#And the hoops made me do THIS

[i-wasnt-ready-for-this]

I can show you the world / Shining, shimmering, splendid / Tell me, princess, now when did / You last let your heart decide? / I can open your eyes / Take you wonder by wonder / Over, sideways and under

On a magic carpet (diem) ride.

[tabithatwo]

(x)

(this is a pls stop blaming juliette lewis for nat’s arc and death post <3)

[sheregenerated13]

I changed the Stardew Valley letters from 'Your Mom' and 'Your Dad' to be from 'Your Aunt' and 'Your Bestie' to be a bit friendlier to folks who have estranged parents, etc. I also changed some of the letter contents to make sense (from a friend, not parent, etc.)

I'll pin the file to the #gaymes channel in my LGBTQ safe space server if anyone needs it! Also in my thasmin!! server :)

[queseraphita]

Lies of P could exist in Yoko Taro's Drakenier universe, and no one would even notice it being anywhere out of place

*smacks my string conspiracy board*

WHITE CHOLORNATION SYNDROME

[supervisormeero]

An Unhinged Analysis of 10 Songs That Remind Me of Syril and Dedra 

Behold, a breakdown of/ramble about a few songs with lyrics that I think fit Syril, Dedra, and whatever delightfully messed-up mess they're likely to have going on in Season 2. Putting most of it under a cut because seriously, I had Too Many Thoughts (shocker) and no one needs to see all of them unless they're prepared. Anyway—

“Egoist” by Jenna Holiday

“I see myself in you, I’ve always been an egoist/I want the best for you, you show me where my ego is…” 

For two of the most self-obsessed people in Star Wars canon, a song all about egos and arrogance and loving someone because “I see myself in you” is a little too perfect. After all, Syril and Dedra don’t care for each other because they’re actually in anything resembling real love; at least in Season 1, Syril’s obsessed with Dedra because she is who he wants to be, and Dedra tolerates Syril because he’ll help her get what she wants. Also “you’re thinking of you/while I’m kissing myself”… like, yeah. Provided they ever kissed, that’d be them.

2. “Oleander” by Mother Mother

“And if you leave me/rest assured, it would kill me/like an oleander, white, white leaves”

This song describes a toxic, codependent relationship, and that’s one of the directions I could see Syril and Dedra going in Season 2 (the toxicity, certainly). They don’t love each other, but for various professional and personal reasons that get inseparably jumbled, they need each other - perhaps more than they’ve ever needed anyone. That terrifies them. Neither of them have the capacity to deal with those emotions healthily, and thus, the possessiveness, jealousy and toxicity commences. Also “I’ll make a mess/and you’ll be there to help me undress” has the spirit of post-Ferrix Keero, what with Dedra “making a mess” of Ferrix and Syril “being there to help” by rescuing her and calming her (take or leave the ‘undress’ lyric, but at least half the fics on AO3 are about something of varying levels of spice happening in the broom closet). “If you leave me, rest assured, it would kill me…” I suspect they might be the death of each other in the end, so... sure. Either that, or somebody’s ending up alone and very pleased with their advancement to a lucrative new position on the Death Star.

3. “Money Power Glory” by Lana Del Rey

“I want money, power, and glory/oh hallelujah, I’m gonna take them for all that they got…”

This is probably more Syril than Dedra, since (in my opinion) he cares more about money, power and glory; she doesn’t need accolades, she only needs control. It’s a typical Lana song, but it’s all about climbing to the top and wanting power above even a romantic relationship. I suspect that’s the direction we’ll see Syril go in Season 2, eventually leading him to betray Dedra in favor of climbing the Imperial ladder.

