chameleonsallinvermillion

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

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My efforts in the community.....,,..

I'm amazed that Swan Control hasn't stepped in, frankly

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

a fun thing about this time of year when all the tourists start showing up is the influx of americans. they're no worse guests than the londoners but they all seem to be fighting this inner battle where they can't decide whether they've stepped into a cute beatrix potter fantasy of jolly peasants and badgers in waistcoats or if this is in fact a cursed land full of dark forces, soaked in blood and sins that they cannot imagine. yankees love it when i tell them about the curse. never a bad reaction from them. don't get that from the londoners. they're english - they don't give a shit about ancient blood curses and goat-horned gods. an american starts treating you like you're a costumed actor in some sort of rural life theme park, you just start telling them about how the royal family don't visit much because the land hates them. they love that stuff.

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

Another thing fandom needs to start doing more of is projecting on tops.

There are delicious amounts of psychological distress you can inflict on that guy once you get into his head. The brainworms of forcing agency and initiative on someone who genuinely is Not Fucking Ready For It are exquisite.

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

Despite the connected world, some experiences remain region-locked. My British children, for example, have access to all the usual artificial flavours - their freeze pops are things like Strawberry, Cola, and whatever “Tropical” is - but they also have access to “blackcurrant,” which for historical biosecurity reasons, did not penetrate my American childhood.

There aren’t a lot of things in the world that are restricted like that, but that’s one: blackcurrant flavour.

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

I am happy because everyone loves me

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

Horse figure of the day: Schleich #42027 Racing Horse Set

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

Spin this wheel first and then this wheel second to generate the title of a YA fantasy novel!

(If the second wheel lands on an option ending with a plus sign, spin it again)

Share what you got!

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

Lowlight of the Portsmouth Museum:

The Laughing Sailor automaton that used to sit on the pier and who my Great-Uncle George did such a perfect imitation of that the memories of the two are inextricably linked and seeing that grinning figure now after so much time was more spooky than if they had had a realistic wax model of George himself. A haunted, twisted sort of grief crept over everyone and nobody dared put a coin in the slot to make him laugh.

Highlight of the Portsmouth Museum:

Sherlock Holmes/Doctor Watson shipping art

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

I know that some British people take umbridge at Americans calling the Great British Bake Off relaxing, but it's just because GBBO is such a different kind of stressful from American baking shows.

American baking shows will be called something like "Cupcake Knife Fight", there's horror movie lighting everywhere and dramatic stings every 5 seconds. All of the contestants are shit talking each other and fist fighting over the one single deep fryer provided by production. It will show the judges all whispering to each other at their super villain table overlooking the whole kitchen, and one will be like, "Oh my god. Everyone look at Brenda right now. She's straight tanking it." And it will cut to Brenda, who is running around covered in flour and crying and also bleeding for some reason. Then you get a clip from an interview with one of the contestants, and they're like, "I really need to win this. Without this award money, I'm gonna need to close my restaurant, sell my dad, and live out of my car. AGAIN." Then the giant digital doomsday clock overhead lets out a horrid klaxon, the judges tell half of them that their cupcakes taste disgusting, and one of them gets eliminated and sent to walk down the dramatically-lit shame hallway never to be seen again.

Meanwhile GBBO is in a lovely, brightly colored tent, there are delightful and friendly hosts/jesters there to keep everyone entertained, and all of the B Roll is of like... a bumblebee going into a flower, or a lamb running in a field. And yes, there will be moments where someone will mess up their timing or something, and they'll be looking at their bake through the oven door like, "oh gosh I don't think this will rise in time!" Then they stand up to find Paul Hollywood directly behind them ominously. His creepy whitewalker eyes will glow white, and he'll say something like "the 12th of June. 2035. Drowning." And his eyes will go back to normal and he'll walk away. Then the baker gives a playful grimace to the camera and says "that didnt sound great, did it?". Cut to a sweet looking older woman sipping tea on a stool and she says "oo I do hope that Prue enjoys the taste of my sugary, sticky baps!". Then, at the end, someone gets a gold star for doing good, and the loser of the episode gets in the middle of a giant group hug. You see all of them at the end of the series at a giant carnival with their families and the post credits informs you that all of the contestants have become a Partridge Family-style traveling band and stayed friends forever.

