibility is a relative concept when we’re talking about experimental atonal lo-fi acoustic quasi-blues fuckery, so let’s just call it his most carefully sequenced--side two builds the way a second side should, starting with an extended harmonica solo before leading into his cover of “House of the Rising Sun” and the album’s ten-minute centerpiece, the lonely, furious “Only Lover”. I love this album so much I could easily imagine a better one lurking in some dank, unexplored discographical corner.

4. Janet Jackson, The Velvet Rope

As a sophomore in high school I heard The Velvet Rope and immediately decided this was the sexiest and most sophisticated music I had ever heard. I was right! To this day I hold a special place in my heart for R&B that confounds the traditional banger/ballad distinction--there are no ballads on this album! With its swirly synthesizer and xylophonesque keyboard chords, “Empty” sounds like a conventional slow song until you notice the second layer of hyperactive drums clicking maniacally atop the core rhythm track: nervous energy disrupting and complementing preternatural spiritual calm. “Tonight’s the Night” is a great cover because the act of covering an established hit mirrors the act of initial erotic exploration, of navigating your way through a series of gestures you knew about before trying yourself; the way she sings “Cause I love you girl ain’t nobody gonna stop us now” is defiantly blunt, unshowy, matter-of-fact. Those are the lyrics! She’ll sing them. Breezy, mechanical, exquisite, The Velvet Rope captures the fragility of intimacy.

5. Fall Out Boy, From Under the Cork Tree

I first became aware of Fall Out Boy in middle school, when the girl whose locker neighbored mine put up a bunch of Pete Wentz posters on the inside of her locker door. I envied her brilliance and poise, since she was obviously way smarter and cooler than me, and I’m pleased to say she was right: this daft, idiotic, magnificent album captures a world of teenage crushes, fixations, stupid feelings poorly rationalized, awkward proclamations blurted out and immediately retracted, aftershave clumsily sprayed on to impress a special someone, the scent of cheap perfume, lipstick stains on your pillowcase and friction in your jeans. It’s so flushed and clumsy it automatically enters the realm of hormonal teenpop utopia, with the crunchy guitars mirroring the anguish in eternal adolescent Patrick Stump’s heart. Pete Wentz writes solecistic, self-aggrandizing lyrics because teenagers in love are supposed to utter howlers like “The only thing worse than not knowing is you thinking that I don’t know” and (sigh) “Turn off the lights and turn off the shyness”. It’s an ode to the enduring power of romantic absurdity, in all its most entertaining guises.

6. Duran Duran, Rio

Like From Under the Cork Tree, only glitzier. Occasionally I play a game with select friends of mine where we try to guess whether a random snippet of doggerel is a Fall Out Boy or a Duran Duran lyric. “It’s just like a scene out of Voltaire twisting out of sight”? Obviously Duran, for citing French philosophy is such a New Romantic move. “We’re well-read and poised/we’re the best boys”? Self-defeating self-objectification is Pete Wentz’s favorite rhetorical device. “The sun drips down bedding heavy behind/the front of your dress all shadowy lined/and the droning engine throbs in time with your beating heart”? Too florid; gotta be Duran. “Couldn’t cut me deeper with a knife if you tried/just take a look before you run off and hide”? No clue--blood and betrayal could go either way. “Let’s fade away together one dream at a time”? “Some people call it a one-night stand but we can call it paradise”? Well!

7. PJ Harvey, To Bring You My Love

As a senior in high school I heard To Bring You My Love and immediately decided this was the sexiest and rawest music I had ever heard. I was right! To this day I know no harsher or more beautiful approximation of what it means to yearn for the sublime. The tiny guitar figure in “Working for the Man”, half-concealed beneath the drums and muffled, thumping bass, devastates because it’s creepy and horrible; the maximalist guitar roar in “Long Snake Moan”, almost as loud and thundering as her distorted vocals, devastates because so would getting run over by a tank. On the rest of the album, she hits every mood between those two extremes, including rapture and delight in addition to all the abrasive ones.

