#CLOWN HOURS IN THIS HOUSEHOLD

[doom-dreaming]

Finalized Beach House Crew

I'm giving it a title so I can convince myself to stop fucking with them and just leave them be. I am happy with the way they turned out. I also went back and tweaked some stuff on OG Blue Team and Cortana (her especially) to draw from official art sources I liked. So now I can finally finish building their house. To be a Sim is to live a life plagued by a meddlesome cosmic horror reshaping reality to its (my) whims.

look how much sharper i got this kid. i got as close to that eyebrow furrow as sims would let me.

look! i found a good hair for him!! he has the energy of a dog that just wants to be told it's a good boy. you can barely tell but he does have the five o'clock shadow. it's just that the next most obvious option looked too intentional and we all know it isn't.

and i did also send their mom with them. this woman has the most intense eyebrows i've ever seen. also . different hair bc fuck that. also also i guess i forgor to get a neutral face ref for her. i can't be bothered at this point.

and new cortana and linda. i did also tweak kelly, but it was mostly really small stuff like the color of her eyebrows. i didn't actually look at a reference the first time i did cortana, so this time i kind of amalgamated her look from h2a and 4. and linda's pretty subtle, but i adjusted some stuff based off of a panel in lone wolf. so there you go.

i have shenanigans from playing last night but i'll put those in another post

[starrynights-sunnyskies]

as the flowers bloom, my heart does too ⋆*·ﾟmisa x putellas!femreader, social media au, (7/-)

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when your relationship ends and all you want to do is hide and cry, flowers suddenly start to appear on your doorstep.

or; misa hating to see a pretty girl cry and suffer and going out of her way to cheer her up while staying anonymous

fic: see my masterlist 🤍

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yourusername: hello madrid 🌼 Liked by sofie.svava, frejaolofssonn, ona.battle and 1,289 others

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ingridengen Sweetest girl!!

username1 😮

marialeonn16 Floraaaa mi favoritaaa 😎

sofie.svava Yay, the princess has arrived! 👼🎀

albaps9 oh dear is the car still ok ↳ yourusername i'm a better driver than you ↳ albaps9 iM a bETtER dRiVeR THAn yOu ↳ yourusername you can't even drive manual 😙

janafernandez3 Aw, what beautiful flowers!! 😍 ↳ claudiaapina from her 'secret' admirer, I bet! ↳ jennihermoso Cough, secret admirer turned girlfriend, cough! ↳ ona.battle They're so goals together 😭 ↳ patri8guijarro Uhhh, you know who SHE is?!!! ↳ ona.battle 🤷‍♀️ ↳ __cata13 HOW ↳ janafernandez3 Just a little common sense, girls 😅 ↳ keirawalsh hasn't it been obvious right from the start or do i just spend too much time on social media to have seen it all happen? 😳 ↳ aitanabonmati The last one, you clown 😁

marisabel_rguez Have fun in Madrid, YN! Hope you have a good time 😎 ↳ yourusername ass 🤣

username2 hello, more MisaxYn content? 🤞

username3 Driving six hours to Madrid for funsies?.... hmmm I wonder why 😳 ↳ username4 she could've just taken the train but ok ↳ username5 Maybe the u-haul was already filled to the brim so she decided to bring the rest herself 🤭 ↳ username6 👀 ↳ username7 uhhh they wouldn't, would they? ↳ username5 Oh, but they might! 😌 ↳ username7 🕵️‍♀️🧐

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Text Messages

ale 🐻 You post a picture before telling me you've arrived? I love you pero can you please stop worrying me like that. I called you like so many times. ale 🐻 I just had the most nerve wracking seven hours of my life, you know?? you ○○○ you ALE you im okay im okay! you fuck i'm so sorry, my phone died and then i arrived and misa and sofie took me in and they immediately took me out to eat and i just kind of forgot im so so so so so so so sorry and i love you the most in the whole entire world. you're the best sister ever and i'm the luckiest shithead there is. t'estimo, t'estimo, t'estimo!!!! ale 🐻 Bé, I was just really worried about you, I didn't like not hearing anything from you. You're my whole world, too. Next time make sure it's fully charged when you know you'll go out for a long time. What would you have done if you had needed help? Not saying this to scare you, but you know that. So, how was the drive? Did you at least take a few breaks? you boring, lots of rain and traffic. aaaand no breaksies because i didn't want to arrive in the middle of the night bc the traffic had set me back some hours. misa has a game tomorrow and i didn't want her to lose any sleep 😅 ale 🐻Next time you take regular breaks, yes? I'm sure Misa would understand and want the same. Can you please Facetime mami? you i will. petons to you all and olga 😘 you and nala! Delivered

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↳ 6h ago: marisabel_rguez added to their story

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Direct Messages albaps9 corrupting the missus to support real madrid, i see? misa, are you even trying to get along with alexia? 😂 marisabel_rguez Jeje 😆 Had to show her a little bit of our Madrid culture, of course! It's tradition to attend a game! albaps9 in the putellas household, it's also tradition to support barca, so have fun holding onto your head! albaps9 no, but all jokes aside. i might not have said this to you in person yet, but i want you to know how happy i am that you're with my sister. i don't think anyone else could've pulled her out of the deep end and love and treat her the way she deserves. you made her see her own worth again, believe that she was deserving of all the good things, and gave us our girl back. i'll never be able to properly thank you, but i want you to know how grateful we all are nonetheless. marisabel_rguez Thank you for telling me. But you don't need to thank me for doing all that. I love her, it's only normal that I treat her accordingly. She's my entire world, Alba. albaps9 i still don't think you realise how much your love and care for her means to her and the rest of us, and how it has impacted us as a family. but remember that we're proud to call you family too. okay? albaps9 unless you hurt her and end up destroying all the progress she's made, maria isabel. then i'll fucking come for you and alexia won't be your only problem. marisabel_rguez I would expect you to do so then! She's really lucky with you two. She loves you very much, so I'm also happy to be part of your circle. albaps9 🥹🥹 okay but you don't even seem the slightest bit intimidated? 🤣 marisabel_rguez Oh no, I know you're bark and bite! I just know I don't have to be afraid because that worst case scenario will never happen! albaps9 thank you misa ❤️

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tagged: marisabel_rguez, frejaolofssonn, carolinemoller_, haleyraso, yourusername sofie.svava: Supporting the boys with my favourite madridistas Liked by claudia.zornoza, carolineweir95, haleyraso and 12,493 others

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frejaolofssonn Gooooooaaaaal golgolgolgolgol 🤩

carolineweir95 Supporting the men but wearing Misa jerseys, I'm so here for it haha ↳ sofie.svava Someone insisted 🙊 liked by marisabel_rguez ↳ marisabel_rguez And we couldn't resist her! liked by yourusername

username1 Did sofie just... ↳ username2 Yes 😭😬😬😬 ↳ username3 she's removed yn from the tags now 🤭 ↳ username1 Too late man lmao

claudia.zornoza Vamos 💪🏼

haleyraso 💅🏽

username4 it sure is real love if someone raised on barca sets even one foot inside santiago bernabeu and it's not in the away-section liked by 12 others

username5 The Misa appreciation is spreading 😛 ↳ username6 and rightly so!! ↳ username7 I wonder who's behind that 🧐👀

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marisabel_rguez: Happy life. Liked by albaps9, bff2, jennihermoso and 18,329 others

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username1 we know who this is why dont u just tag her lmao srsly ↳ username2 Honestly, do they truly still think they're being slick 🤦‍♀️ ↳ username3 I don't even get the point in keeping it private, like what's the big deal? ↳ username4 maybe they just don't care but don't want to indulge people like you all

marialeonn16 😊

albaps9 ❤️ ↳ albaps9 but that tush will always be mine 😭

sofie.svava 💖

haleyraso Awww

username7 I love how they're slowly growing more comfortable letting the world in ):

sofiajakobsson 😘

bff1 ummm hey? hands to yourself. she's still my snookums until she officially has your last name 🤣 liked by alexiaputellas ↳ yourusername omg stop embarrassing me ↳ marisabel_rguez ✋🏽😳🤚🏽

ingridengen The sweetest together!

salmaparalluelo 😍

jennihermoso 👀

username4 You forgot the other half of the caption ↳ username5 Happy wife, happy life? ↳ username4 Ding-ding-ding! ↳ username6 don't think they'll get married so long as alexia is still lurking in the background 🤣

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yourusername: madrid, you were good to me!! (plus a little surprise i discovered at the petrol station on my way home. te amo mas que a la vida en sa) Liked by bff3, fridolinarolfo, haleyraso and 2,499 others

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albaps9 hmmm i wonder whyyyy liked by yourusername

salmaparalluelo Pls yn confirm that you-know-who and the anonymous admirer are the same person!! ↳ jennihermoso 👀 ↳ yourusername hehe ↳ janafernandez3 !!!!!!!!!!!!! ↳ ona.battle We want to know 😱 ↳ marialeonn16 Oh, but we know 😌 ↳ ingridengen yup!! ☺️ ↳ jennihermoso 👀 ↳ ona.battle ???

username1 the note in the car is the cutest 😔

username2 I want a Misa too, care to loan her out?

alexiaputellas Proud of you and how strong you are. You kept fighting and look at you now. You deserve all this happiness, ma germana petita. T'adoro. ↳ yourusername t'estimo tant tant tant

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yourusername: feliç diada de sant jordi, la meva gent🌹 Liked by ingridengen, alexiaputellas, albaps9 and 940 others

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marisabel_rguez Horrible choice of clothing, I should give you some of my shirts to wear ↳ yourusername you're acting as if half of them aren't already at my place ↳ marisabel_rguez Right where they should be 😉

bff1 feliç sant jordiiii

begovargas 🌹

alexiaputellas 🌹📖🐉🌹

marisabel_rguez And I love when you speak Catalan!!!! liked by yourusername

janafernandez3 feliç sant jordi, el meu amic 🌹

aitanabonmati Feliç Sant Jordi, YN!

claudiaapina feliç sant jordi! 😊

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↳ 5h ago: marisabel_rguez added to their story ↳ 4h ago: marisabel_rguez added to their story ↳ 1h ago: marisabel_rguez added to their story

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marisabel_rguez: este camiseta 💪🏼 Liked by yourusername, sofie.svava, realmadridfem and 14,398 others

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alexiaputellas Visca Barca!!!!! ↳ yourusername be nice... 🤨

yourusername oh wow black is your colour too 🤭 ↳ yourusername (keeping the rest of my thoughts to myself bc alexia's lurking here) ↳ alexiaputellas Yes, behave... 🤨

sofie.svava looking gewd amiga!!! 😇

realmadridfem Nuestro orgullo 💪🏼🤩

haleyraso ✨👏

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username1: o-oka…okay.. ma’am 😳 Liked by username2, yourusername, username3 and 548 others

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username2 lucky person who gets to keep her ↳ username3 @/yourusername 👋 ↳ username12 how shallow of you ↳ username2 she's gorgeous??? and look at that smile 😪 ↳ username4 don't act like you didn't see the other two pics 🤥

username3 LOL HI YN

username4 yn we see you liking 🤣 ↳ username3 I can just imagine her kicking her feet and giggling

username1 okay i understand yn now ↳ username2 And you didn't before?!!?!? liked by 25 others ↳ username3 SHAME

yourusername 🤩🥹😳 liked by 120 others ↳ username5 and i oop- ↳ username10 🤣😭 ↳ username11 pls fangirl again it gave us life last time ↳ username6 girl don't hold back, we know what you're thinking ↳ username2 Alexia isn't here now, come on, let it go 🤭

username6 Misaaa

username7 😣

username8 🤯

username9 Hahaha Misa in that suit summoned yn again ↳ username10 can you blame her? 😱 ↳ username11 everything about that picture is making me swoon!

