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nothing scarier than being a fan of a fic and then becoming mutuals with the author. like hi shakespeare. big fan of your fake dating au

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Just a little guy. Photo from my collection, no date/info.

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Norfolk, England

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February 1985. Crayons

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me, writing: okay so I have to build up the relationship until it feels natural for these two people to be interested in each other

the monkey in my brain that screams about story ideas all day: let's make it subtextually clear in this chapter that he's already embarrassingly in love with her

me: damn monkey you're so right

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One of the reasons that Dracula is one of my favorite epistolary novels is that it cares about the archive.

This isn't just a set of letters and diaries put in order for the reader; it's an archive that was made by the people in the story.

We get to see how the letters were found, who found them, who transcribed all the wax cylinders, and who kept the documents.

It's a book that takes the role of the archivist and written documents seriously.

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Remember lab safety everyone 👍

Some thought process under the cut!

I've always wanted to depict chronic pain or waves of pain with red circle-ish pattern, well There's finally a piece where I can use it! Super happy! It's the big chunks of circle shapes centered on him, and they're supposed to represent radiation & radiation pain!

Also I have no idea how to represent the "human turning into ghost" theme outside of his body, I used red blood transitioning to green blood in the end and it just looks like his human blood was blasted out of him lol, I hope I get it across

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Gorgeous boy ☀️🌟

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Okay, kids, let's try this again. My askbox is back open. I do not reblog or respond to fundraising requests from strangers, and anyone who puts one in my askbox will be blocked and reported as spam. If I start getting overwhelmed by unsolicited requests again, the askbox goes away again.

With that said, I'm finally making headway on writing things again, and I'd love to procrastinate talk writing with folks! The climactic chapter of Something Borrowed, Something Blues is complete and coming sometime this week, and my goal is to get former heroes finished - or at least close enough to finished - to start posting in October. There may be more samples.

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always fascinated by which things people assume are unique to their culture and which they assume are universal. listening to an australian podcast right now and they are very confident that nobody will understand that 'cozzie' is short for 'swimming costume' and explain it every time it comes up, but they give zero information about swooping season because surely everyone gets attacked by birds for like a month a year

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man that new florence song amirite?

-------

(breathless and begging)

---

“Belief makes gods.”

The sudden non-sequitir made Mabel start, her fingers dropping her crocheting for a second, before picking up quickly where she was before.

“I don’t know Grunkle Ford, that feels a little too Terry for me.”

“It’s not always that simple,” he allowed, his many fingers deftly shuffling a deck of cards over and over again. “But the atmosphere in this post Transcendence era is absolutely ripe for Spontaneous Deification, I’ve been measuring the ether using a new tool I like to call the-“

Grunkle Ford quickly descended into dense technobabble, too thick for Mabel to parse.

She couldn’t stop thinking about that first thing tho.

---

(extraordinary and normal all at the same time)

Sometimes Mabel felt like she was two people.

Obviously she was Mabel, who sometimes picked her nose and had an achy knee that promised to become a serious problem in about 20-30 years.

She was a teenager who finished high school, a young adult who started a business with her uncle and won the heart of a lonely young man, a new mom, and now a slightly more experienced mom. Her life was filled with beautiful things, many of which she had made herself. She had a loving extended family, both blood and chosen.

She chose her family.

She chose where to live.

She chose her Henry, chose to have her children.

Those choices were hers.

She didn’t choose to be Mizar.

No one, or at least no one in their right mind, would ever choose to be that.

---

It felt like a dream.

It was more than a dream, Mabel knew.

She was walking in a desert of black sand and merciless burning blue sky. This was not an unkind desert, it just was.

The wide open space felt freeing, and Mabel spread her arms wide, unfurling and becoming her great size. Inside her she felt things shift, like the bottom dropping out of her stomach, like the shift from her belly button to her hips before her cycle. She opened her mouth and sang, a wordless joyful scream, a scream that went on even as the jagged black salt sand tore her feet and left them bloodied. She breathed and the air she exhaled was the oxygen others inhaled. She wept and it was the water that others drank. At some point she began skipping and running, leaving more and more blood behind her but she didn’t care, not when every step made her feel bigger, better, stronger

There was something, somethings behind her, their attention like a claw, but Mabel ignored it, letting herself unravel like throwing a blanket onto a bed. Here she was no one’s mother, no one’s wife, no one sis-

Weight.

She stopped.

She turned around.

There was nothing behind her but ashes.

Dust motes swirled and there was no one behind her.

There should have been a hundred someones behind her, a thousand a million a billion, all the selves she had been before, a joyful conclave of loved ones meeting loved ones-

Obliterated by her stare, by the crushing weight of belief and identity, by the singularity she had become-

by Mizar.

Quick like a gunshot, Mabel covered her eyes, cast her head downwards to the ground, she couldn’t she couldn’t she couldn’t burn the future she couldn’t she couldn’t

(she shot up in bed, gasping and crying and unsure why she was doing both.)

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(cells divide)

Once there were two.

(2 4 8 16 32)

One of the other two became akin to the sun. The other died.

(64 128 256 512)

But that’s not the end of the story, not when the world remembers the other one. Not when stories are told of the other one. Not when the other one had children who begat children who begat children who-

(1024 2048 4096)

What does it do to a soul, when the world pins a singular identity to it?

What does it do to a soul, when a god is unable to stop thinking about it?

Endless possibility overwritten, enslaved to  a singular identity.

(4194304 8388608 16777216)

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Mabel sat in the desert, refusing to walk any more.

She didn’t want to haunt the narrative.

She didn’t want to be constantly haunting her brother.