8. Fleetwood Mac, Tusk

I almost went with Tango in the Night, given how my generation seems to have discovered and reclaimed it, with “Seven Wonders” popping up in Balearic dance mixes and American Horror Story. Tusk, however, is a giant compendium of whirring gears and rotating spokes and plinky keys and strummed acoustic guitars and tinkly music boxes and billions of other moving parts, and the totality of the sound correlates with a draining, overwhelming emotional extremity. Lindsey Buckingham fills the space with a bunch of tightly crafted miniatures, distilling his imagined ideal of the Fleetwood Mac sound into the searing anger of “What Makes You Think I’m the One” and “I Know I’m Not Wrong” (Lindsey Buckingham in a song title), but Stevie Nicks gets all the big statements: the thundering “Sisters of the Moon”, the incomparable breakup ballad “Storms” (“Never have I been a blue calm sea/I have always been a storrrrrrm” always makes me cry), “Sara”. Meanwhile, Christine McVie’s “Brown Eyes”/“Never Make Me Cry” couplet is the axis on which the album’s sequence turns. Tusk resonates because it conflates the singer-songwriter confessional urge with the band’s collaborative dynamic, creating a communal space for them all to bask in their shared hate for and exhaustion with each other.

9. Crunk Hits

I needed a compilation, and this magnificent one brings to life my favorite radio format: mainstream hip-hop in the mid-‘00s. Crunk and R&B were everywhere back then; to me this album sounds like New York in the hot, lazy summers of ’05 and ’06, when these songs confounded with their unprecedented hedonism and aggression and delight. Definitively singles-oriented, this music saturated a subsequent generation of hip-hop fans, so that album artistes in this decade like Young Thug and Playboi Carti have internalized crunk’s valuable lessons about shamelessly exposing the id. I couldn’t omit an album whose first five songs are Usher’s “Yeah”, Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz’s “Get Low”, T.I.’s “Rubber Band Man”, Chingy’s “Right Thurr”, and Ciara’s “Goodies”--damn! It’s practically a greatest-hits album for the entire decade.

10. Steely Dan, Gaucho

When I bought this album in seventh grade, I wasn’t aware I was buying the fleetest, shallowest, most efficient howl of anguish ever set to music. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are only ironists insofar as they’re romantics who mask their feelings in inscrutable form. The question with any of their albums, which are basically all flawless, is to what degree they’ll reveal their bleeding hearts, and on Gaucho there’s such a gash in the fabric the blood spurts out everywhere, staining the shag carpet, dripping through the singer’s sleeve onto his fancy leather shoes. The modest functionalism of their slick California studio-rock, the tasty licks and glossy keyboards and sparingly deployed saxophone and sudden sharp bursts of guitar, hardly enters into a dialectic with the desperation and horror of the songwriting--it’s the perfect musical expression for these feelings, as perfection that’s slightly disfigured is so much more devastating than total abrasion (when critics use “Bret Easton Ellis” as shorthand for the demented luxury porn we’ve enjoyed and suffered through this decade, what they really mean is “Steely Dan”). No matter how many glass tables you smash, how many ashtrays you inhale, you’ll never feel as shitty as this record.

[aion-rsa]

Mario Dies: The Character’s Most Painful Deaths Ever

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Fans everywhere are declaring March 31st to be the day that “Mario Dies” since that’s the day when Nintendo will inexplicably stop selling Super Mario 3D All-Stars, remove Super Mario Bros. 35 from the eShop, Super Mario Game & Watch system, and shut down the original Super Mario Maker‘s servers. It’s a series of controversial decisions made all the stranger by the fact that they’re falling on the same day.

While Mario isn’t actually “dying” on that day, let’s not pretend that we haven’t seen Mario die countless times before. From running into that first Goomba to falling off a cliff in Super Mario Odyssey, Mario games are practically defined by the ways that we have contributed to the character’s death over the years. Estimates suggest that Mario has likely died billions of times across the various games when you account for the actions of everyone who has played them.

Of course, when it comes to Mario’s deaths, it’s really about the quality and not the quantity. While I wouldn’t wish most of the ways that Mario dies on anyone, there are some deaths that stand out over the years as being particularly brutal.

Getting Hit So Hard With a Barrel That He Does a Flip

Donkey Kong may not have featured the parade of hazards seen in future Super Mario games, but Mario’s debut does include a clear candidate for the plumber’s most painful deaths. I’m of course talking about the all-too-common sight of watching Mario get hit by one of Donkey Kong’s barrels so hard that he does several flips and then dies.

Besides taking the idea of a barrel roll a little too literally, the most remarkable thing about this death is the idea of Mario getting hit so hard with a barrel that the impact breaks every bone in his body along with the laws of physics. It doesn’t even look like the barrel is “tripping” him, which means that Mario is hit so hard in the chest that he starts performing Olympic-level gymnastics in response to the pain. 