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yourusername: girl's trip to celebrate one of my besties getting married!!!! Liked by albaps9, bff2, bff3 and 5,439 others

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bff1 what happens in croatia stays in croatia

bff2 💃👩‍👩‍👧‍👧

username1 😍

judebellingham 😁😎 liked by 230 others

alexiaputellas Sunscreen! 😅 ↳ bff3 Don't worry, I'm on it! 😊 ↳ alexiaputellas 😊

username1 i want a friend group like that </3 ↳ username2 fr

albaps9 jealous!!

marisabel_rguez 😣

bff3 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

jennihermoso Guapa!

begovargas Sunflower in human form! 🌻

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Text Messages

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17:48 m 💌 I hope you're having a great time together. Don't forget to drink enough if you're out in the sun a lot! (And I don't mean alcohol, jajaja) ✓ m 💌 Ah, no... pls don't tell me you fell asleep in the sun again ☹️ m 💌 I have to go now so I'll call you later tonight. Te amo mas que nadie and take care!! ✓ 22:36 m 💌 Just saw your post. Are you trying to make me miss you even more? I miss seeing your gorgeous face, it always makes me so happy seeing you. m 💌 You know it’s been torture not having you around, right? m 💌 I miss you so much, YN ✓✓ you i miss you too, my love. the most. i'll be back before you know it! more rested than ever 😚💅🏽 and don't worry, i didn't fall asleep. we were on a boat! i'll tell you more in a bit on the phone. you soon we’ll see each other again, vale? we can go on a trip of our own. for now, just try not to miss me too much 😘 you sent you a photo ▼

m 💌 ○○○ m 💌 Oh, you fucking did not! you oh but i fucking did tho 🥺🥺🥺🙃 m 💌 YN. you si, chula? you ○○○ you misa? you i'm sorry you ☹️ Delivered

Incoming call m 💌

accept

"Are you alone right now?"

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a/n: wishing you the sweetest start of your week! i hope someone does something nice for you and if not, then here's a flower from me to you already 🌻

[arjudy224]

Alfred’s extra help

Batfamily x new maid part 1

The past couple years haven't been kind to Alfred. Although, he would never admit it... His years have slowly been catching up with him. After a recent attack on the household, Alfred took it upon himself to hire some extra part time help during the school year. The new help just so happened to be a college band kid in desperate need of money. This is how it went.

Jason:

It was the little things, Jason had decided, that made the family enjoy the extra addition to the household. The faint singing that could be heard three doors down as she made her usual morning rounds. Dusting. Bleaching . Sweeping. It didn't matter what she was doing: music always played in her head. If you were lucky, sometimes you'd get to hear it too.

Alfred:

Monday Mornings were Alfred's favorite. After a long weekend of dealing with super-powered vigilantism, Alfred looked forward to the way she would clock into Wayne Manor with shy grin. It didn't take much prompting to get a play by play of how the Gotham U football game went. The Batfamily had never considered her being targeted by Batman's Rogue Gallery until Halftime was interrupted by the Joker emerging from a comically large birthday cake. When reinforcements arrived, they were shocked to discover the entire Color Guard beating the Joker senseless with their wooden rifles. To any outsider, this would have appeared to be part of the choreography with the way each guard member chanted "5,6,7,8 SLAM DOWN."

Y/N couldn't figure out why Nightwing, Red Hood, and Red Robin had all come to check on her until Monday morning when the door opened to reveal a hallway full of smiling Wayne's. Even Damian couldn't help, but give her a hug... after an intense lecture on how dangerous the Clown Prince of Crime was.

Even more confusing was the way Damien's older brother, Jason, would always end up forgetting something at the manor when she worked. After chatting for a couple hours, she would say her goodbyes and silently acknowledge the fact he left empty handed... again.

Damien:

Damien admired the dedication on display. In the early morning mist when she thought nobody was awake, the wooden rifle would make an appearance. With the kitchen wiped down and the oven on self cleaning, all there was to do was wait. Damien admired her resilience when practicing rifle. Each brutal slap of the wood and metal on skin had to be painful, but she never complained when the bruises littered up and down her forearms. She was radiant. In her element, it was easy to get distracted by the crisp rotations on display. One day, he hoped she would feel comfortable enough to show him a few tricks... until then he enjoyed his early morning performances.

Dick:

Dick had warned her against working for Bruce from the beginning. The Bats mood swings could drain even the sweetest of souls. The relentless pursuit of a better Gotham has always been tainted by the blood of those lost. Bruce Wayne was not always known as the nicest guy to work for. Yet, after years of witnessing the tragedies of Gotham... Dick couldn't help, but notice the way her eyes shone with excitement whenever they would visit a new part of the city. The alley Scarecrow tested his fear toxin for the first time now is littered with book shops, ice cream parlors, diners, etc. In each street that’s rooted with trauma, a new sprout of hope grows out of the shadows. The quiet formality that he had grown accustomed to growing up in the Manor faded away. It was a nice change.

Tim:

Tim didn't even notice there was a change in the household until he stumbled into her conversation with Jason for the 3rd time that week. Typically, her shift would have been over at 3pm, but since her classes had been canceled that day she had worked overtime. With Jason's sudden reappearance after months of no contact, Tim took note of the way his older brother's voice deepened ever so slightly whenever she was in the room. Or how during Saturday night patrol they always managed to spot Red Hood "doing business" on a building close enough to the stadium to watch halftime. If anybody questioned it, Jason would have fiercely denied any interest claiming that he was merely "watching out for the Joker".

Tim mostly minded his business whenever she was working. His night life tended to consume most of his waking time, so if he got sleep (big if) he tended to wake up hours after she left. Mostly he appreciated the cute little animals she would make out of the groceries that week. One day, he opened the fridge to a cheese ball that looked like a turkey. Two olives made the eyes and each of the turkeys feathers were made out of crackers. His favorite had to be when she made a Robin out of Bell peppers and Grapes. Tim had left his sketchbook out the night before flipped to that exact drawing. After she had cleaned the kitchen, she left the treat along with a note explaining how beautiful she thought the drawing was.

[homestuckreplay]

EOA1 ==> Media, Agency and the Suburbs in Act 1 of Homestuck

It is April 13, 1959. Mr. Egbert, Sr. has recently made the move out of the city into a newly built house in the suburbs, because clowning isn't paying so well after the recession. His son John hasn't seen his friend Rose since they moved. Staring out the window at 4:13pm and glimpsing nothing but the neighbor's wall, John goes downstairs to catch the second half of a black and white episode of Truth or Consequences, losing himself for fifteen minutes in their world of pranks, hilarity and emotional family reunions. Hopefully for his birthday, his dad will get him that cool new board game and its all-important hours of distraction.

We pick up the daily newspaper, and flip to the funnies to see John's new antics.

(Essay below the cut - about 5k words.)

==> I: John’s Suburb in Historical Context, or: Johntext

During the 1940s and 1950s, mass expansion of the American suburbs was accompanied by a ‘best of both worlds’ promise. Families who moved there could enjoy easy travel to the city via car for work and leisure, but wouldn’t have to deal with the ‘undesirable’ parts of city life, such as noise, pollution, or people from marginalized groups. Suburbs were characterized by detached, single family houses that guaranteed each family their own bubble of space away from neighbors, but also promised a community of likeminded people with whom to form neighborhood associations and PTA committees. Residents could enjoy independence from city governance and increased control over their own living spaces, but anybody who might push back against current social norms would be quietly excluded. Utopian promises and attractive prices encouraged many Americans to make the move, and many of them have never left. 

Here in 2009, it’s not uncommon for people to have lived their entire lives in the suburbs - often in a single house. Promises of progress and innovation within households have remained strictly cosmetic, while the values guarding suburban families and communities have changed very little. Although people of color comprise an increasing percentage of suburban residents, white people are still overrepresented. The same is true of married couples’ overrepresentation compared to other family structures. Suburban architecture remains centralized around the car as the primary means of transportation, and the separation of residential from commercial areas. Opportunities and reasons to leave the house are both minimized. 

With the growth of the suburbs came increased criticism of their designs and ideals. Their dream of a spacious home for each family has led to feelings of isolation, while the promised communities have primarily formed around churches and strict Christian ideals. Residents lack trust in their neighbors, and as such, children are no longer left to their own devices outside of the house. The suburban goal of easy car accessibility to cities has ended in highway congestion, air pollution and lack of public transport or pedestrian access. And while the percentage of Americans living in the suburbs continues to increase, not everyone has the luxury of choosing where they live - particularly children and teenagers. 

Homestuck’s main character John Egbert doesn't directly express a hatred of the suburbs - he seems more conflicted, showing fondness for the tire swing in a kid's yard (p.27), the fireplace (p.50) and the father smoking a pipe (p.74), while also expressing that he feels stuck in his home (p.30, 253), that he avoids his father's company (p.30), and that he feels something missing from his life (p.82). He doesn't seem aware of the source of his emptiness, just that he's always felt it, and we can only guess the source through incredibly subtle context clues, such as the work's title and the way John longingly gazes towards the outside.

It's certainly possible for someone with an otherwise privileged life to feel alienation in the suburbs, but those who differ from the white nuclear family ideal tend to have these feelings heightened, and may be ostracized by the community or threatened into conformity. Similarly, the gulf between John and his dad, and their separate perceptions of that relationship, could be simply generational, or could suggest bigger, unseen differences between them.

One interpretation I and others have discussed is that John is a transgender woman who has yet to actively realize her identity, but knows on some level that she can’t achieve the strict gender expectations of a suburban community. This loss of self-understanding would contribute to John's feelings of absence and lack of control, and strain her relationship with a father who expects her to fit a male gender role. 

This might be my favorite possible explanation, but there are lots of others, any or all of which could be true. John being queer in any sense would mean he might not fit into the nuclear family structure of the suburbs as an adult. John being a person of color in an otherwise white neighborhood would visually distinguish him from his neighbors and cause them to judge him based on stereotypes, and if John is mixed race and Dad is white, this distinction could highlight differences between them too, the absence in John's life marked by a disconnection from a culture he's a part of. John being neurodivergent could impact his ability to interact with other people in the neighborhood, or to replicate the rules and performativity of daily life. Single parent family structures are more accepted in 2009 than they were in 1959, but it's still possible that some past scandal involving Dad and John's family life is hanging over them, fresh in the minds of their neighborhood - perhaps one that just like Nanna's death, Dad 'never wants to talk about'. Any of these factors could lead to John being ostracized by his community and mean that even at a young age he didn't 'buy in' to the idea of the happy suburban family. 