She didn’t want to know that she would be an endless lodestone weighing her brother down, weighing the world down, weighing everyone who came after her down.

She didn’t want she didn’t she didn’t.

It wasn’t fair.

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(but how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?)

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"Why'd you give it up Mom?"

For once Mabel didn't have to ask what Willow meant.

"Because I became a mom."

Willow's face puckered. "Oh."

Mabel waved a hand at her. "Oh come on, you know it's not like that. Though, uh, it sounds like it does."

She sat down on the couch next to Willow.

"No, its just that... it was different, doing risky things when it was just me and your uncle. Even when it was me and your uncle and I married your dad... I knew if I beefed it he'd be upset for a while, but then he'd get back on his feet and find someone new."

Willow thought that Mom was severely underestimating Dad's coping skills, but let her go on.

"But then you three came around, and I couldn't do that to you guys. You needed me more than your uncle needed me as a partner, and I needed to do cool stuff with weapons every night. So that was that."

Mabel looked at Willow's scuffed up hands.

"Are you thinking of giving it up?"

Willow nodded. "I think it's morally dubious at best, wrong at medium, and actively harming at worse."

The completely blank stare on her Mom's face told Willow that she had never even thought for a second that anything she did hunting was wrong.

"Never mind."

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“Lucy Ann, am I a good person?”

The diminutive vampire snorted. “No.”

Dipper must have looked stricken because she went on.

“Look, I know you can’t help asking these questions. You went from an ape god gave anxiety to, to a species that quite frankly doesn’t innately HAVE a sense of good or evil. You went from vanilla ice cream to an endless supply of chocolate syrup on top of a ten story sundae.”

She took a sip of her drink. “I’m sorry Dipper, I’m not Mabel. I’m not going to kiss your boo boos and lie and tell you it’s all okay.”

(“She didn’t do that” Dipper muttered under his breath.)

“You do god awful things, all the time, and will continue to do so for time immemorial. We’re monsters, that’s what we do.”

The gesture didn’t come naturally to her, but she reached out and awkwardly patted his hand.

“But I think the important thing is that you try. You always try. You’ll always keep on trying. Like, that’s the best any of us can do or ask for.”

She pointed with a finger and said “Now finish your organ meat you big sap.”

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i made this¹ the other day 👍

¹ pasta & sausage & spinach & bell pepper

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Liah Nyuot by Brianna Capozzi for All-IN Magazine June 2025

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DJ Bodyhorror has the whole club pulsating and throbbing

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have you heard that jordan peele said steven yeun's character is the one that has the most in common with him. have you thought about how most of his cinematic career has been built around discussions of race and the traumas that come from racism. have you thought about how any media handling real and personal topics is a sort of emotional self-disembowelment on the part of the creator. have you thought of the glory and horror of being Seen. have you screamed

Have I? HAVE i. Have I thought about how Peele has discussed being objectified and tokenized on set, especially early in his career? Have I thought about what it's like to suffer real-life trauma in a space created for make-believe? Buddy, I haven't thought about anything else for days!!

I think one thing that makes this movie so visceral to me is that it's an exploration by a great popular artist on the human cost of making popular art. To me, the connection between Peele and Jupe is a link between the auteur and the cult leader — both are people consumed & defined by stories, people who are compelled by a narrative and feel an urge to spread that narrative to an audience.

And I am really impressed by how hard Peele seems to work to reject the cult leader in himself as best he can — to make art that enriches the lives of ALL THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE IT. Every interview is about how collaborative and present he is as a director. Obsessed with this Q&A for many reasons but this moment sticks with me:

KEKE PALMER: There would be moments where we’re going through different parts of this script, this story, from when we first rehearsed to when we were actually on set, or when we had an idea that happened that morning. I would be listening, my head would be down, I’d be listening to what Jordan’s saying, I’m like, man this is deep. And I look up and there’d be just this one little tear falling. Man, this brother’s deep. JORDAN PEELE: I’m not afraid to cry as a director. KP: And he’s chill! He’d be like, “That’s what happens” and tears are falling. I’m like, “Are you all right?” But he keeps going and he’s like “Yeah, yeah. So that’s the thing.” And then he just walks out.

To me, that reads as a person who is NOT JUST super smart and deep and creative etc but who is also aware every moment of how lucky he is to be doing what he's doing, and who is not ashamed of his own reaction to that gratitude. What's to be ashamed of? It's incredibly fun! He is having an amazing time! He's hanging out with people he likes and respects and coating actors with goop in the esophageal tube! What a job!

I wonder if, to be that thankful and that aware (and that collaborative), you have to have experienced the flip side; if you have to have been Jupe, at least for a little while. I wonder if the process of -- to some extent -- commodifying your own suffering (as capitalism practically demands that artists do in order to survive as artists) leads, almost inevitably, to a moment where you think, "I survived this horror and became a Star because I am the main character of reality: I am more special than other people, I have a special ability to communicate, I have a special destiny." That is a powerful story and a seductive one, but if you don't leave it behind, it will eat you and the people around you alive.

It seems to me like an extension of what Peele is exploring in Us--the notion that your contentment is entangled with someone else's suffering. Why you? Why not the person with all your qualities who for whatever reason never ended up where you are? Especially for creators with marginalized identities, right? "Am I occupying a space that should belong to someone else?" You can avoid that question by deciding that you have special individual qualities that make you the Chosen One, as Jupe does. Or you can accept that the question will always haunt you, that luck (LUCKY THE FINAL HORSE??) has no logic, and you try to spread your luck out and open your space up to as many other people as you can. Which you see Peele doing all the time! Gah!!