Being Eaten by a Cheep Chomp

While many early Mario enemies were able to defeat the hero seemingly by touching him, the Cheep Chomp went a step further by simply engulfing Mario if the player got too close to them.

The comparatively explicit violence of that moment helps it stand out, but what really puts this one over the top is the size and shape of the Cheep Chomp’s teeth. Unlike the Pirahana Plant’s sharp teeth which were clearly designed for efficient enemy eating, the Cheep Chomp’s blunt bucktooth would likely take a little more time to finish Mario off. 

Swimming in Super Mario Sunshine’s Graffiti

Many early Mario deaths were quick, but by the time that Mario got a health bar, Nintendo’s cruelest designers and artists really took the time to let us watch his deaths slowly play out.

One of the best examples of that painful period has to be the graffiti in Super Mario Sunshine. That stuff can kill Mario in a variety of ways, and if you wander into a huge patch of it, you’ll have to watch as Mario struggles to escape whatever it is that the goop is doing to him. I imagine it functions similarly to the creature in The Blob remake which eats and disintegrates its victims but hey, that’s just me. 

Falling Into an Infinite Void

Mario does straight-up fall to his death in later games, but the early Super Mario titles will always be remembered for the times that he falls into what seems to be an infinite void. 

While not necessarily “painful” in the physical sense, the idea of falling forever means that Mario most likely hoped every day would be the day he finally saw that bottom swiftly coming up at him. Some games even highlight the fall by having Mario say “Oh no,” which is seemingly the moment that Mario realizes the nature of his twisted fate but only has time to express his horror in the form of a final line whispered with despair.

Being Hit by Whatever Those Spinning Fire Bars Are

The logistics of the rotating fire bars seen throughout the Super Mario series (though they were initially created for the Legend of Zelda franchise) remain frustratingly unexplained. What is producing the flames? How do they stay in place? WHO PUT THEM EVERYWHERE?!?!?

One thing we can safely assume is that getting hit by one of these fire bars probably hurts. They seem to combine with the thrill of being hit with a large spinning object with the fun of being set on fire. Just imagine what one of these things would look like in real life and the terror you’d feel staring at a room full of them.

Being Flattened in Super Mario 64

Objects have always threatened to crush Mario, but Mario 64 upped the ante a bit by suggesting that some of these objects can actually hit Mario so hard that they completely flatten him.

It’s one of those bits of cartoon violence that becomes much more horrifying when you apply it to real life. Maybe you’d be lucky enough to have the object flatten you in an instant, but the game implies that Mario may actually survive the initial impact and linger on with the knowledge of what it’s like for every part of you to be squished but not the ability to convey that pain to anyone and relieve himself of the madness of that knowledge. 

Anything Involving Those Spikes

Spikes are hardly the sole property of the Super Mario franchise, but there is something about the way the Mario games utilize them that fills you with dread whenever you enter a room filled with them. Maybe it’s the knowledge that even a single mistake could send Mario into the spikes and force him to endure a truly terrible death.

Again, the best hope is that these spikes kill Mario quickly, but the thing about walls and pits of spikes is that navigating them rarely goes according to plan. It’s far more likely that Mario remains alive in these spike traps for an unfortunate amount of time. 

Getting Falcon Punched to Death

Despite his fondness for jumping and the consequences that can have for Goombas everywhere, Mario doesn’t strike us as a fighter by nature. He certainly feels physically underqualified to properly defend himself against some of the heaviest hitters of the Nintendo universe.

Just imagine how confused Mario must have been when he found himself face-to-face with renowned humanoid bounty hunter Captain Falcon only for Falcon to straight-up punch him in the face with such force that Mario is sent flying into that good old void before being greeted by the sweet release of an explosive finale.

Being Run Over by a Shell

Considering that Mario is almost comically fragile most of the time, you’d think he would know better than to start kicking shells around and bouncing them off walls at high speeds. Then again, he is searching for those sweet coins, and you don’t get paid if you don’t put the work in.

Even still, the pain of being hit by one of these shells must be tremendous. They’re not as big as a car or truck, but the fact that the impact of them is enough to kill a man means that they must be traveling at speeds high enough to convert them into a lethal weapon.