I believe it is intentional that Homestuck hasn’t defined John’s location more specifically than ‘west of Kansas’. Although research has shown that different suburbs have their own individual characters, critics tend to emphasize their similarities. We’re supposed to think that John would have broadly the same experiences if he lives in Arizona or Colorado, Texas or Georgia, maybe even England or Belgium. The externalities of John’s life are the same as countless other kids in the Western world, not because of John’s choices or even his dad’s choices, but due to the larger structures that organize families into houses, houses into suburbs, and suburbs into sources of constraint.

==> II: If You Love Your House So Much, Why Don’t You Never Leave It?

The suburbs walk hand in hand with advances in technology. The 1950s saw a boom in the sale of household appliances, with devices for cooking and cleaning promising to lighten the housework load for women, and television providing entertainment for the whole family from the comfort of the living room. Various corporations created model homes to display the futuristic properties of their fantastical appliances, promising consumers that in the future, all homes would look just like this. This was a marketing tactic primarily benefiting the corporations - but in some cases, they were successful. General Electric’s ‘New American’ home in Denver featured a dishwasher as early as 1935, and these increased in affordability and domestic popularity across the 1950s and 60s. Disneyland’s Monsanto ‘House of the Future’ boasted a microwave oven. The house opened in real world 1957 but was ‘set in 1986’, and by 1986, one in four American homes owned a microwave. The Westinghouse ‘Home of Tomorrow’ contained the first ever portable radios - six of them, with radio outlets in every room to grant every family member a constant supply of media. 

This idea of constant, individualized media consumption may have been the greatest called shot of these houses. In 1959, John would be limited to a handful of TV channels on a fixed schedule, fighting over the tuning dials with his dad, but in 2009 he almost certainly knows the delights of Megavideo on top of having a video game collection, DVD collection and TV on demand service. 

Televisions were marketed to families in the 1950s claiming that they would keep families closer, as parents and children alike would want to stay home and watch together instead of going out to separate places, and many parents at first expressed relief at always knowing where their teenage children were, and consequently, being able to keep an eye on them. Television altered the boundaries between public and private space, allowing people to experience a public activity such as a trip to the movies, a performance from a live musician, even witnessing the moon landing, without leaving the home or interacting with strangers. 

Increasingly, media is marketed with the promise of interactivity and agency. Television provided a world to passively escape into, but video games allow the player to actually embody a character in that world. They present fantasies of control, of being able to explore a virtual map according to the player’s whims, and offering in-character choices that allow the player to control the narrative itself. Players are compelled by the possibility of media they can customize to their own specific tastes, and media they can master and bend to their will instead of simply observe. In this way, the Nintendo Wii isn’t so different from the fridge-freezer that promised greater mastery over the family’s diet, or the modern microwave oven and its dozens of settings and options for preparing food. 

As our society moves from home televisions to home computers and video game systems into an age of portable, all in one smartphones, we and the media become more dependent on each other, and we expect to have access to it more of the time. John Egbert has found connection with a close friend who lives multiple timezones east and stays in regular and real time contact with her. That friendship enriches his life, and wouldn't have been possible without today’s high speed internet and instant messaging services. John’s computer opens up an incredible social world, but - as we’ve seen with Rose losing power - if he lost that technology, he’d also lose that community. 

So, advertisers ask, what possible reason is there to leave? Why would you go somewhere mundane, like a park or a youth club, when you could go up on a plane surrounded by dangerous criminals and outsmart them all in time to save your friend? When you can bike down the highways from Missouri to Virginia to save the girl you like from natural disasters? You can be a hard boiled detective, a monster's best friend, a scientist making contact with aliens, an oil magnate turned savior of the world, a FBI agent surgically given the face of a terrorist, and a world leading expert on ghost slime - and you’ll never get dirty, you’ll never get hurt, and your dad will be right in the next room with a constant supply of fresh baked cakes and fatherly affection. What possible reason do kids have to complain, or to feel like anything is missing from their lives, when they can master reality from couches and computer chairs?

John Egbert embodies constant media consumption. Two of his five stated interests are consuming media - specifically movies and video games - and even when he’s not actively watching or playing something, he’s surrounded by media. His room is filled with movie posters, the television in the living room is switched on even when nobody’s watching, and the first thing he does after loading his computer is check for webcomic updates. Even his thoughts are consumed. He’s constantly replaying his favorite scenes in his head, which seems to bring him genuine joy, fixating on the next game he wants to play, and filling his social interactions with references to his favorite franchises. Even before actually entering Sburb’s virtual reality, John already wasn’t present in his material space. He’s digitally transitioned from what Lynn Spigel describes as ‘the home address to “home page”... computer generations rather than genders’. 

==> III: Kids These Days Just Don’t Respect The Cultural Idea Of Childhood We Created For Them

The suburban home loves technology, but the reverse may not be true. A significant amount of mass media depicts the suburbs as the place where creativity and individuality go to die, reflecting the cultural criticisms instead of the promises. Some of the earliest sitcoms, such as I Love Lucy and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, predated widespread criticisms of the suburbs and presented an idealized suburban life. These soon gave way to the ‘fantastic sitcoms’ of the 1960s, including Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. These shows have implausible premises, featuring supernatural creatures, aliens or futuristic settings while still depicting mundane suburban realities. This juxtaposition opened up new questions about the real world, asking why we exclude certain people from communities and playing with the strict roles within the nuclear family. 

Media aimed at young people often presents a world where kids are in control and regular power structures are inverted. 1950s and 60s comic strips aimed at kids, such as Peanuts and Dennis the Menace, were also set in the suburbs - but an idealized version of the suburbs where kids could roam freely, not confined to the home and able to disobey the instructions of adults without consequences. Some parents restrict these from children, not wanting them to ‘get the wrong idea’ and copy the bad behavior they see in comics or on TV. Popular music is a site of rebellion amongst teenagers - The Kinks in the 1960s, Talking Heads and Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s, Green Day and Blink-182 in the 1990s and 2000s, and uncountable other acts have put criticisms of suburbia to music and created a cultural dream of escape by getting on the road, joining a rock band and never putting down roots again. 

In a time of rapid technological change, parents fear the impact technology and new media will have on their children, partly because they didn’t grow up with those technologies themselves. Television was feared because it gave children access to knowledge, different worldviews, and the realities of the adult world that parents wanted to keep from them, lessening parents’ control over their kids. It was also feared for its all-consuming nature, for making children want to watch constantly at the expense of homework, chores and family meals. More recently, video games have been feared for these same addictive properties, and for the belief that they negatively impact social interaction and cause increased aggression and violence. 

But John isn’t like other teenagers. His taste is striking for being exclusively movies that reinforce ideals of the nuclear family - usually suburban, with the exception of New York City-based Ghostbusters II - which suggests he doesn’t only want to escape his current life, he wants to legitimate it to himself. John’s movies end with family reconciliation, not with the kids getting one over on the parents. If John feels like he doesn’t fit into suburban ideals, he can try to connect with them by seeing them through the eyes of a character he likes. In a world where John’s primary source of agency is the media he chooses to consume, he could easily choose to reject his unsatisfying life altogether and live vicariously through outlaws and exiles, getting really into Westerns or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but he doesn’t. He chooses characters who are fundamentally conventional, despite their rough edges, suggesting he’d really like to just fit in and be content with what he has.

Sburb, however, is the game that actualizes parents’ worst fears, inverting the power structures of the house, giving Rose and John dominion over the space while Dad - formerly both the breadwinner and the homemaker - has been relegated to an unseen location. John has access to a physically dangerous inventory system and a strife specibus that encourages him to solve problems by hitting them with a hammer.

Media promises us an escape, and it undoubtedly has the power to teach us and open our eyes to new perspectives, but in many cases provides nothing more than a filter over our lives. Encouraging people to live in a state of distraction, a TV show or video game gives us an easy way to hide from reality. People look for a new technology to solve their problems instead of a social solution, placing parental controls over their children’s television and internet usage instead of having honest conversations among families about media consumption, and designing security systems to keep ‘undesirable’ people from trespassing in middle class neighborhoods without questioning why those people are excluded from suburban society in the first place.

==> IV: There’s A Fine Line Between Fantasy And Reality And My House Is Built There

In the 1935 movie Murder by Television, a money-hungry scientist manipulates the interference between telephone lines and television broadcast signals to create the ‘death ray,’ and murder somebody on the other side of a television screen. Released less than a decade after the world’s first television broadcast, this movie demonstrates our cultural obsession with the boundaries between electrical and real space, and our dream of making those boundaries permeable. The 1950s presented TV families (such as the Nelsons from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) as normal families whose lives just happened to be televised, but who behaved the same way on and off screen to the point of forgetting the cameras were rolling. To this day, reality television such as Big Brother and The Bachelor promise to show us contestants’ authentic private lives, and even when we as viewers know the show is staged, we choose to buy into the fantasy.

More recently, 1998’s The Truman Show literalizes our dependence on the media, its ubiquity in our lives, and the impact this has on our personal relationships by showing a man whose whole life has been orchestrated by a TV production company that broadcasts him 24/7. Through a lucky accident with a time portal I obtained a copy of 2023’s Barbie, in which a plastic doll lives the dream life promised by her marketing, but starts thinking about mortality and the ‘real world’ when her owner’s mother starts drawing pictures of her with typical adult problems.

In both of these movies, the characters are happy until they are forced to confront the constructed nature of their worlds. By understanding the production and design processes controlling their lives, they become disillusioned with the simulation of perfection and begin searching for something more authentic. Even though Truman and Barbie both escape synthesized worlds and achieve full human agency, their endings are bittersweet. Their ‘escape’ lands them in present day Los Angeles, with all the social constraints, local mass produced suburbs, and constant diet of blockbuster media that this implies.

Blurring these boundaries is an effective advertising strategy as well as a narrative one. Adverts invite players to ‘become’ the main character of a video game, such as a Kid Chameleon promotion inviting players to ‘change personalities faster than they’ll change helmets’ and ‘transform’ themselves into a variety of mavericks. A Mortal Kombat arcade machine advert showed real men bursting out of the machine to attack the player. Promotions for The Sims 2 featured real photographs of people with the Sims interface added digitally, presenting the controllable Sims within the game as more than just pixels.

Following in this grand tradition, Sburb takes the permeable boundary between electrical and real space and smashes a meteor through it. Sburb answers the question of ‘can technology transform our society?’ with a 'yes'  loud enough to shake the neighborhood houses from their foundations. Sburb represents the greatest and most utopian promises of technology, as well as the worst of our cultural fears around it. 