3. “Drumming Song” by Florence + The Machine

“There’s a drumming noise inside my head, and it starts when you’re around/I’d swear that you could hear it, it makes such an almighty sound…”

I think most would choose “Kiss With A Fist” for Keero. I understand that. But for reasons I can’t fully articulate, this song makes me think of Dedra being dragged into having feelings for Syril entirely against her will. It’s about falling for someone to the point where their presence has a physical effect on you; hence, the “drumming noise that starts when you’re around.” She wouldn’t know what to do with any of that, of course, because I sincerely doubt Dedra “never been touched” Meero has felt any of it before. But I do think it could happen - and if it did, she’d hate him for causing that "drumming noise" and making her weak.

4. “Love Love Love” (Cabin Sessions) by Of Monsters and Men

“Those bright blue eyes can only meet mine/across a room filled with people that are less important than you…”

This song is almost too sweet for Syril and Dedra. But certain of the lyrics fit so perfectly that it's unsettling, so I threw it on here. At its core, it’s about having someone fall in love with you and knowing that for whatever reason - circumstance, a lack of reciprocation, you having no understanding of or experience with relationships whatsoever and being more rattled by someone touching you than stalking you - you can’t return their feelings. I’m probably too stupidly sentimental about a ship that laughs at sentimentality, but it almost landed to me as Dedra reflecting on Syril’s attitude toward her. Plus, “bright-blue eyes across a room filled with people that are less important than you?” In my ridiculously elaborate headcanon that will never happen on this show, that’s Dedra making eye contact with Syril across the meeting room table after he weasels his way up from the Bureau of Standards to the ISB.

5. “Us” by Regina Spektor

“We’re living in a den of thieves/and it’s contagious…” 

A den of thieves = the ISB, and the Empire in general. Aside from that, the song references having a “statue built of us,” and while I don’t think Dedra’s necessarily after that level of recognition, I don’t think she’d turn it down were it offered. Syril would love a statue built of him so he could proudly show it to his mother. He and Dedra are both trying to achieve a goal that would lead to that sort of laudation within the Imperial ranks, and in the end, they’re probably hoping for a timeless level of appreciation and respect. In some form, that’s probably Syril’s greatest hope: a statue of him with Dedra at his side. 

6. “Easy to Hate” by Waterparks

“You’re selfish and a half, and the other half is me/all that I can do is fall in blame with you…”

This is a fun, catchy song. 2. This is a song about hating someone almost as much as, if not more than, you love them, because your partner loves themself more than they love you. To me, that rings as Syril realizing Dedra doesn’t really care about him, much less love him or see him as an equal, and she never will. So, “it’s too easy to hate you/you’re hard to love.” And yet, as the lyrics state, he’ll “fall in blame” with her, but he won’t initially break off whatever weird connection they develop. Partly because of what he feels for her despite her apparent and cutting indifference, partly because he thinks if he keeps trying he’ll make something happen between them, and mostly because he needs her in his quest to gain power. 

7. “Breezeblocks” by Alt-J

“Please don’t go, I’ll eat you whole/I love you so, I love you so, I love you so…”

I have loved “Breezeblocks” and the whole An Awesome Wave album since the early 2010s, and so now I have little choice but to cram Alt-J onto any fandom mixes I create. In this case, though, I think it mostly fits: especially after the bridge. Much like “Beggin for Thread,” there’s a power imbalance here and such a consuming, obsessive desperation to keep someone close that you’d “eat them whole.” Huh. Who’s known for having consuming, obsessive tendencies almost to the point of delusion? 

8. “Beggin for Thread” by Banks

“Stooped down and out, you got me beggin for thread/to sew this hole up that you ripped in my head/stupidly think you had it under control…”

Look. I can’t resist a sewing reference because of Mr. “(Please) Look At Me, I Tailored My Uniform, And My Suit, And Everything I Own.” But like many others on this list, this song deals with power imbalances, mind games, and needing to have the upper hand in an unhealthy relationship. Kyle’s talked about how Syril and Dedra’s relationship in Season 2 delves into the concept of who does and doesn’t have power, and I think this song is a decent example of that. Whether intentionally or not, Syril and Dedra are going to mess with each other’s heads in their unending attempts to Prove Themselves to the Empire. The vibe of this song aligns with that. Also “my words can come out as a pistol and I’m no good at aiming/but I can aim it at you”… Dedra sure can’t defend herself in a riot, but she can definitely “aim her words” right at Syril’s heart.