Getting Bullied by the Sun

I don’t know why Mario has as many enemies as he seems to have (he seems like a nice guy) but I’ve really never understood why a giant, angry sun tries to kill Mario in Super Mario Bros. 3.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Whatever that sun’s problem is, I can only assume that it must hurt like hell when a celestial body decides to break into the atmosphere and take all of its unfulfilled dreams out on you. It also has to be terrifying to watch that process play out before your eyes as you try to comprehend this moment while the increased heat boils you from the inside. 

The post Mario Dies: The Character’s Most Painful Deaths Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3f1Upra

[tumbling-down-tumbling-down]

A Transcription of the Late 1st Era Tele-Memetic Artifact “M.N. Captain Nero’s Adventures through Oblivi-Space!!, Vol. 17”

Transcriptor’s Note: One of the great pitfalls of modern academia’s myopic fascination with relics from great tombs and Ayleid ruins is that it tends to find a lot of incandescent crystals glowing every color of the rainbow that ironically shed virtually no light on how people of the past actually lived. While my colleagues at the I.C.A.U. were busy announcing what Dwemer outpost they’re going to spend the entire yearly budget (and probably a few graduate student souls) exploring, I just happened to look into my sweet neighbor Dynatia Geelteus’s request about a small cache of old artifacts workers found while excavating to expand her shop’s basement.

Who would have guessed that while we scrape the bottom of the barrel to plunder every single crypt for the last few legendary maces of +10 stamina damage, the real cultural treasures have been here all along, moldering beneath the ground of our city that’s been continuously inhabited by man and mer for at least 5,000 years. But by all means, don’t take my grant proposals.

—

This artifact appears to be a piece of entertainment or propganda of an unknown format. The physical object is two smooth translucent disks that can freely rotate around a single axis, apparently intersecting in physical space but able to pass through each other freely. Each disk individually is covered in Remen-era proto-Cyrodiilic text which this researcher is not fluent in. Nonetheless, when focusing not on the individual disks but instead the system as a whole, one is somehow able to pick out and resolve the competing overlapping fragments into clear meaning and even full color images.

Since this style of pictorial dissemination has been lost to time, this scholar will merely have to transcribe the language and events into mundane text for publication. Originally an artist was commissioned to recreate the images for closer inspection, but for some reason this style of tele-memetic transmission resists such replication. The images flee from the mind like fragments of an interrupted dream the moment a brush touches canvas. Until further investigation, it is unclear whether this is due to the metaphysics of observing a message through conflicting constituent aspects or if it’s some type of copy protection.

Humbly and respectfully, Ashei Tigonus Sr. Professor of Tamrielic History Imperial City Arcane University, 4E194

​

Transcription: “M.N. Captain Nero’s Adventures through Oblivi-Space!!, Vol. 17”

[A tall dark structure lies suspended high above the twin planets Zenithar and Mara. Three figures drift towards it, all decked out in full mundane-simulacrum frames of imperial mothsilk1 — a near-necessity for all but the most tenacious mortals in the interplanar stretches of oblivion. The wingcloaks of the suits flap slowly, propelling them forward and giving off gentle fuchsia pulses with each beat. In the background behind the three figures is an enormous moth imperator. The behemoth floats lackadaisically in the void, sunning the hanging gardens in its wings and the silver cathedral built into its back with the rays of distant Magnus.

Four title cards: “FIRST MATE YAL BOETH,” “CENTURION CLAI DUNLAIN,” and “BURGLAR XEIRSAAR” appear on the silhouetted figures. “THE N.V.N. MYRRHMIDON” names the far-off moth.]

YAL — “Remember: this warp-spire has been allegedly abandoned, but that just means there are no Alinori soldiers in there. These empty things have a tendency to accumulate all sorts of riff-raff, fugitives, and Khajiit before the last sunbird is even out of sight.”

XEIRSAAR — “I once found a grounded Akaviri cloud litter on the fourth ring of Kynareth. It was a tiny thing, no bigger than a large hut. And yet, when my egg-brother cracked open the hatch no less than six kaoc Khajiit shot out and scattered to the winds.

[Clai laughs as the party reaches the surface of the spire. Xeirsaar pulls out a small set of tools and gets to work on removing a silver plate from the surface while the others wait.]

XEIRSAAR — “I tried to grab one but they were the small quick ones that seem to squirm out of your reach before you’ve even considered moving your arm. We got the last laugh though. All the original Akaviri artifacts had been stripped away, but inside the Khajiit left behind a 10,000 drake cache of moon sugar — ahh, here we go.”