The appeal of Sburb as a game is that it promises teenagers control over their lives in a world where they’re otherwise powerless. It’s a way to speedrun growing up - alchemy mechanics offer the chance to manipulate space and create all the material goods the player wants, but the game also bestows responsibility for tackling a crisis, for maintaining the home, perhaps even saving the world. And the players who are going to want this badly enough to fight through the impossible challenges Sburb presents are the kids who really can’t wait, the ones who aren’t doing well, and who feel trapped enough in their everyday lives that they would risk it all on an experimental technology to escape. 

In truth, many scholars challenge the concepts of interactivity and agency in video games, arguing that these are players’ perceptions and not their realities. Games invite players to participate in the creation of art, but the relationship is never equal, with the creators always having the final say on exactly how much free will the player is allowed. Even a game that aims to be open world and allow for as much free play as possible is bound by the limitations of processing power and how many options a human can reasonably write and code for. 

Sburb also puts restrictions on its players. Most likely, there are limits on what objects can be created via alchemy, and Sburb would likely restrict any item that could be used to work against the game. Players being controlled by commands which are interpreted by a computer also ensure that only commands coded for in the game are transmitted to the player. When a command is incorrect, the narrator steps in to help the player (p.253). And so far, the game has dramatic ways of keeping John on a very linear path - first starting a clock so he had no choice but to focus on stopping the meteor, then cutting him off from the world so that he has to stay in his current location. It’s impossible to have agency while living within a game that can and will end your life with four minutes and thirteen seconds of notice.

The ‘homes of tomorrow’ discussed at the start of part II were designed as sentient spaces, responsive to their inhabitants and able to almost anticipate their needs. John Brehm said about MOMA’s 1999 Un-Private House exhibition, ‘one can prepare a meal with the help of a virtual chef from a favorite restaurant and have dinner with a virtual guest or friend through the liquid wall’ and suggested that the house was ‘an extension of the body or a transparency of the mind… that both protects and transcends the limitations of the body’. In 2000, the Microsoft Home in New York City showed a future where people could control the lights, thermostats, security systems and stereos directly from their phones, even from another location. The home of tomorrow promises it can be anything its owner wants it to be, without questioning the idea that the privately owned, individualized home should exist and be desired.

Of course, the houses of tomorrow are always singular, prototype homes built with no thought of neighbors and community, but perhaps sacrificing a whole neighborhood to build the perfect home is a tradeoff some people have to make. Far from the static, impersonal houses of the suburbs, Sburb allows players to create their dream houses, offering bigger bedrooms, additional floors, and an endless void to throw your father’s harlequin statues into. It’s another technology that offers transformative potential for the family home, but is ultimately still driven by it, forming an individualist utopian bubble within a larger, far more conservative and restrictive structure.

==> V: If I Die, I Wanna Die In The Suburbs

The remote control, the video game joystick, and the Sburb alchemiter all tell us we can master reality by mastering technology. If that’s the case, then John still has to master technology. A shattered window from stack modus failures and a desktop littered with enraged programming files show us just how far John is from mastering either of these things.

John’s lack of agency goes far deeper than being trapped in the suburbs. His simple choice to pick something up and put it down is controlled by external agents. Though he can choose to escape his father in the kitchen by going to his room, a variety of screens will follow him and keep him in his own personalized panopticon. Rose’s mastery over the cursor means that John can’t guarantee the objects in his room will be where he left them, and even John’s thoughts are surveilled, interpreted and transmitted outwards by the narrator.

The USA PATRIOT act of 2001 expanded the US government’s legal rights to monitor electronic communication, and the early 2000s saw increased covert network surveillance by governments and private corporations alike. John’s technological illiteracy means he probably doesn’t know how to use a VPN and might not have known as a kid that his internet activities weren’t private, but in Act 2, inside Sburb, he begins to realize. Just as parents fretted at PTA meetings, John’s media has allowed him to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and put an end to his carefully constructed childhood, all on the cultural milestone of his thirteenth birthday. 

Sburb has compounded the problem of John being surveilled and puppeted, but didn't invent it. The first 136 pages of Homestuck establish the meta-narrative restrictions on his life, from his inventory system to his being guided by commands, before he installs the game. There are layers of control over John’s life that he’ll need to break through one at a time. The first will be acquiring the Sburb server disc, which will give John greater power within Sburb, and the ability to use the full extent of its abilities. The second will be escaping the game of Sburb, which could be accomplished by simply winning the game (like in 1995’s Jumanji), or by using some kind of cheat or glitch to break out of it (2003’s Spy Kids 3: Game Over), but either way John will need to master the game mechanics. 

The final layer is Homestuck itself, and unfortunately for us, John escaping the player and narrator’s influence over his life would almost certainly mean the end of the comic. But in Homestuck the Earth is already being destroyed, and being a webcomic that doesn’t have the constraints of a two hour Hollywood movie, the story doesn’t have to stop at the level of escaping the simulation. It has the chance to go a layer further, and imagine a world where John and his friends are able to enact real and meaningful change.

John has clearly had an emotional dependency on media for a long time, and now, he has a physical dependency too. Sburb is the thing keeping him alive, and his only hope to save the rest of the world, but he’s not alone in seeing popular media as a sacred text necessary for his existence. Smethurst and Craps point out that the player reacts to the game as much as the game does to the player - if anywhere, agency can be found in players’ interpretations of a game. Increasingly we rely on fiction to shape our politics and our worldviews, while also reading texts at a surface level. While media itself is insufficient to give us agency, media literacy is a big step towards asking questions about what restricts our agency, how, and why. The way John discusses movies now isn’t too in depth, with reviews like ‘the applejuice scene was so funny’ and ‘cage is sweet. so sweet.’ But in a story about becoming part of a video game, media literacy could be a very powerful tool for John, and he could come out of this as a genuine movie critic.

==> Conclusion

While Homestuck is a distinctly modern multimedia experience, it exists in a much larger tradition of media that criticizes the suburbs, and depicts the fantasy of escape for young people. Like other metafictional works before it, it handles these themes self-reflexively, showing its main character combat the horrors of the suburbs directly, instead of depicting a fantasy where problems do not exist. 

Based on its first act, Homestuck is a story about John Egbert’s quest for agency in a world that constantly tries to restrict it. John’s life so far has been defined by the suburbs, by a single but unremarkable point in space that he’s been trapped in for the first thirteen years of his life. John is both physically confined to his suburban neighborhood, and socially confined into being the ideal of the middle class all American boy that has been presented as his only option. John’s taste in media reinforces the ideals of his society, meaning he has yet to question the status quo of his existence or examine the source of his depression. John is also controlled directly by his server player, the Homestuck players, and the narrator. 

John’s experiences playing Sburb show us that while the escape media provides for us is real and can change us in meaningful ways, it can only solve the first step of the problem - and isn’t without its own risks and drawbacks. In order to truly develop agency, John will need to question the existence of the suburbs themselves, and not only his placein them. He’ll also need to  - at some point - quit the game, return to reality, and use the skills he’s learned in the game to develop mastery over both the physical world and the story itself.

==> Sources

I wrote this essay after reading Lynn Spigel’s excellent essay collection ‘Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs’ (2001), which I would highly recommend.

Full bibliography

Filmography

[markantonys]

mat/rand/elayne/aviendha is a great polycule because they are all incredibly smart and competent yet also incredibly stupid and useless, each in a different way, and in the end they all balance each other out.

important diplomatic event? elayne negotiates 3 new alliances by the end of the night. aviendha causes an international incident. mat actively despises every diplomat there (except elayne) yet somehow ends up charming all of them. rand just wants to go home.

lost in the wilderness? elayne tries very hard to help out but she can't even read a compass. mat fusses about how bored he is and how they are never going to make it back to civilization (they've only been lost for 2 hours). rand insists the others should eat him if they run out of food (they've only been lost for 2 hours). aviendha completely ignores everything the other clowns are saying and doing and gets them back to civilization in one piece by hour 3.

trapped in a sticky situation of certain doom? rand and aviendha solemnly prepare to accept the embrace of death, and to sacrifice themselves so the others can escape. mat and elayne say "no one's dying today, idiots" and cook up a harebrained scheme to get them all out of there, and against all odds it works.

time to talk about feelings? elayne will volunteer to go first and will openly share every feeling she's ever had. rand is the best listener, but will volunteer nothing about his own feelings unless forced. aviendha thinks all feelings should be processed via the meeting of toh, not via discussion, and feels shamed whenever elayne tries to talk about something for which the toh has already been met. mat cracks jokes to deflect from his own feelings and ends up pissing elayne off because she is TRYING to have a serious conversation, and aviendha is also pissed off at mat for dishonoring elayne by making light of the matter, and then rand blurts out something troubling that makes the others forget their bickering in favor of unionizing to make rand go to therapy.

household chores need doing? aviendha refuses to waste water on something as trivial as mopping the floor. elayne is too busy with her queenly duties. mat is too busy bringing the kids to raid the palace kitchen for desserts way past their bedtime. rand goes into a househusband frenzy and gets the royal apartments all tidied up and the kids and mat tucked into bed after their sugar crash by the time elayne returns home from her duties (and of course he has a hot meal and a nice cup of tea waiting for her).

[mylittleredgirl]

previously on mylittleredgirl: [four seasons of m*a*s*h] [six weeks of screaming about margaret houlihan]

i have now finished season five disc one and a bullet point recap is due! [yeah there's more screaming in it]

bug out was a fucking DELIGHT

god i was so worried though when klinger had to trade all his dresses i was wailing internally. what if he just wears fatigues forever!?!??? but it's all okay!!!! that tassel mod dress he has on in "the abduction of margaret houlihan" healed me ten times over. his outfits have been 🔥 this season.

such a mix of really dumb slapstick comedy and "oh god the war is Right Here" drama and little character sweetness... love it.

and the family reunion happiness at the end!!!! god bless. i left my body for like thirty-six hours.

i really really love the tone they're striking with frank this season. they've walked back the cartoon villainy of late season four, so he's once again a relatively harmless clown. i breathed a huge sigh of relief. he's soooo much more fun this way.

margaret's engagement: bonkers. delightful. she's unbearable. there is so much wrong with her. i want to study her in a jar. i will never shut up again.

with this put together with some bits later in the disc (including that cut scene crayon joke lmao), did she somehow manage to trade DOWN from frank? is that even possible??? it's either that or this new dude is actually just The Exact Same Guy, but now she'll be the fool wife at home instead of the beloved mistress.

i mean personally if i were louise burns i'd be very happy for my dumbass husband to fuck around on the other side of the world for as long as possible while i enjoy the $35,000 house and two cars without him, but for someone like margaret who is far more interested in being wined and dined than running a household, this... may not be the field promotion she thinks it is.

hawkeye rising to frank's defense and him and b.j. enabling frank's little takedown of margaret at the end felt very real. sure, in the grand scheme of things, margaret is Annoying and frank tried to have hawkeye executed last season, but bros before hos.

okay how FUNNY would it be though if the "little redheaded nurse" frank planned to seduce was baker-from-the-nurses, because she would have scratched frank's eyes out for trying and not felt bad about it

and actually, that's a plausible backstory for the extra bad blood between her and margaret, too??? oh yeah. that definitely happened.

i actively missed frank/margaret as the disc went along though. maybe the show had stretched the tension of that relationship as tight as it could go, and it's nice that they get to do new things... but they're so funny and awful together and i miss them sharing scenes!!!

i really assumed - like frank did lol - that they would continue to rabbit around together, only now she would also get to string him along with the jealousy game, but...... well, i'm glad it's still hanging out in the background of the narrative, anyway. i live in hope that they will slip and fuck and it will be soooo messy.