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

Yes... @lovedthestars-toofondly yes he would. Without understanding the reference. or that it's a reference.

Ken is of course one of the universe's natural Route Planners. In his Duke of Edinburgh expedition as a tiny baby Ken, his team role was Navigator (and of course they got gold.)

His orientation is so straight you can use him as a ruler. He's so steady that compasses point to HIM. He can even follow Charlie conversations. He likes ordinance survey maps, geological maps, and canal route planners (in fairness, those are easy - canals don't have a lot of junctions.)

So think it would be extra funny if he goes the fuck to pieces in London. Lost on the londerground. Absolutely fucked trying to get to the geolsoc library in fucking piccadilly where he is ironically going to look up a map. FUCK. HELP.

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

i have a croissant related grievance

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

There is not a shred of doubt in my mind that somewhere in Ankh-Morpork, Sam Vimes has a drag king impersonater

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

Every one of those horsey Tiernans has got something wrong with them, that's a given. Mad even for jockeys, and no two mad in the same way.

Bill’s youngest is odd with it, though. Something strange there.

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

Mortifying ordeal of having a job

[chameleonsallinvermillion]

To be twenty-six and still functionally adolescent is…cringe. That is a word I have heard often enough to describe it. And yet here I am, coming up fast on thirty, and I have less independence, less self-control, and less life experience than many of my peers did when we were all sixteen. I crawl forward, inch by inch, as I am rapidly outpaced and outgrown. Such is the way of it. I fail to grow up.

During the course of a year in which I was able for the first time in my life to visit a hairdresser unaccompanied by a supporting family member, one of my dearest friends fell madly in love, conquered his fear of flying, and spent most of his time dashing between his job, the house he had just bought—and his girlfriend’s home in another country. They recently eloped. He is emigrating. I am so unspeakably happy for the pair of them, so glad to see the life in his eyes in the photographs he sends me now and then, that it almost drowns out the grief I feel at being left behind. It is a selfish grief, the terror of being abandoned, but it is not unfounded. We were once on equal footing, losers together, fumbling to make sense of the world. In the last few years, he has grown decades beyond me. I feel, now, like a child when I greet him. I cannot be six months older. He is a man.

The boy who was my best friend as a toddler has a child of his own now. The girl I had my first ever sleepover with, aged seven, is now a cop. The younger brother of a friend, mercilessly but affectionately mocked by all of us as a mere baby for so many years, has two daughters and a house that he owns. I talk to none of them anymore. There was never any malice in it. They grew up, moved out, went away, got lives of their own. The news rolls in: weddings, babies, promotions, houses, a year’s sabbatical abroad, an award. My mother insists that she does not care that she never has any news like that to share in the fiercely competitive arena of book club but I know she is lying. I have known her for twenty-six years, after all.

I make progress. My therapist insists that I congratulate myself on it and so I do. Three years ago I could not have made phone calls with the complaisance I do now: taking only minutes to beat my heels against the floor and scratch the skin off the back of my hand, often not even chewing my lip bloody as it rings, barely stammering when I talk. I have had only a handful of true panic attacks this year. I can go to the supermarket alone and only sometimes sit in my car before entering, heart between my teeth, fighting against the instinct to run. I make small talk, my script polished and my acting flawless. I seem well enough, often, that people forget what is wrong with me. I am well enough for them to resent the ways in which I am not well.

One year ago, my best friend was in love with me. Today, she is all but engaged to someone else. They claim they are not engaged – that they will get engaged in December – but I utterly fail to understand the distinction between being engaged and being, for lack of better term, engaged to be engaged. But all that frippery is what she wants, this friend of mine. A wedding, a home, a cat, maybe a baby or two. That was what I refused to offer her and that is why, despite the sweetness of our casual relationship, she was actively seeking my replacement. Somebody more mature. Somebody with her shit together. Somebody who would marry her.