[The armored plate pops out of place and Xeirsaar spins it like a discus out into the void. Clai draws her catalyst staff and drops into the exposed hole. After a few seconds the others slide in after her.

The party emerges from the ground of a huge cylindrical colony with livable space wrapped around the spinning inner surface. The habitat environment looks it was plucked right out of the Alinor countryside — well-trimmed gardens filled with fountains and flowering trees blanket the gently rolling hills, soaring prismatic palaces shimmering in the artificial noon-light dot the landscape, birds flit to and fro among the trees and wheel through the expansive central sky. The crew removes their bulbous M.-S.F. helmets.]

CLAI, letting out a slow whistle — “Woah. Nice place. And the Dominion abandoned it? Why in Mundus would they do that?”

YAL — “Uhh, I know the high elves have strange architecture, but I’m pretty sure that one wasn’t built that way.”

[Yal points to one of the palaces behind the crew which is significantly shorter than the others. Rather than coming to an elegant peak, the blunted top is ragged and gashed, with chunks of shattered crystal and steel strewn all around the yard. Several trees on the surrounding hills appear to have been wrenched up by their roots and more deep gashes can be seen in the gardens themselves.

All at once birds from the surrounding area all take flight at once and stream away from the ruined mansion as a low hum begins to emanate from it.]

CLAI — “That’s probably not a good sign.”

??? — “MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE MYRRHMIDON…”

[Two title cards: “CAPTAIN NERO” and “CHIEF CARTOGRAPHER GAILIEL.” Gailiel is lying on her back in the glass-roofed observatory when Nero swings open the door and strides in. The top of the panel shows the canopy of brilliant stars speckled across the void of oblivion.]

NERO — “Hey Gail. Looking for something?”

GAILIEL — “There are 1,007 other known Magna-Ge tears out there. Who knows how many have their own system? Their own planets?”

NERO — “Surely only the Star of Magnus is great enough to sustain worlds. Our manometer measures the minor tears’ power at a thousandth of a thousandth of a thousandth as strong. They’re tiny compared to the sun.”

GAILIEL, breathlessly — “I’ve been thinking about this ⁠— that might merely be a matter of perspective. The Bosmer of my old homeland worship Y’ffre chief among all gods, while you Alessians relegate her to barely a footnote as merely one of the Earth-Bones. Perhaps the inhabitants of a sub-planet of Thief-IV have done the same with Magnus, and venerate their own king tear of the Magna-Ge instead.”

NERO — “That’s an interesting hypothesis, so where’s your proof?”

GAILIEL, exasperated — “Well surely that’s what explorers like us are for. Until we try, who would know?”

[Gailiel stands up and looks at Nero for the first time.]

GAILIEL — “Sorry. That’s why I’ve been so frustrated with our orders to set back for Tatterdemalion. I just want to push forward, not retrace paths that a dozen mananauts have tread before.”

[Nero smirks mischievously and pulls a two-disk tele-memetic device out of his pocket.]

NERO — “Oh these orders? The ones I read conspicuously aloud to everyone in front of that ‘merchant’ sunbird on Dibella?”

[Gailiel catches on and grins back in return while Nero crushes the disks with one hand.]

NERO — “Oh don’t worry, as soon as the exploration team gets back I have a much more interesting destination in mind…”

??? — “WILL YAL’S AWAY PARTY ESCAPE THE DANGER? TUNE IN NEXT VOLUME TO SEE THE INTREPID CREW OF THE MYRRHMIDON’S NEXT GRAND ADVENTURE!”

??? — “Bonus section: On this volume of ‘Meet the Crew!!’”

[Title card: “CHIEF META-ENTOMOLOGIST OCTAVIA OCTA’VO”

A young Cyrodiilic woman stands confidently, holding a butterfly net leaning across her shoulders with one hand and presenting a sealed glass jar with a silver-green moth inside with the other.]

??? — “Octavia is in charge of tending to the needs of ALTRRUHN, the moth imperator that serves as the foundation of the Myrrhmidon2. While the species doesn’t require mundane food or drink, its wings need to be continuously checked for voidmites or the dreaded silk shalks that have brought down multiple N.V.N. mothships.