FUCK is it possible i shipped that for real???? god. i don't know if my family name can bear this dishonor.

out of sight, out of mind...

...has taught us the very important lesson that hawkeye is 9000x more annoying without something to do (annoying to everyone else i mean!! not to me. i will happily watch him annoy everyone.)

him asking b.j. to visit him a million times a day 🥺

i'm almost satisfied now by the "doctor-experiences-the-role-of-patient" theme that i didn't get in "hawkeye." i suppose hurt/comfort fic can take it from here.

however i'm totally satisfied by how sweet it was to see everyone taking care of him!! and how much they love him!!

lt. radar o'reilly... devastating. i mean funny and delightful but it's mean!! so glad that boy is back in stripes. however they could have at least promoted him a little for his trouble. sergeant o'reilly???

i have already said more about the nurses (post here) than ever needed to be said. and yet. i'm quite sure i could say more if pressed

the abduction of margaret houlihan

........ will i never be free of colonel flagg episodes 😞

i love the continuing evidence that she has invested time in learning korean, and i really really really love the slow expansion of our perspective to include like oh yeah. there's a village where people live full time and it's literally right here.

imagine if after the war she becomes an ob nurse...

on the one hand, how do they not make frank do gun handling training. on the other hand they probably don't because it always ends with stitches and an accident report.

i sometimes wonder if mash was like jury duty for asian actors in the 70s. you probably won't get to say anything but they call you up and you just have to go.

dear sigmund!!!!!! this is another episode where people were staring at me through the window so i'll comment a little more:

the fandom's favorite guy sidney freedman deserves that crown. what a weirdo. talk about a busman's holiday for a psychiatrist to come to the 4077 for a vacation and psychoanalyze everyone. but for fun!

i really don't have a proper sense of the geography at play here because he really does like. just come by to play cards once a week. and drives through a war zone i guess to do it? he has probably sacked out in the swamp before when the air raid situation changes but this time he just... doesn't leave.

and aaaa!! margaret took her very special episode about How To Make Friends to heart!!!! she joined the poker game!!!

she had plenty of time to work on that lesson though because the jeremy bearimy time shenanigans are in full swing here at the 4077. we went from midsummer in 'the nurses' to a bitter cold march two episodes later.

i always kind of assumed the mash weather was loosely inspired by real human weather, but no, in fact the actors just have to randomly suffer in parkas or getting sprayed in the face to look sweaty in alternating weeks regardless of the surrounding conditions.

SUFFERING for their ART

also jfc b.j.!!!! dunking frank in cold water in freezing temperatures is a serious health and safety concern my dude!!!!

i'm afraid b.j. is still not beating the little brother allegations, he has just aged up from innocent baby to fucking gremlin

(i should confess that my little brother diagnosis is guided by the fact that in my complex family and housing history i only ever lived with "brothers" younger than me, and never older ones. but the innocent baby and prank gremlin stages are real.)

i made a note here of "margaret randomly drinking gin in the swamp now!!?!??" like the poker game was one thing, people could strong-arm her into that while she feigns protest, but ma'am WHO are you and what have you done with— and then the next note is "oh good she's still insane"

potter named his horse sophie <3 also he's collecting granddaughters, i think the count is up to 3 now. or baby sherry is experiencing a temporal anomaly of her own!

the letter radar wrote to the dead guy's parents and potter reading it... fucking ended me. please let harry morgan do serious bits more often, it's outstanding and far too rare.

it's not surprising that frank's wife changing (wearing pants! doing activities!) would stress him out, and not just because he's a dick. any of them would struggle with their families growing without them, because that means they can Never Go Home to the life they left!! (e.g. trapper losing it because his girls were getting older.) but it is kind of fascinating that he loves both his wife and margaret, and even said mid-fever that he wanted them to be friends, but he also wants them to be NOTHING alike.

all in all it's understandable that sidney would check in to the no boundaries motel to have his poker buddies shake it out of him, but he could also have taken his leave somewhere with indoor heat. so he's as crazy as the rest of them. <3

also they're not his patients he's just observing them like zoo animals so forget confidentiality he's absolutely gonna write a book about them someday.

mulcahy's war: i don't know why i have been misspelling his name with an 'e' the whole time because it was literally in the end credits of almost every episode for four seasons.

oh god he's so precious i don't talk about it enough. playing poker for orphans. feeling like he doesn't do enough while potter thinks he has the hardest job. that unrelenting positive regard for everyone. always with that little grin.

that little grin in FULL PLAY as he sneaks out of the house to go off to war when dad's not looking

radar should never be sent on a mission where people are bleeding when will they LEARN

corporal cupcake deserves every medal he gets!!!!

frank's foot fetish becoming his one true medical specialty is just. i don't know what to do with this. good for him??? do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life???

speaking of unrelenting positive regard, margaret's policy of nurses never talking back to the doctors in the operating room sure has taken a hit. i realize this is about frank being an intolerable ex, but i choose to believe that the detente between margaret and her nurses has turned the O.R. into a pvp zone. the next time hawkeye tries to seduce a nurse over an open body, he's gonna get wrecked and margaret's just going to shrug pretty and look the other way.

in conclusion: season five is soooo gooooooood!!!!! can't wait for disc two!

[0seraptor0]

A theory made by me and my friend: part 4

Hello everyone I’m the Whitepine community. Me and my friend have spent the past hour making up theories. They may be quite long but we’d love for you to read them!!

4. Another key moment how ivory has a connection to the piano i like how it is most likely this piano is made using pine and ivory keys its almost clearly pointing out the fact it is some sort of ivory piano.

I also would like to acknowledge Who is the one conspiring? i believe it to be either the butler or clown It is possible there is more characters we haven’t acknowledged yet. Clown is possibly trying to hide something as around when they are reading the letters the liberation letter clearly spells out “help” we do not know what this could mean besides the fact it is a secret code asking for help that is my suspicion on clown. But another suspicion my friend found is the butler. When we bump into the butler he says “im just a butler” is he though? think about it ivory is new has noway to confirm this and hasnt met the maids/butlers offically this gives a great opportunity for the butler to lie about their identity giving them the perfect way to find a way to posion another victim. Someone also mentioned (whoever they are we give you credit for this) mentioned because of the sudden deaths in the mill and lack of food Whitepine and the hemlockes decide to invite new workers so they can help people as they seem to be a kind family who wouldnt want people to suffer starvation and overworking. Maybe the butler came from this mill having knowledge about what the hemlock plant can do and plots to kill everyone within the household.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

[valpogossip]

VALPOGOSSIP TEACAP: JUNE 2024

You lot sure have be busy the last month. If I was of lesser mind or simply someone with something better to do, I would have resigned myself to my silence and let you all carry on. But business pays. And unfortunately for you, it's yours that pays me, and you're all not going to believe this.

A natural good citizen, Abril Valdivia out of the kindness of her heart ( or her lust ) returned a ring ( allegedly ) to one Mallory Watson. How did she get this ring? Unknown, but the two seem pretty familiar with each other and their addresses but who knows ! Maybe they're just quilting together?

Speaking of Mallory, the winter wind whispers and it all says that Wylie Henderson ( Mallory's ex? almost? unclear) has also wandered back into the Valpo region. Will there be room in their hear with all their puppets and clown memorabilia? Only time will tell.

Anayeli Chavez was seen exiting Charlie Hastings office at the university. But then again, Charlie was also seen entering and at some point exiting out of Anayeli's office too. And back and forth they go, but something tells me that they're not using office hours for their intended purpose. Does anyone else find it strange that where Rohan is Anayeli seems to be too? Interesting.

A ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR ADEM KARTAL ! Valpo's favorite dad has finally found use for another D word ! Dating ! The word was dating you freaks. He asked the beautiful Ysla Alonso out for their first official date. We're so proud of you and can't wait to see where this goes !

Aivryn Johnston made an interesting dye job choice, but don't worry after being absolutely terrified, Dixie Harrison found it within her to help the younger one out.

According to our sources, Arlo Hwang has been spending a lot of time at the Harrison household for one Leia Munoz-Silva. Don't worry though, all that time in the bedroom and the only screams coming from there are a video game. He's not the only man coming in and out though, Rohan Kaur has been making his own rounds. Hm. Wonder what could be all the way out in Casablanca that he needs to make that drive for. Interesting.

Astrid Blackwell and Noah Fontaine have laid down the law ! After laying down their lips together back in May (what? did you think we forgot) ? It only took another showcase of their undeniable jealousy for them to decide to... not? act like friends? but be? best friends? Interesting ! Best of luck to you both !

When he's not in Anayeli's office, Charlie can be found hanging around Secondhand Style. Though, he never goes in? We're thinking it may have something to do with Saffron Barton? What do we think, Valpo?

Drew Crane is back in the Valpo region ! The slushie machines in every local gas station has been quickly depleting upon his arrival and so has the raccoon population? Someone call PETA? He's staying with the Dominguez-Herreras/Cisneros, and five in one house? Seems to already be causing some distress with Luna being upset he's sharing things with their family but not with her. They say loose lips sink ships but maybe sealed ones do too?

Hiyori Ito and Luna Dominguez-Herrera were seen taking a bus out to god knows where and not returning until the next morning looking sleep deprived, excited, but also (in Hiyori's case) terrified ! They must have had quiet the time! Who wouldn't want to go missing with them? (Me)

Speaking of returns, Leon Amos is back in town! Wasted no time making quick work in Salem West's DMs and pissing Luna off. What exactly does it mean to break up with someone because you don't trust yourself? I don't know but I do know it goes down beautifully with my popcorn!

Omar Osei found like a deer in the headlights at the appearance of his ex Nevaeh Thompson! I guess you can never really outrun the consequences of your own actions, but how funny it is to watch him try!

Between dodging Charlie and dodging Zak Torres, Saffron has become as hot of a commodity as the clothes she carries. Maybe one day she'll give that friend of Zak's a chance or for entertainment purposes she'll rehash some memories with Charlie. Only time will tell.

In lighter news, it looks like Yazmin Taylor might be in the market for a new job! If my professor looked like she does, I know I'd never miss a class either. We're wishing you all the best!

That's all I have for you today, but don't worry. We'll be back next month with even more delicious tea for you to catch up on. And to Vanni, Felix, Elias, Javi, Nikhil, Poet, Rafael, Rania, Reyna, Sade, Sebastian, Zaid, and Vicious; i'm always watching.