9. “Sober II (Melodrama)” by Lorde 

“They’ll talk about us, all the lovers/how we kiss and kill each other/they’ll talk about us, and discover/how we kiss and kill each other…”

Circling back to The Toxicity, this song is all about two people who have an on-and-off relationship riddled with miscommunications, misunderstandings, and constant tension. If that isn’t Syril and Dedra, I don’t know what is. Plus - “all the glamour, and the trauma, and the fucking melodrama” - seems very ISB/Imperial to me. It’s glamour on the surface and backstabbing and trauma beneath, and the reality of that is going to cause some very real melodrama for Cereal and Debra. Plus, this song has the coolest combination of strings and a beat. Just… listen to it. It’s short, it’s one of my favorite Lorde songs, and you won’t regret it. 

10. “Daylight” by David Kushner

“Oh I love it and I hate it at the same time, you and I drink the poison from the same vine/oh I love it and I hate it at the same time, hiding all of our sins from the daylight”

Okay, so, because I’m old and not cool and on TikTok or wherever I suspect this song blew up, I just found it. It’s actually probably just about garden-variety infidelity, but there’s enough wiggle room in the writing that you can twist it to the right angle to fit Syril, Dedra, and their (presumably?) super-secret Season 2 investigation into Axis and Andor. “Hiding all of our sins from the daylight” could be embarking on a “sinful” non-sanctioned hunt for the rebels who ruined both of their reputations, or it could be embarking on a sinful non-sanctioned hunt for the rebels who ruined both of their reputations and falling in the most doomed, toxic, imbalanced, non-sanctioned love at the same time. “You and I drink the poison from the same vine” feels very Keero to me; the poison, of course, being Imperial ideology. And, because Syril and Dedra are twin flames, they’ll “love it and hate it at the same time.” Dedra would love how well they work together and how efficient they are as a team, but any of the feelings… cannot process. Complete shutdown. At least listen to the last minute of this song; whether or not you think it applies to Keero, it’s gorgeous. 

[thecolorsfucked]

choker by @michellemoe (fr check out their etsy)

[fingertipsmp3]

Should I get up at 6 in the morning to go for a run or is that an insane decision that I will hate myself for

[mainfaggot]

today I put on a different mask and it felt better than the usual

[rubys-domain]

i did furina's story quest. all i can say is that i should've learned not to expect anything from story quests by now.

[no1ryomafan]

SRW is such a funny thing for me to think about cause it’s like “wow a trpg game that’s been ongoing for decades that really encapsulates how huge and significant mecha is to japan by having every and all mecha been featured in this giant crossover that also has really cool attack animations that replicate the shows they’re from well, with new original content for some shows sprinkled in as well” at first glance then I proceed to be salty by going “oh wait the main show I like in here is only ever used for one iteration which they end up butchering and all the other mechas I’ve liked have shown up maybe once because I’ve liked the ones that had to flop in Japan- also this game caused tags to be unnecessarily filled with crossovers and people acting like they know a series just because it was in SRW thanks I hate it” and this cycle is only a constant because I haven’t actually played a SRW besides 30s demo for a bit 💀

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

where are my girard girlies(gn)

[svnmouth]

I think getting a hysterectomy would either help with my migraine issues or just give me different problems but I wont be able to know until next year minimum and even then I dont know if I can do a second surgery so soon. the way that birth control just utterly and completely fucks you over when youre starting it, when youre on it, and when youre getting off it is so. Idk if its even worth it to change my birth control if Im gonna get a hystrectomy in the vague soonish future even if I feel like absolute dogshit for an entire month for 1/3rd of the year.