When the crew makes landfall, Octavia keeps the Myrrhmidon in an chronoglass — a jar blown by the famed Glass-shouters Guild of Windhelm. The Nords say that Kyne’s breath fills the glass so uniformly that not even Akatosh has room to get in. Storing the Myrrhmidon inside will keep ALTRRUHN in near-perfect unaging stasis — important since moth imperators are hard to find, even harder to train, and don’t tend to live a particularly long time.”

??? — “THAT’S ALL THIS WEEK. CHECK BACK IN VOL. 18 TO MEET HELMSMAN ZYKLOHS!”

​

Transcription endnotes: 1 To see a rare surviving M.-S. frame from the era in person, contact Professor Hlov Gateri at the Imperial City Arcane University who regularly displays one from his private collection in his office. He’d love to talk to anyone who’s interested about the Remen-era New Void Navy.

2 The Elder Council Public Archives keep records of every known moth imperator of the first, second, and early third eras and ALTRRUHN is not on the list. The existence of other places, events, and individuals listed in the text is harder to ascertain, since many of those records are still held in confidence by the Royal Imperial Mananauts and are never disclosed publicly.

[residentgrandpa]

EVOLVE 93 Live Review.

MATCH RATINGS: -Cedric/Yehi 3.5 -Yehi/??? NR -Henry/Kincaid 3.75 -Drake/Theory 2.75 -Freelance 4-way 3 -DJZ/Darby 3.75 -TrollBoyz/Workhorsemen 2.25 -ZSJ/Lee 4+ -Riddle/Tracy 4.25 -The venue was great. Plentiful free parking, air conditioning (on a 90+ degree day), plenty of concessions (including good, cheap pizza), alcohol, clean and spacious bathrooms. Zero complaints about that building. A comfortable fan experience if I've ever had one.

-Zack Sabre Jr. is the most naturally over babyface the Evolve roster has. The ovation he received from the Summit crowd was loud and sustained, different from the reactions received by Keith Lee and Riddle. It's not easy to describe, but ZSJ got everybody on their feet the most of anybody, while guys like Lee and Riddle received louder chants from the audience. Then again, "Ooh, Zack Sabre, Jr." is always a hit among the live crowd.

-DJZ and Darby Allin had one of the most fun, succinct matches I have seen in a hot minute. Both are criminally underrated and linger in that "we'll do anything to put on a good match" territory -- including Darby diving from the corner post to a seated DJZ on the floor. Nuts! These two need more bookings elsewhere. I'd love to see Darby in AAW -- maybe a rematch of this one?

-Matthew Riddle is the best wrestler in the world when it comes to fan interaction. He is second to none in this regard. I could write a fucking novel about the ways he has gone above and beyond for me, including naming his finishing move after me. Yes, he has a move called "The Derek," and he uses it to close matches. Exclusively. Nobody has kicked out of it yet. (That I have a finish named after me, that I gave to a wrestler who is my favorite, that is protected to this degree -- that Matt even points at the move's rightful owner before he hits it... come on. What the fuck is even going on?)

-I felt the Freelance showcase was a little rushed, like the guys were trying hard to impress, which led to a little sloppiness. Matt Knicks slipped off the top rope and nearly ended himself right in front of me. I didn't need to see that. Beyond that, this was a fun match that got the crowd going. Lots of "Free-lance Wrest-ling" chants. I saw people buying Stevie Fierce shirts and Freelance merch, and honestly, isn't that what it's all about?

-I laughed at the antics of the #TrollBoyz, but they looked extremely... how do I say this? Checked out? They're clearly unhappy in Evolve, and they wear it on their faces. Maybe run the next Evolve show in the Knights of Columbus in Hamilton, ON and these guys will perk up a bit, I don't know. Beyond the Yehi squash, the tag title match was my least favorite of the evening.

-Seeing Cedric Alexander was a treat, but something about his appearance felt a little off. Maybe it was because it was for the live audience only, maybe it was because it opened the show. The match was one of the best of the night, but people were still filing into the building and a number of them missed this match. I think offering an exclusive match at the start of the show, when you open doors only a half-hour early, is a bit silly. Open doors at 7, do the show at 8. What's difficult about that? Gives people more time to give you their money.

-Fred Yehi is a treasure. An over-the-top nice person and a heck of a wrestler to boot. Big personality. Fred needs more bookings.