It is impossible to trust that somebody loves you when you hate yourself. It is also impossible to trust that they love you when the life they talk about leading together seems to feature some future version of you that you cannot guarantee becoming. She loves me as I am – I insist, for vanity’s sake, that she still loves me – but she does not want me this way, and no wonder. How could she? Why should she?

She told me often how she loved me, how she had always loved me, but when I asked what she wanted from me, it was not what I could give. She wanted me to be financially stable, to get a good job, to move to the city, to marry her. A house by the sea, two cats, three children. She is twenty-six – she cannot wait. Time is running out. What I could offer her – love, and nothing more – was naturally insufficient. Thus she finds someone else, who can give her everything, and they grow up together, move on, become something, build a life that I could never build even if I was sure, completely sure, that I wanted it.

The terrible thing about trying your hardest and achieving only bare minimum is that it looks shockingly like not trying at all. People try to understand but they understand none of it. That is what my mother says.

“They will never understand,” she tells me. “Neither will I. We can try but it will never make sense to us.”

There is refuge to be found in metaphors. Imagine moths trapped between your flesh and your skin, their fuzzy wings beating. Imagine every second of every day like a badly-shot action sequence in a movie, a blur of incoherent motion and rapid cuts, till your mind tunes out and waits for it to be over in order to guess from context clues who came off the better. Imagine sinking below the stormy surface of the ocean into silence, blessed silence, till you would rather drown than brave the madness of the surface again. Imagine the fardle-fardle mumbling of a teacher in the old Charlie Brown cartoons which you can only translate into language by giving it the entirety of your attention. Imagine having to do on purpose so many things that you do subconsciously. The human brain is a marvellous machine and it can do all by itself, in milliseconds, magical feats of reasoning and computation. My brain is an ancient contraption, an entire factory operated without machinery, all hand tools and badly-filed paperwork. Imagine layer upon layer of self, a thousand little lies and performances, stacked up into a shell till you no longer know what sleeps in the centre of it, and imagine draping that in veil after veil, painted masks and lengths of gauze, till underneath could be anyone at all.

Her name is Bobbi. I built her years ago. When I was fourteen, I needed a mask suitable for talking to old men. Bobbi was my proudest creation. She was a little ditzy, a little scatty, but bright beneath it all, eager to learn, endlessly fascinated with almost any topic of conversation. She was a Jolly Good Sport, built from a lifetime’s study of boarding school novels and adventure stories to be the sort of girl who reminds old men, in some vague indefinable way, of the granddaughter they never had and inspires them to tell her things about engines and offer to take her flying with them. She was a masterpiece and I have scarcely had to tinker with her over the years.

These days, I no longer fly. I miss it dearly. I dream of it often. I watch the clouds and remember, scarcely believing that it happened, that once I pushed an Arcus through a cloudbank just like that, spiralling round the towering columns, plunging into the fog before bursting into a shaft of dizzying sunlight, pointing the nose at the ground and yet barely descending, faster and faster, sucked upwards by the first overtures of a storm. I used to flit between the showers of rain, watching the perfect silver spotlights where they fell, dodging round them, catching the rising air tantalisingly close to them but never once touching the water. I used to fly in the evenings as the sun set, when everything was gold. I used to circle with the buzzards over the cricket ground, opposite one another like partners in a dance, scratching away in the freezing winter air. I used to be a pilot.

Bobbi has been modified somewhat for her new purpose. She talks to neighbours. She is, in fact, relentlessly helpful in the local community. Bobbi will give any infirm old lady a lift to her blood test, or pop down the shops for somebody else’s shopping, or do the laundry of someone who quite frankly could manage their own laundry perfectly well. Bobbi will chat, will laugh, will cajole crotchety invalids into taking their pills, will flirt inconsequentially with bored old men. Most of all, Bobbi will smile. The best thing about her is the smile. I practiced in front of the mirror, over and over, until I got it exactly right.