[nerdyqueerr]

Im pretty sure they only pick rec league basketball refs out of like the most insecure young men who apply. These guys fucking suck

[silverskye13]

different anon. it does for some people but not everyone. (also, some people may find the feature annoying in certain cases because the length it decides is Too Long is kiinda arbitrary and peoople have differnent lines.)

So in the spirit of Under-The-Cutting, I guess.

First thing of address, I guess: I can't control if people turn off the auto Tumblr readmore function. If it doesn't work for you, you can't control that either. But I find it a bit unfair that someone might, hypothetically, turn off the useful tool for cutting back on longposts on your dashboard, and then come into my inbox and be passive-aggressive about me not doing the function for them on my side of the equation. If that's the circumstances that kicked all this off, it's a bit... ahm... self-centered. I personally have it turned on, less because I want to filter long written posts [I like reading the fics posted on Tumblr] but because I like to filter long image posts, and those generally don't get censored under a readmore.

For that matter I also can't control someone's scrolling speed. I get what the second anon is trying to say: maybe only censor posts of a certain size. The issue here is what I think is long isn't the same as what someone else does. For me personally, I think long is a written work that tops out around 10k words. I'd get annoyed scrolling through that on my dashboard. The fic I posted yesterday was a rare 5k-ish. Most fics I've posted here in the past are around 2-3k, but I've posted an 8k fic here before with no resistance. Something I'm learning from this is other people think 2-3k is fine enough to scroll through, but 5k is a lot. So... noting that for the future.

So I personally don't like censoring my posts under the readmore function for a couple or reasons:

It cuts back on engagement, noticeably. It's the side-effect of social media that you want instant gratification as quickly as possible. When someone is given the choice to either click a button and sit on a post for awhile, or continuing to scroll through their dashboard for something quicker to engage with, normally they'll pick the second option. That's how social media was made, and while the Tumblr platform subverts this a little by it's nature, it still buy-and-large holds true.

Read mores, as far as I'm aware, can only be added on desktop. The snippets that make it to Tumblr, barring when I archive them for myself on a separate document, are all written on mobile. If they aren't completely mobile, they're at least started/drafted there and then moved to desktop later - but I want to say 9/10 of these are written and posted completely from my phone. And they're going to lean even more into that, since for various reasons, it's currently easier and more reliable for me to write on my phone. I won't be able to continue writing fics here if I have to wait until I have access to my laptop every time before posting them. Which leads me to my incredibly me-only dilemma:

Writing these quickly and posting them rough to Tumblr is the only reason these quick fics get written in the first place. I started posting written work to Tumblr because I was tired of abandoning so many ideas in the shuffle between "Is this good enough for AO3?" and "Is this good enough to be written at all?" But if I have to re-add roadblocks that make posting here more trouble than it's worth, I know myself, I will end up not posting fics here anymore. I'm sure it sounds silly. It sounds silly to me. But it's less of a "readmores make me not want to write" and more of the mental gymnastics of: Is this fic long enough to need a readmore -> If it does need a readmore, when will I have the time to add it -> Do I post it now and edit it in later? Probably not, because I won't remember to add it later -> Since I waited to post it, do i even remember hours later that I had a fic I wanted to post -> Would it have been easier to post this on AO3, even though it doesn't meet my standard of craft of AO3 fics? -> Why am I bothering to do this when I have so many other things I'd rather spend my time on? If you've ever done that thing where you got nothing done on a free day because you had (1) thing you had to do in the afternoon, and all your mental faculties were taken up going "No I can't do X, I have to do that thing in 4 hours!" That's kind of the odd cascade the whole readmore thing is doing for me right now.