-Anthony Henry is a bona fide star in the making, and the match he got out of Jason Kincaid was wonderful. I phrase it like that because Kincaid's style of offense is so much lighter and he can't take that huge beating you like to see out of a guy. But he meshed extremely well with Henry here, and this match really helped shape the beginning of the show for me. I think I liked this more than Cedric/Fred.

-If I never have to see Jarek 1:20 ever again, that will be too soon. I got up to take a leak and talk to Shigehiro Irie during his segment.

-I was not impressed by James Drake and his high-waisted trunks. Austin Theory is jacked beyond belief at like, 19 years old, and I'm afraid to see what he's going to look like when he's my age (for numerous reasons). I just wasn't a fan of this match. Priscilla Kelly is always nice to have around, but she didn't add much to this one. Not a bad match, don't get me wrong, but it didn't burn down the house.

-It was fancy seeing Dominic Garrini in Evolve as Stokely Hathaway's enforcer. I think if they play up that angle -- that he is Stokely's protection from guys like Riddle -- that would be for the best. Dom more than looks the part, and he kills it in the ring, so this was a good call. Love me some Dom.

-ZSJ and Keith Lee was some hot soup, though! I went four stars-plus on that, because I'm a sap who does star ratings, quarter-star ratings and all that other stupid Meltzer-like stuff. Lee dominated throughout the 18 minutes, flattening Zack with chops and elbow strikes, with Zack selling like a bastard. The finish was a bit rushed, and I honestly wanted to see Zack win by blunt force as opposed to a lucky flash pin, but I'm also an idiot. (Yes, Derek, ZSJ winning via five straight penalty kicks is great business!) Good pacing, much different from the match that followed.

-Apparently to the viewer at home, Keith Lee's consistent attention he gave the guys seated right behind me played into the match, and led to Lee getting pinned at the end. From a live viewership perspective, this flowed completely organically. I thought Keith was legitimately upset with these legitimate jerks behind me, so he kept staring over at my side of the arena. But he kept doing it. It was weird, a bit, just how distracted by these guys he was, at one point jawing at them that what he was about to do to Zack was because of them. Brilliant move that it tied into the rest of the match, but again, from my perspective seated in the front row, I thought it was just crowd interaction.

-My match of the night was Bro vs. Sauce in anything goes. There were restrictions they had to work around here, due to the building -- for example, they couldn't use the crowd chairs the way they wanted, and they couldn't do anything with tables since they were plastic. They wanted to do more but what they delivered was nevertheless creative and inspired and left fans wanting more. There were some funky-looking spots in this one, don't get me wrong. A Bro-buster on the apron, a tombstone on an open folding chair, and a Van Daminator from Riddle to Tracy, but using Riddle's knee. A respectable blow off match. Now, leave it at that. Don't pull an Ego/Darby and keep it going.

-Chicago crowd was hot all night. The draw was great. I would say there were maybe 250 there? Maybe 300? I am bad with numbers, but I had joked about the potential for a bad draw going into this show, and Evolve well surpassed my wildest dreams. I give them credit. They delivered on their promises and I don't think anybody went home unhappy. A return date should be announced sometime in the next calendar year. I think the Detroit/Chicago loop is lucrative and will work well in Evolve's current show rotation.

-Finally, I just wanted to say I got zero beef with Gabe or anybody. I respect the booker man and I had a nice chat with him after the show last night. I was hesitant to approach him, because of the whole "Derek trolls people online sometimes with his criticisms" thing, but fuck it, we're just people. And Gabe is a nice enough guy to me, has always been decent to me. WWN and Evolve get a lot of trash, but personally speaking, I still dig them and they will have a customer in me going forward. (There is no Bullet Club-style finger gun to my head as I say this.)

Fun night. I'm still beaming. Check out a show if you can.

[himindovermadi-blog]

in the sprit of sexuality

“We’re all free spirits here, ain’t no one gone judge you” is what he told me when he blocked the door the first time I tried to leave. My face scrunched up in confusion as I thought to myself, “Nigga that is not what I am worried about right now.”

...

Sexuality has always been sacred to me. I discovered mine young. I played with it until i thought it was evil. I promised myself I’d save my first kiss for marriage. But, I’m not sure if i lost my virginity to my first girlfriend or my first boyfriend. In college, I turned to sex when I was insecure, bored, or lonely. I went celibate when I realized my life was a mess, I broke celibacy for an asshole that couldn’t tell me I was beautiful. I believed a lot of lies about what relationships were supposed to be. I fell in love. Maybe for the first time, maybe the third. When we broke up I went numb.