[witchcraftingboop]

Unfortunately, because of my upbringing, if someone tells me about an unsuccessful crime, especially a dumb one, my first instinct is not "oh no let's comfort them" or "be safe, play nice with them." I start laughing.

Because wdym you went to fight someone for owing you money and their uncle threw a knife at your neck (light graze, he was more scared than anything) from across the parking lot? You lost a 5-to-1 fight cause you were so hot to jump you ran straight into an undercover ninja? Hilarious. What was doubly funny was how serious this kid's family was about it. Meanwhile I'm perched on their living room couch tryna not to bust my rib. I absolutely could not hold it in any more when ninja-starred boy's older brother started grumbling about going back to break the dude's kneecaps. Because that was the second funniest thing I'd heard that day, albeit tasteless and super cliche. There's a prime of his life uncle out in that parking lot whipping out and chucking butcher knives at your boys and you want to return?? And over only $200 no less?? I was beside myself, damn near inconsolable. I had to stop hanging out with them that day though, cause stupid was for sure catching in that household.

And then at my apt some other dumb ass was trying to steal cars, and all I can do is laugh. Because wdym you went through the effort of marking their shit and breaking in and you forgot to finish the YouTube tutorial on how to hot wire a car? I laughed my ass right back to sleep. Homie couldn't even get a Kia to start and all you need for them shits is a screw driver! Mans is marvelously lost, couldn't even pick a crime he could do. I had to give my boss photos of all the police and K-9 units posted in the parking lot, howling it up through the woods until the wee hours, to excuse the few days I was late. I was so overjoyed at having met such a supreme level of dumb ass in my own backyard that I'm pretty sure he still doesn't believe me. I've met a lot of car thieves but ain't a one just sit in a car and let the alarm blare like that before crying out and taking off. Shit felt like Christmas came early. I have never seen a grown man in a ski mask flail their arms dashing over ice like that neither. He kind of looked like Captain Jack Sparrow got caught up on land after a minor snowstorm; it was a decadent treat of a sight.

It's just so funny when people pick a crime and they suck at it. Whatever you're gonna do, be a great one, but especially if you're picking an illegal trade. Because I know my old friends would've split a side right alongside me to see how these wee bairns go about their shit.

And I'm not gonna pretend it's not funny to try to make an example of a kid over $200 and find yourself in the ER cause his uncle packed you and your friends up or like it's not hilarious to run hollering from your third attempt at stealing a car in the same parking lot. People are acting like clowns, and I'm loving the sight of this circus being in town.

[windslar]

When the jokes on TV aren’t funny so you write your own jokes

I’m not reviving the rotational gameplay (for now). After months of not opening this save file, I opened a few weeks ago to test out some gshade presets. My last household was Johnny Zest’s and I had actually taken several screenshots. I just never got around to editing and writing captions for them because my interest in my own OCs was taking over. I don’t want to say I’ll never play with premades again because sometimes I do miss it. I just can’t get past a few sim hours before I’m bored, which doesn’t happen as much when I’m playing with my OCs. So in the spirit of keeping this game a recreational thing instead of a chore, I chose not to continue with the rotational gameplay. 

Fast forward to today. I’m messing around in Photoshop, trying to combine/create actions that simulate a film look for my Lightflower gameplay. I’m happy with the results but can’t really post the screenshots without spoiling my own story, so I apply the actions to these pictures of Johnny instead. And ta-da! It’s giving sad clown vibes because of Johnny’s traumatic upbringing and disownment by the Landgraabs.

[magnus-the-maqnificent]

Stars Around My Scars

Chapter 5 - We Make The Rules (Read on Ao3)

At around 8 at night, Magnus finally heard the first stirrings of Alec waking up at last.

Magnus grinned to himself. He was in the middle of summoning up dinner. Alec seemed to prefer the blander things in life - a pity, but he was still a guest. He managed to come to a compromise, however. Bruschetta topped with tomatoes and cheese, spaghetti with the traditional tomato sauce, and crème brûlée for dessert.

From behind Magnus, the bedroom door opened.

“Alec!” Magnus exclaimed. “You’re just in time. We need to- Oh. Oh no.”

“Just in time for what?” Alec asked, rubbing at his eyes, apparently oblivious to the state he was in.

“No,” Magnus backtracked. “No, no, no, you’re too late, I’m afraid. I- What have you done?”

Alec frowned. “What have I done?”

Magnus was still contemplating what he had to say, when Chairman trotted out of the bedroom and beelined straight for the kitchen. Magnus watched him go, and then turned to Alec.

“You woke up Chairman,” he said.

Alec’s frown deepened. “I didn’t mean to, I just kind of jostled him when I woke up - wait what does it matter anyway?”

Magnus pressed his lips together. “It matters because it is one of the Ten Cardinal Rules of the High Warlock Household.”

Alec blinked. “The what of the what?”

“The Ten- you know what? Nevermind.” Magnus shook his head and summoned up the paper in which he had the rules written out. “Read them for yourself.”

Alec quickly grabbed the paper, his eyes scanning through the lines.

“Long story short, you are to follow these rules as long as you stay under my roof. And if you break any of them, well…” Magnus waved his hand vaguely in Alec’s direction. “It results in that.”

“Results in-“ Alec looked down at himself, and his eyes immediately popped open as wide as saucers. “WHAT THE HELL?!”

Magnus was honestly surprised that Alec hadn’t realized until now, that he was in a skirt.

A knee length red skirt held in place by a large black belt, and a matching red shirt. Under the skirt he had on knee length red socks, and personally, to Magnus, what took the cake was the clown themed makeup on his face - complete with rainbow-dyed hair done up in ringlets.

He silently saluted his own magic for a job well done.

“It’s-“ Magnus had to clear his throat to stifle his laughter. “Cute, isn’t it?”

“It’s not cute!” Alec snapped, his face about as red as his fake red nose. “Get this off!”

“Punishment is a punishment is a punishment,” Magnus shrugged. “It may have been by accident, but you did break Cardinal Rule 5. Don’t worry - it’ll wear off in two hours. Besides, I don’t see a problem. It’s a knee length skirt. Perfectly conservative.”

Alec was still seething, however.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Magnus coaxed, taking Alec by the shoulders and leading him to the dining table.

“Let go of me!” Alec snapped, wrenching himself out of Magnus’s grip and turning to face him. “This isn’t funny, Bane- give me back my clothes right now.”

Magnus stared at him coolly and said, “No.”

Alec blinked. “No?”

“No,” Magnus shrugged. “What are you going to do about it, huh?”

Alec scowled at him and advanced, fists clenched by his side. “You-“

Calmly, Magnus flicked his fingers and ropes of magic shot out, wrapping around Alec’s arms and spinning him back around, pulling him close in one swift moment. Magnus’s own arms quickly replaced his magic, going around Alec and locking Alec’s arms in place as in a straitjacket.

“Are you really that bothered by the skirt?” Magnus whispered in his ear. “Or do you just want me to choke you again?”

Alec stilled.

“Did you really think I haven’t caught on to your tricks, little Lightwood?” Magnus asked.

To be honest, if it weren’t for Ragnor, he certainly wouldn’t have - but Alec didn’t need to know that.

“I’m not-“ Alec made a feeble attempt at trying to wiggle out of Magnus’s grip, but Magnus wouldn’t have it. His arms tightened around Alec, pulling him closer.

Magnus faltered a second - Alec’s body was warm, and he smelled like fresh clothes and Chairman’s bath soap and a hint of something sweet. He tried not to think of any of it.

“Smart little thing, aren’t you?” Magnus whispered. “You knew I wouldn’t attack without being attacked first.”

Alec was silent.

“Now,” Magnus went on, “I’m going to let you go, and you’re going to sit at that table, and I’m going to tell you how you need to live from now on. Do you understand?”

Almost imperceptibly, Alec nodded.

“Good,” Magnus said. “And one more thing. You just broke Cardinal Rule 2 - no picking fights in the house.” He smiled. “The first rule you break, you get a change of clothes. Every rule you break after that… your skirt becomes two inches shorter.”

Alec’s breath hitched.

“I’m pretty sure it’s already gotten shorter by now,” Magnus grinned. “So unless you don’t want to show off your pretty thighs… be careful.”

Magnus let go, and Alec immediately scampered towards the dining table to take a seat. Magnus’s eyes slid down to his legs, and yes, the skirt was definitely shorter.

Alec had already helped himself to the bruschetta by the time Magnus sat down. Magnus didn’t immediately get to eating, however - he summoned up the list of rules and smiled at Alec who sat across from him. Alec seemed to have realised he had on a fake clown nose, and was attempting to pull it off.

“Oh, I’m afraid you can’t take off any part of your punishment costumes. Don’t worry, it won’t be a clown next time.” Magnus grinned, earning a glare from Alec. “Now, let’s talk rules, shall we?”

It was going to be hard to have a serious conversation with someone who looked like a clown and glowered like his father on a bad day, but Magnus would try.

THE TEN CARDINAL RULES OF THE HIGH WARLOCK HOUSEHOLD

Do not, under any circumstance, attempt to leave the house without the High Warlock’s permission.

Do not start any physical altercations inside the house. Intent to start a physical altercation counts as an offence.

Do not enter the High Warlock’s study under any circumstance.

Take great care around the High Warlock’s possessions. Some of these antiquities were acquired around the 16th century and cannot be replaced.

Make sure that Chairman Meow isn’t underfed or overfed, awoken from his priceless naps, hurt or upset in any manner.

Do not disobey any command given to you by the High Warlock meant to be for either your or the house’s benefit. This includes any chores given to you.

The High Warlock will meet clients in the living room everyday. When such a client is present, do not attempt to talk to the client unless the High Warlock wills it.

Do not attempt to contact any Shadowhunter or other Downworlders without the High Warlock’s knowledge.

Do not enter the High Warlock’s closet under any circumstance. Do not touch his clothes, or his makeup, or even his laundry.

 Do not consume alcohol, do cigarettes or drugs, or have sex with anyone while under the High Warlock’s roof.

Breaking any of these rules will result in a penalty period of two hours during which you will be wearing a randomly chosen Outfit of Shame. Breaking further rules during the penalty period will result in downsizing of the outfit by two inches.

Alec was not happy.

Not that he ever was, but he particularly wasn’t happy today, at this very moment, staring bleakly at the list of rules.

He almost wished that Magnus had made a bunch of the most ridiculous, most outlandish rules known to mankind. Maybe then his anger would’ve been righteous. But no, all of these were perfectly reasonable.

Magnus had explained it all to him over dinner.

Alec was to eat three meals a day, without fail. He was also supposed to shower, and brush twice a day, and wake up whenever Magnus woke up, and do bloody chores.

He almost felt like he was five again, being schooled in good manners and hygiene. This is the way we brush our teeth, on a cold and frosty morning.

Things were so much simpler when he was five.

Alec leaned back into the pillows with a sigh, dropping the paper to the side with a sigh. He was so, so tired. He had been tired for years now.