My thoughts on this currently is I have 2 compromises and 1 definitely-not-a-compromise. And the one not-a-compromise is I ignore all this ever happened, and continue doing what I have been doing. I don't want to do that because I like to be accommodating? I'm very community focused. I like building an atmosphere that's welcoming when it comes to the blog. But that might also be what I resort to just because, as I said above, if this turns into more trouble on my end than I think it's worth, I'll just stop posting fics here, and I don't want to do that. Which leads me to--

Compromise 1: I stop posting fics here. It's not really a compromise, but it's easy. Ish. Eh. Not really. Tagging everything on AO3 is a pain in the butt for something quick and dumb you wrote up because you thought it'd be fun. But being able to post a link to a fic like with my LongFics is a think I could just fall back on. I think it also means I'll probably stop writing this stuff though, because I'll get bogged down in things like trying to edit them, or link them together cohesively when they're out of chronological order [Like the Hels/Wels fics, which currently are all over the place in their timeline, and will continue to be so probably]. Regardless it's an option.

Compromise 2: We can go back to the old standby which is me tagging anything longer than 3 paragraphs as "long post" and then if anyone doesn't want it popping up on their dash, they can filter the tag. I also don't like this option because it blocks even more than a readmore does. But it's quick and easy for me, and maintains the integrity of "I wanted to post this to Tumblr and not worry about it anymore."

This is all stuff for me to stew on. I don't expect people to weigh in on these options, though you're welcome to if you think you have some good input for it. But that's about where I'm at right now.

[snoppy]

leo valdez post link pls 🙏

oh no babe i meant post as in after tlh.... 😭

[suturcd]

@outwards said: hiiii i slide in the 👫 with narafran orrrrr maybe franna (fran and kanna) or maybe even frantrish whatever you vibe with i just think all our charas are so cool in any sense so i spinny a roulette and chinhands at your gorjus words

send a 👫and I’ll write four headcanons I have about our muse’s relationship    // accepting.

001. // Fran is not in the practice of doling out flattery for flattery's sake, but when she thinks something is praiseworthy she will remark on it in a very matter-of-fact way. Whenever Narancia is on the receiving end of this his confidence for the day reaches an all-time high and he will brag about it 100% unprompted. He brings it back to the Bucci gang like "YEAH SO TODAY FRAN TOLD ME I HAVE GREAT BODILY-KINESTHETIC INTELLIGENCE AND A STRONG SENSE OF RHYTHM" all puffed up and proud of himself. He cannot be taken down a peg in this state. Sorry Fran didn't compliment you on your sweet moves or told you that you remind her of a dope sea slug but that's not his problem. Some of us are just born cool and loveable and girls compliment them about it. Maybe in the next life you'll have his luck.

002. // Sometimes Fran sees Narancia move or drum along to his music and it itches her brain in such a way that later on in the day she will find herself adopting/mirroring it as an absentminded stim. Feels good feels organic.

003. // Narancia and Fran stopped attending school at around the same time in their lives, so in a post-VA Narancia-lives, maybe perhaps mayhaps... they kind of finish up school together (in whatever form that takes). Or maybe they infiltrate a school as students to investigate/lure out someone operating from within it? I just think Fran-Narancia school life light novel side story is very fun as a concept. "Classmate B's Observation Log: The Transfer Students Are Mobsters?! (More Importantly, What's Their Relationship...?)"--Book 1 out now.

004. // I love to think about Fran doing things that throw Narancia off his rhythm without meaning to like reaching out to brush something out of his hair, staring intently at him for extended periods (she is zoning out), abruptly bringing up some tiny detail about something he does that she observed and tucked away for later, etc. Fran autistic girl swag once again.

005. // I think it would be difficult for it to come about but there is something in the fact that both Narancia and Fran lost their mothers at almost the exact same age (surviving the same events/conditions their mothers passed from, at that) and how guttingly world-shaking that is. I would love for them to talk about their moms is what I'm saying. I think it would be good.

006. // Fran’s surgical mask Narancia’s natural enemy. Narancia did something silly once that Fran huffed out a very quiet, very muffled laugh over and he whipped around like a bloodhound catching a scent and has been trying to replicate the results ever since. Fran smiling at Narancia behind the mask indulgence. Alright Fran, keep your secrets.