I found consolation in one of my oldest friends.

The two of us hadn’t spoken in months,  in those few months our lifestyles had become increasingly stratified and it was hard for us to agree on almost anything. At one point she had been a mentor to me. Now, we were learning to just be cordial again. And, despite our growing differences, I still trusted her more than almost anyone on the planet. So when she invited me to a hotel party, I assumed I'd be safe and we would stick together, just like we always did.

After the breakup I was intent on retaining some celibacy, my heart hadn’t even begun to process the thought of losing someone I cared so much about. But the idea of reviving one of my most favorite relationships with this friend comforted me greatly. When we arrived to party at the hotel room to much less than what I expected, I should’ve felt tricked. Instead, I laughed. I knew myself. I told everyone no. Firmly. I was celibate. But at the same time, I knew in my heart it wouldn’t matter. I knew in that hotel (motel?) room I would have to discover something incredibly new about myself, and even though my willpower was strong, it was to be no match for my curiosity.

It started with a shot of cognac. Then a cigarette, one blunt in rotation, then two, and half a bean google later told me was ecstasy. Things began to slow down and my hands started to shake. I felt the energy in the room deepen, all of us…connecting. My heart told me to let go and enjoy, but my brain kept thinking of the gunshots I heard outside the room earlier. And the two fully loaded magazines next to the bed, and the red shirt and hat the man in front of me wore proudly. The baby furniture next to the bed and all the doors broken off their hinges. People can be incredibly persuasive while under the influence. And I’m not sure I can blame it all on the influence. I gave in. I wanted to leave, I tried to leave, twice, but again and again I gave in after encouraging words. “I’m showing you my whole body, babe, why won’t you show me yours? You’re my best friend and this is the only way I know how to show love to you, and if you leave, we might never speak again.”

Her words didn’t matter as much to me. I had heard her stories before, and she knew exactly how to get inside my head. But, I think I gave in because I knew I couldn’t leave without it. Without finding out exactly how deep and how far I could go. My entire body was divided in half. Logic told me to run, not walk to my car, speed away and never look back. My intuition begged me to stay, and enjoy the fate that was always meant for me. After all, sexuality was about experiences, right? Taking a journey through the unknown, finding pleasure in the most unlikely places… right? After all I was never opposed to experiences like this. I begged my boyfriend for experiences like this. Why deny my body an experience I had once so desperately wanted in the past. If these were the circumstances under which my pleasure came, how could I deny them?

…

It still doesn’t make much sense to me. I feel like in another dimension I stayed, the whole time, and loved every moment. Maybe I felt sick after. Maybe I went home and sobbed and could never see myself in the same way again. Maybe we just rolled another blunt and watched cartoons for a while. I got home around 11 that night. My parents were asleep. The ecstasy kept me up for another few hours, turning over and over in my bed. On my left side I convinced myself it was my destiny to ruin all my hopes and dreams and start selling my body. I was known to switch up for no reason. When I flipped over to my right side I knew I had been sexually assaulted, by my best friend. I should be angry, furious! In the political climate we live in, how did I let this shit happen to me?!

However, in truth, I don’t feel angry. After seven months I hardly remember what they looked like. I never spoke to my friend again after that night. In the car on the way home she kept trying to tell me she didn’t set me up. The next day she sent me incredibly long messages about how I chickened out and abandoned her while we were high. She told me she was better than me for wanting to stay. She told me I was a weak bitch, and part of me believed her. I went to go see two therapists that week. One of whom (white) called himself an honorary nigga. I laughed harder after that session than I had in months.

After that incident, I ended up taking a film class where we watched this Luis Buñuel film, Belle de Jour, about a French woman with vivid fantasies of working in a brothel. In his film, Buñuel doesn’t shy from sexuality and approaches it with a deeply intrusive yet completely objective approach. I was shocked by how seamlessly he moved between assault and pleasure. I went from being re-traumatized to intrigued to appreciative. Often times with sexuality, our experiences are not black and white. We love and hate some parts, we love and hate the same part. They are all different shades of gray— oh my god, I get the book title. Sexuality traverses the entire spectrum of our emotions and sometimes does it all in one take. Maybe sexuality is just this powerful force to be explored and respected, ultimately neutral on its own.