He wanted to give up.

But then there was Magnus Bane, stubbornly holding him back.

Alec wondered why. What did he stand to gain from all of this?

Maybe nothing. Maybe that was why he’d let him sleep the whole day. Maybe that was why he’d been so gentle as he explained to Alec had he had cast spells on him - spells to ensure he wouldn’t harm himself, spells that would immediately alert Magnus if he had somehow grievously injured himself, or even attempted it.

“My magic is watching you,” Magnus had said. “It will do nothing but keep you safe.”

But safe was subjective, and so was harm. People thought of suicide as something brutal - a noose, a knife, a gun to the head, a body on the pavement. No one would think of the subtlest of poisons sipped in plain sight, eating away until it destroyed you. Death by a thousand cuts.

He doubted Magnus would see it, either.

Alec looked once again at the list lying on the bed next to him.

When he was a Shadowhunter, he’d always done his best to follow the rules. Follow the advice given to him by the Silent Brothers. It’s for your own good. It never mattered. The odds had been stacked against him from the beginning.

And they were still stacked against him, now.

He knew that Magnus would want for him to find happiness again. Find a new normal. But normal was never in the cards for him.

Alec supposed he could just put his head down, live the remainder of his life peacefully in this house, however many days he had left.

Or he could fight the rules as hard as he could. Fight Magnus. Run away. And then go the easy way - quick and painless.

***

Because of your choice last chapter -

Alec is now well rested buuut his serious conversation with Magnus ended up having a very messy start.

Also, we finally got to see a glimpse of Alec’s side of the story! Any theories? 👀

[villain-in-love]

And here I present to you two clowns who have formed an unfortunate alliance, explained in 5 minutes (or not):

So here we have the smartest and the strongest guys in the Pandora organization. If only they would act accordingly...

Don't forget that this couple consists of a criminal investigator and a former serial killer, so if you decide to mess with them, I can guarantee that no one will ever find your body.

Anyways, very lengthy explanation of the points made is under the cut:

♤ Age is a complicated matter in this manga, as one of the possible side-effect of having a contract with a chain is that the body can stop aging. Which is why Break doesn't look even a day older than he was when he concluded his first (illegal) contract. Also at first I intended to do the same with Mortifera and freeze her at the age of 29, but then I thought that it just sounds too convenient, so screw it, it’s fine as it is. Now Break can get on Mortifera's nerves by joking about her being a creepy older woman who's into men "much younger" than her.

♤ Let me tell you, this level of trust is already a lot for Break. This man has serious trust issues – you can be friends for years and still know almost nothing about him, and he always preferred to stubbornly deal with everything alone. Sometimes Mortifera still has to resort to a third-degree interrogation and complicated psychological manipulations to get him to tell her anything.

♤ The difference in the horny level… Mortifera is suffering here. Break is also suffering – from sexual harassment, or at least that’s what he likes to call it. Obviously, Katharine won’t force him into anything, but she still possesses a remarkable ability to make anything sexual, and it gets annoying.

♤ Both have relatively low levels of jealousy simply because, well, they really don’t give each other that many reasons to get jealous. Mostly because no one else will be insane enough to even try to romantically pursue these people. However, there is one thing Katharine still can't get over, which raises her level of jealousy...

♤ ...I also suspect that the reason Xerxes doesn't get jealous might have something to do with his absolutely fucked self-perception but let's talk about it the other day. This is too much to unpack right now.

♤ Speaking of the relationship attitude, they are so reserved about it that most people don’t even know that they are dating. Everyone thinks that they are best friends that are just a bit too comfortable with each other.

♤ First kiss wasn’t on the lips, by the way, and happened before they actually got together. It was one of those weird sexually charged moments between them that none of them knew how to interpret but it just happened by itself…

♤ Xerxes wakes up first, but he also falls asleep last. It was canonically stated that his hours of sleep are short and restless, so he can go to sleep at 3am and wake up at 7am. Katharine tries her best to do something about it, but they don't really live together, so...

♤ None of them really cooks, nor does housework. In the rich households that are Rainsworth and Ledford, there are other servants that take care of it, and both Break and Mortifera are a separate class of servants that are above the regular house staff, which is why they can enjoy some privileges. Same goes for driving carriages. And it all also applies to Pandora's headquarters.

♤ Though they do clean their own rooms because both Xerxes and Katharine value their privacy too much to let other people inside. That is to say, “clean” is a strong word, because their rooms are always a mess anyways...

♤ Also, technically they can cook, to some extent, because there were times when they lived alone. But they'd rather avoid cooking if they can.

♤ Break is canonically protective, and violently so. Mortifera is no better, and she's even more aggressive. Which means that if you hurt one of them, if they don't kill you themselves in retaliation, the other one certainly will.

♤ Xerxes likes spewing cryptic bullshit and speaking in riddles. Mortifera, despite being a great detective, cannot catch a hint to save her life. Do you see why it took them so long to get together?

♤ I really don't think they would be able to exchange clothing since they have rather different fashion styles and are 100% committed to their personal aesthetics. Also there's obvious difference in clothing sizes and body types... Though there was one occasion when Mortifera suddenly barged into Break's room, took one of his fancy hats, and ran off, because she urgently needed it for some outfit. Break still cannot get her to give it back.

♤ When it comes to "mature – playful" scale, they are perfectly capable of acting like serious adults. But it’s not fun, so they would rather not. (When the situation actually gets serious, though, more often than not these two turn out to be the most sensible and competent people in the room)

♤ For the “ray of sunshine – doneTM” scale, I put them in the middle because while both Break and Mortifera maintain this cheerful and happy-go-lucky, if not slightly menacing façade, underneath all the pretences? They are tired and lowkey depressed.

♤ Same goes for the “tense – easy-going” scale. They might look like the type of people who are not bothered by anything, but Break is always on his guard, and Mortifera is stressed 24/7...

[lunarsun12]

Aegi Beomgyu

Masterlist

You all wondering why, why beomgyu is the aegi (baby in Korean) in the this household.

Well it is mainly yeonjun, who lets him get away with everything. Always placing the blame on Kai and Taehyun.

Taehyun had enough and decided to tell Soobin the truth about what Yeonjun has been doing when he is away.

Will Beomgyu get punished?

Back TXT Family Chat

Today 18:00

Taehyun🐯: I can’t stand this any longer! I’m telling Eomma!!

Yeonjun🦊: Hey! You don’t know anything!

Taehyun🐯: Oh yeah? You and Beomgyu?

Yeonjun🦊: Beomgyu and I were having bonding moment. As he missed his Eomma today

Beomgyu🐻: No I don’t! Eomma is a big bully, he c h e a t e d

Yeonjun🦊: We talk about this later, need to stop your brother from spilling the beans before I get another silent treatment

Taehyun🐯: Threat all you want Appa! Me and Kai got evidence of you are biased towards Beomgyu!! Right Kai

Heuningkai🐧: Kai knows nothing…me fear for my life

Taehyun🐯: Kai, we been through this. Beomgyu threats won’t work when Eomma hear about this

Beomgyu🐻: You should listen to Kai and stop babbling nonsense when I am innocent ^_^

Soobin🍞: Kids? What is going one? What do you need to tell me Taehyun?

Taehyun🐯: APPA IS LETTING BEOMGYU GETTING AWAY WITH EVERYTHING! When Beomgyu broke the plates, Appa blamed it on Kai and made him clean up like I care anyways

Taehyun🐯: Then the next door neighbour, mother came and asked who made his Mark into a clown. We all know it was Beomgyu but Appa pushed the blame on me!! I have to apologise for something I didn’t do!!!

Yeonjun🦊: He is lying! I did no such thing! He is just angry for having to say sorry

Soobin🍞: Yeonjun…what did I say stop showing beomgyu extra love. You have to be non biased, or else you have to deal with this

Taehyun🐯: Punish Beomgyu! He causes trouble for me and Kai

Heuningkai🐧: No he didn’t!! Please leave him alone! I am definitely not in a choke hold by beomgyu right now

Taehyun🐯: You see! He is threatening Kai right now as we are speaking!

Soobin🍞: Kai, I’m sure beomgyu is hugging like always

Beomgyu🐻: It my special hug, for my favourite sibling ^_^

Heuningkai🐧: SHUT UP PLUSH MURDER!!

Taehyun🐯: Wait beomgyu murdered Kai babies?

Beomgyu🐻: I did no such thing! APPPPA TAEHYUN BEING MEAN AGAIN

Yeonjun🦊: Stop being mean to our angel child! Soobinie nothing to worry, the kids are bit rowdy

Heuningkai🐧: it was Beomgyu who did that…I thought it was Appa not gonna lie…

Soobin🍞: I would have believed you, if you said it was your appa…he has the tendency to do things out of anger…

Yeonjun🦊: It was one time…or another two but who’s counting

Taehyun🐯: Why did you say shut up plush murderer to Beomgyu?

Heuningkai🐧: That how I always say shut up to Beomgyu!

Heuningkai🐧: OMG! HE KILLED MY PLUSH FAMILY! MY OWN BROTHER!! PUNISH HIM!!

Taehyun🐯: All it takes to say Beomgyu is the plush murderer

Beomgyu🐻: Appa! Taehyun is being mean! He is framing me for something the ghost did!!

Beomgyu🐻: As well as Kai full on punched me!! Do something!!!

Soobin🍞: That it! I’m coming home! I don’t care if I have chance of meeting RM tonight!

An hour later…

Heuningkai🐧: Okay, i thought when I lost my plush friends was bad but seeing Beomgyu acting all cutesy with Eomma…it’s sickening

Taehyun🐯: He is doing that! As he know he is trouble big time!! And also Kai how did you managed to punch him?

Heuningkai🐧: I used my height against him. Doesn’t take much to take him down

Taehyun🐯: Eomma is so bad at lying when he said he doesn’t have favourites!

Yeonjun🦊: Beomgyu derserve to be punish now!

Taehyun🐯: You called him your angel child, who does no bad things!

Yeonjun🦊: I never said that! I’m gonna punish him!!

Soobin🍞: Hang on, don’t touch Beomgyu he is innocent! He was in shock due to all things happened today

Yeonjun🦊: HE DID ALL OF IT! And made his siblings take the blame!

Heuningkai🐧: Wasn’t it you? Who blamed it on us?

Yeonjun🦊: I did nothing! Now hand over the kid

Soobin🍞: Touch him and you are sleeping on the couch tonight

Beomgyu🐻: APPA IS THE BEST

Soobin🍞: Don’t you mean Eomma?

Beomgyu🐻: YOU CHEATED ON A VIDEO GAME WHERE I CLEARLY WON!!

Soobin🍞: I don’t recall that! I won fair and square stop being a baby! I WON FAIR AND SQUARE

There was huge stomp coming from the living room, more likely Soobin. One he still thinks he beats Beomgyu and second immediately when Beomgyu said that. Yeonjun immediately ran to the living room and pushed soobin away giving beomgyu the biggest hug. Soobin wasn’t happy, so he started having a tantrum…ah I mean an adult meltdown.