She is useful, and she is a lie. She is one of my better creations, a mask that other people like me to wear. Rachael, Bertha, Tommy, Ned, Catherine, Isobel – they all have their purposes. People like Bobbi the best. I suppose that was always the point of her. I lie, and I lie, and I lie, and by lying as well as I possibly can I have found a way to have purpose. I am useful. I have worth. Sometimes the mask slips and they catch a glimpse—not of me, never of me, even I rarely catch a glimpse of me anymore, but of a layer below her, the outer shell, and I can see in their faces how confused they are by it, how little they like it, how gladly they welcome Bobbi sliding smoothly back into place.

The friend who loves me tells me earnestly that I can unmask around her, that she doesn’t mind. She tries so hard to be kind, armed with information from TikTok and her own good nature. She does not believe me when I tell her that she won’t like me unmasked. Nobody likes me unmasked – and why would they? Even I don’t. Unmasked, I frighten people. The closer we get to the centre, the more they worry and the less they see me as a person.

I am Dependent. I cannot live alone – not yet, maybe not ever. A brief attempt proved disastrous and it is now all but forbidden. I work parttime for unstable wages. Maybe one day I will do more. I hope so, yet there are days when even this exhausts me beyond measure. I do not go to see the doctor alone because I cannot communicate with them, the masks I wear at war, the need to perform making it utterly impossible to be honest. I am not trusted with anything, and rightly so. My mother lives in fear that if I am left alone for a couple of days I will kill myself. I do not think I will but I cannot blame her for being afraid. She knows where the scars have healed over as well as I do.

Being Dependent traps you as a teenager forever. Bound by other people’s schedules, other people’s rules, always asking permission. Permission to go out with a friend, permission to eat an early lunch, permission to stay up late or to go to bed early. Designated chores and set mealtimes and grumblings about lights-out time. In this house, you cannot even creep about. Every room can hear what is happening in every other room, and every bit of the floor creaks. Sneaking contraband food, lying about what I am doing on my computer, not because these things matter to me but because they are the only things I control. Getting haircuts my mother approves of, and eating food she doesn’t in the supermarket carpark.

I keep secrets because there is nothing else under my control. I do not think it would be more than a small row if she knew that sometimes, when I go alone to therapy, I buy a croissant as a treat and eat it before I come home – but it would be a row and everything would be spoiled, because then I would end up doing it with her grudging consent and it would no longer be Mine. I do not think that she would mind very much if I told her about me and my friend, about how it used to be when I went to visit her, about how it felt to be loved and how afraid I am that I am too selfish, too cold, too self-absorbed to ever love anyone as they deserve to be loved. But I cannot tell her these things, because they are Mine. They are all that is Mine.

I am trapped in childhood. If the waking nightmare of my brain did not make it so, the circumstances needed to control it do. My old friends outgrow me and move on. There is no malice in their leaving me behind. I cannot go with them. New losers, new late-bloomers, and for a little while I belong, but they outgrow me. I am the only one who does not grow up.

My mother pretends not to mind what other people think of me. She tells me that she will always look after me but when she is tired, or angry, or I am slipping out of control, she lets it show how greatly she wishes she did not have to. I cannot blame her. How could I blame her? I wish it too.

She has cut off one of her friends for things said about me but she will not tell me which one and I do not move enough in her social circle to figure it out. She pretends that she does not want a child worth bragging about in book club. She swears that she will try to understand. Only adolescence lets you love and hate someone the way I love and hate her. My only support and my gaoler. I am a child still. I think perhaps I will always be a child.

I should have had a Gift. You must have a Gift, if you are like me, otherwise people cannot figure out the point of you. If I had been better at music, everything would have been alright. If I had any fine motor skills worth talking about. If I had an eye that understood colour and form. If I could do maths above what is needed to pass a GCSE. If you have a Gift, everything else is forgiven. But if you have no Gift but still require all this support, still stay perpetually a child—volatile, irresponsible, frightened—then at best there is pity and at worst there is disgust.

Still I crawl. One day at a time, a little progress, a little hope. Take your pills. Do your exercises. Find a reason to survive. Fight the battle that you will never win. Climb the mountain with no summit. Try to forget that it takes everything you have to do the things they do without noticing. Try to forget anyone is watching. Grow. Grow. Grow. And all for what? To be too late.