Yeonjun🦊: You can’t outrun the Yeonjun love 🥰

[halfelven]

Sage and orchid! :)

from this ask game

sage ⇢ what ‘medium’ of art (poetry, music, fiction, paintings, statues etc.) is the most touching to you? why do you think that is?

this is a hard question because I don't like to draw very hard lines between types of art (I am immediately thinking of epic poems that could be chanted/spoken/sung as well as what film would fall into when it combines so many mediums) and the types of art that have touched me the most are across various mediums.

I would probably choose poetry though. Poetry written hundreds or thousands of years ago can still touch me on such a deep level. And poetry is about attention to detail, crafting images through language, putting experiences into words. my choice to become a writer was to put things into words that felt unexplainable. so much of poetry is that.

but it is also close to music and theatre/film/performance art. it's all connected and what is touching me the most depends on the day. and music and fiction fight for how much time i spend with a medium though i think fiction will always win with how my imagination doesn't slow down even when i sleep

sorry for the long answer but it really has me thinking. because with time spent i think i probably spend the most time with other people's art as music. but with my own art it's my fiction because i'm always running stories through my head. but i also look at paintings/drawings every day and am surrounded by art in the design of my everyday household objects since i spent years carefully getting everyday things that are designed beautifully and functionally. and i could talk about this for hours because i am compelled to study how humans relate to art and what ways control of that art is used to shape people and society. i feel like i will be studying this for my phd someday even...

orchid ⇢ what’s a song you consider to be perfect?

I'm going to say UFOF by big thief because it's the only song that's gone to no. 1 song on my spotify in 2 separate years (2020 and 2022). and I can't even begin to express how much the lyrics mean to me. "just like a bad dream, you'll disappear / another map turns blue / mirror on mirror / and i imagine you taking me out of here" it just has that fight against despair feeling. I'll also say send in the clowns by judy cllins dancing in the dark by bruce springsteen buzzcut season by lorde mad world by tears for fears king and lionheart by of monsters and men ada by the national

thank you!!! 🌿🌸

[bllsbailey]

What We Know About the Trump Shooter

In the early hours of Sunday morning, at approximately 1:34 a.m. EST, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s Pittsburgh Field Office officially identified the Trump shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

Not much is known about Crooks. Now that the FBI has taken over as the lead federal investigative agency, expect further delays in the investigation's findings.

Here's what we were able to confirm as more details come to light:

According to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing corresponding to the shooter's residential address, a teenage Crooks, then age 17, donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a left-wing voter turnout PAC, through the Democratic donation platform ActBlue on January 20, 2021, the day of President Joe Biden's inauguration.

FBI officially identifies shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20 of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Voter records show Crooks was a registered Republican who made one singular $15 donation to a liberal PAC on January 20, 2021 — Biden’s Inauguration Day. pic.twitter.com/orEO4hq1PS— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) July 14, 2024

In a statement shared with Drop Site, an independent news project of The Intercept's co-founder Jeremy Scahill, the political action committee said Crooks had sent the donation "in response to an email about tuning into the inauguration."

"The email address associated with the contribution only made the one contribution and was unsubscribed from our [mailing] lists 2 years ago," Progressive Turnout Project said.

Minors can legally make campaign contributions within certain limitations, the FEC stipulates.

The upcoming race in November marks when Crooks would have been old enough to vote in a presidential election.

However, according to Pennsylvania voter registration rolls, identifying information matching that of Crooks says he was a registered Republican.

Allegheny County Councilman Dan Grzybek, who represents Bethel Park, said in an interview with The New York Times that Crooks's mother was a Democrat and his father a Libertarian. "You've got a large spattering of different backgrounds and ideals and definitely have a lot of mixed households in Bethel Park," said Gryzbek, who had previously met Crooks's parents while canvassing the neighborhood.

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Investigators reportedly believe that the rifle Crooks fired several shots from belonged to his father, Matthew Crooks, who allegedly purchased the firearm at least six months ago.

CNN contacted the elder Crooks, but the distraught dad declined to speak publicly about his son, saying he would rather wait until he talked to law enforcement first as he tried to figure out "what the hell is going on."

In June 2022, Crooks graduated from Bethel Park High School, a suburban school district south of Pittsburgh and an hour away from the site of the shooting. Townhall has found footage of Crooks walking out during commencement to receive his diploma (1:08 timestamp on the right side of the split screen). Crooks, dressed in a black graduation gown designated for male graduates and donning a silver honors chord, crossed the stage and posed for a picture as few in the audience applauded him.

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) July 14, 2024

Crooks briefly appeared in the background of an old BlackRock advertisement filmed at BPHS. The company commercial spotlighted an economics teacher there. The firm confirmed Crooks's ad appearance, according to a press statement the world's largest money manager made on the matter. "We will make all video footage available to the appropriate authorities, and we have removed the video from circulation out of respect for the victims," BlackRock said, stressing that the students were unpaid. However, as of Sunday night, two clips, a 15-second version and a longer 30-second cut, are still up under BlackRock's X account.

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) July 14, 2024

At the school's annual Awards and Recognition Program, which honors BPHS graduates, Crooks earned the National Math & Science Initiative Star Award, a $500 cash prize, for his academic achievements, according to TribLive, a local outlet covering community news around Allegheny County.

Investigative journalist Meghan Schiller, reporting for Pittsburgh-based KDKA-TV, shared two yearbook pictures of a young Crooks. According to WPXI, a local NBC affiliate, the one photograph was taken in 2020.

— MEGHAN SCHILLER (@MeghanKDKA) July 14, 2024

TMZ also obtained what appears to be his Pennsylvania driver's license photo.

First Photos of Donald Trump Shooter Surface with Boyish Face | Click to read more 👇 https://t.co/8M1ScnmhwJ— TMZ (@TMZ) July 14, 2024

Crooks's former classmates described him to ABC News as "a loner" who was "a quiet kid," though they wouldn't say he "ever appeared as a threatening person." One student who sat behind Crooks in an AP statistics class remembered him as academically gifted, always excelling in math and sciences. Others said he was "relentlessly bullied" and often wore hunting outfits to class.

Neighbors told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Crooks seemed "a little odd" growing up, but they never anticipated he was capable of carrying out a shooting, much less trying to take out a former president. "It's crazy ... you wouldn't expect that from that kid," one resident, who lived doors down from Crooks, said. "He was a little bit off. He was like the weird kid, but you wouldn't expect this."

Crooks worked as a dietary aide at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. Marcie Grimm, the nursing home's administrator, said the facility was shocked to hear of his shooting spree, saying that the employee's background check came clean, per The New York Times.

According to Pennsylvania's public court records reviewed by Townhall, Crooks did not have a criminal history, at least as an adult anywhere in the Keystone State.

Bomb-making materials were found inside the shooter's vehicle, parked in the vicinity of the Trump rally, and at his home, according to The Associated Press.

Crooks opened fire at a campaign rally where Trump was speaking Saturday in Butler County, about a 50-minute drive northeast of the Steel City.

A viral video circulating on social media shows the body of the gunman lying motionless on the roof of a manufacturing plant, AGR International Inc., near Butler Farm Show grounds. The shooter was spotted by spectators "bear-crawling" on the building before a counter-sniper team of Secret Service agents returned fire, killing him.

A photograph making rounds appears to depict the assailant wearing a T-shirt that promotes Demolition Ranch, a popular YouTube channel for firearms enthusiasts. Known for its sensational experiments and demonstrations, the page frequently posts videos testing guns and teaching educational content on firearms safety.

Demolition Ranch's founder Matt Carriker reacted to the neutralized shooter sporting his merchandise, writing on Instagram, "What the hell."

The rooftop was less than 150 meters (or 164 yards) from Trump's podium, a distance from which a decent marksman could reasonably hit a human-sized target; for reference, that's the range at which U.S. Army recruits must shoot a scaled human-sized silhouette to qualify with the M-16 rifle, according to AP.

Crooks tried to join his high school's shooting club, but he was rejected for being "comically bad" at aiming and cracking "crass," "off-color" jokes, The New York Post reports.

Bethel Park's rifle team shoots Anschutz single-shot rifles with peep sights and .22-caliber ammunition, Crooks's ex-classmates told The Post. The school's shooting range is 50 feet long by 21 feet wide and has seven ranges.

Once, Crooks fired from the seventh lane, which was the closest to the right wall, and hit the left wall, missing every target on the back end. He was off by close to 20 feet, one teammate recalled. "[Crooks] tried out … and was such a comically bad shot he was unable to make the team and left after the first day," he said.

Crooks "couldn't shoot at all. He was a terrible shot," another BPHS alum added.

Even the coach, the team members continued, had concerns about Crooks. "Our old coach was a stickler, he trained Navy marksmen, so he knew people. He knew when someone's not the greatest person."

"We noticed a few things Thomas said and how he interacted with other people … He said some things that were kind of concerning," the source stated. "You know, obviously, we're using guns in a school setting so you need to be very careful in that regard," he explained, without elaborating on what exactly Crooks said that was inappropriate.

Reportedly, Crooks was asked not to return after a preseason session. However, he did belong to the Clairton Sportsmen's Club in a neighboring borough, the club's counsel confirmed to ABC News.

The presumptive Republican nominee narrowly survived the assassination attempt after literally dodging a bullet that grazed his ear, piercing the upper part and causing blood to gush.

At least one attendee has died, and two rally-goers remain critically wounded. A GoFundMe campaign has been launched for the family of the deceased victim, Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief and father who heroically shielded his daughter from the gunfire.

As Spencer covered, authorities held a midnight press conference on the shooting but offered nothing enlightening, sidestepping questions concerning the shooter's identity. Officials said they were "not prepared" at the time to release the name of Trump's would-be assassin until they had "100 percent confidence."

The reason for the delay in positively identifying the shooter was partly because he didn't carry ID on his person, which was one of the "complicators," according to authorities. "It's a matter of doing biometric confirmations," officials explained, such as "looking at photographs" and testing his DNA to see if there's a match already in a system somewhere.

Investigators are "working tirelessly to identify what that motive was," officials said.

Internet trolls initially misidentified the shooter as Marco Violi, an Italian sports writer residing in Rome. The video blogger, who runs a YouTube commentary channel about AS Roma, the Italian soccer team, published a statement on his Instagram page saying he "strongly den[ies] being involved in this situation" and was "woken up in the middle of the night" from numerous notifications related to rumors spreading online, according to an Italian-to-English translation. The journalist added that he will file a complaint against the X accounts that "invented this fake news and all the news headlines that spread" the misinformation.

X user "@jewgazing," pretending to be the Trump shooter, posted a picture of himself to troll other X accounts and cause confusion. The image was widely reposted, with X users finding shared similarities in the troll's and shooter's facial features. Eventually, the troll scrubbed his X page after uploading a clip of himself in the car, declaring, "My name is Thomas Matthew Crooks. I hate Republicans. I hate Trump. And guess what? You got the wrong guy."

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