#Common threads

[daltongraham]

One of my favorite movies of all time was added to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry today!

If you weren't there in those horrific early days of AIDS...if you've always wondered what the deal is with the Quilt...give this movie a look. It'll break your heart; it'll be worth it.

I first saw "Common Threads" in a film festival in Houston. I was wearing a skirt and had to use it to blot my face from all my tears. It helped inspire me to start an AIDS assistance program at my UU church. Really, it's worth seeing. And the music is so beautiful.

[remembertheplunge]

Common Threads

August 28, 1990

The moon tonight looks something  like this. (See following blog). First fall leaves filtering down now. Drought brown ivy.

A client, doomed to prison for many years to come, said to me when I saw him in the Stanislaus County jail “I’d like it if they would just give me a gram of heroin and leave me alone.” (Enough heroin to kill him) “Then they wouldn’t have to bother with this.” I said “I agree. Some types of life are worse than death.”

He was intelligent and articulate. I said “You seem to be such a quality person.”

He continued “We try to keep the cells clean. But, the new guys coming in are coming down off trips and throwing up. New guys, short timers. 9 men in 6 men cells—gotta step over bodyies to get to the John (toilet). I been here 4 months now.”

And, after leaving the jail, I go back and I try to tell others of his glory and magnificence, and they guffaw. And, I go out into the world with my grief and my longing and the world gaffaws.

And then I watch Common Threads. And , I find a warm, soft friend. I nestle and I cuddle in the sweet quilt of "Life is not denial".

End of entry

Notes 5/28/2025

Common Threads was a 1989 movie . On the eve of 1987's Second National March on Washington for lesbian and Gay rights, surviving families and friends of people who have died of Aids prepare panels for the Aids Quilt project. The stories behind 6 of the people memorialized in the panels are shared in the movie.

I must have watched Common Threads after my moving meeting with the client in the jail described in the above entry. The dignity portrayed in the film must have helped heal my mental jagged edges arising from hearing my client's story.

[onlyhurtforaminute]

SCALPEL-DIABOLICAUST

[holdenreviews]

Common Threads - Bobby McFerrin

Happy 75th Birthday, Bobby!

[secondhandpull]

1994 common threads tee from livmb_

[ahotknife]

i will never stop being 6 years old and lonely. i will never stop being 11 years old and lonely. i will never stop being 19 years old and lonely. i will never stop

[geospiral]

The real Alien Stage tragedy is them killing off all the characters with the big bushy eyebrows

[wolfythewitch]

Aphrodite

[melonisopod]

Lifetime Stew is so much darker in hindsight.

Sinclair and Don Quixote both get it, and it’s specifically *Lust*, not *Gluttony*, despite being food-themed. (Although Gluttony in Limbus terms is basically Greed, and Lust very broadly refers to “desire” for things that aren’t material).

So, Lifetime Stew is based on the fable of Stone Soup, wherein a man managed to feed his whole village by bringing each together with a different ingredient, to make a soup that would last forever. He just kept telling each person in the town square, “All it needs is one more ingredient,” and everyone just kept adding to it. Is the gist of it.

Sinclair and Don have voice lines that more or less imply the same thing - the Abnormality (Basilisoup) just wants everyone to try its delicious soup! Cute, silly concept, right?

So what do Sinclair and Don Quixote have in common?

(SPOILERS beyond this point! You’ve been warned)

In Canto 3, Sinclair recalls that once his mother, father, and sister all received full-body prosthetics, they no longer had a need to eat. The table was set and food was placed only for him. It’s one of the things he found so especially heartbreaking, that he was the only one left in his family who could still eat food. It’s such a core memory that it’s plastered on the window-wall of his cell for his base E.G.O., four roboticized humans sitting at the table, with no food present.

He desperately misses getting to share meals with his family.

And in La ManchaLand, the Bloodfiends have been starved of blood for the past 200 years, barely sustaining themselves on hemobars that don’t satisfy them. They can *live* without subsisting on human blood, but they’re utterly miserable doing so. The only one of the First Kindred’s clan who escaped such a fate was of course, Sancho, though she’d long forgotten she is a Bloodfiend, Faust says she still craves blood. She’d been in effect, the only Bloodfiend allowed to sate her cravings, while the rest of her kin starved. Being the only Bloodfiend able to escape their fate was so traumatic for Sancho that she wanted to forget everything about herself.

In other words, Basilisoup/Lifetime Stew is about “the joy of sharing a meal with family,” something both Sinclair and Don Quixote desperately wish for.

KIM JIHOON WHEN I FUCKING GET YOU

[alciedoodles]

part 7 of 7 - confessions

[« previous] [full story in chronological order]

Thank you all for reading! Especially if you've been following since day 1 lol :) as a side note, this was meant to be only 1 page per day, but the final two parts got a little out of hand... for a total of 16 pages! (9 just for this finale)

[gloriousmonsters]

love when you can ask the Narrator why the Princess is a Princess and he's like 'well i uhhhh YOU did that. maybe it's because uh... something something about her being above you... but still approachable... look i don't want to analyze or anthropomorphize your--' my guy. i am a primal being of Order and Eternity and Shaping. You're the one who convinced me I was some dude and were quite willing to take credit for shaping my view on the world through narration five seconds ago. Are you gonna look me in the eye and tell me the desire to interpret something worthy of adoration and more powerful than me as a dommy princess is written in the very nature of the universe or are you going to show me your browser history like a man

[themanlykittenkayden]

I’m half expecting at this point that the finale of this season of Game Changer is actually just going to be Sam revealing the secret criteria that he’s been judging the entire cast on on every show on the platform for the last several years

[bossthebicon]

#I've heard this before

[unhealthyfanobsession]

If there is one thing you will always trap me with it is a man looking at an offputting, sarcastic, kind of bitchy woman and saying "That one is mine and loving her is actually my entire personality now. I will be committing murder for her also, as an aside."

[dkniade]

🌌💫🌒

Fan art of @kianamaiart’s characters from I Don’t Want To Be A Magical Girl! (with glasses, ft misc glasses characters & two IDWTBAMG universe fan characters)

I’ve been following this project from the start so it’s been great seeing interactions between the characters and how the fandom is so excited for it. ^^

I tried to draw the cast from memory and, while Miss seems a little different from canon, at least I got the dark hair roots and strands sticking out lol. But details aside they’re all recognizable! Which means they’re lovely designs that are unique from one another✨

Eclipse’s shades are a combination of his usual eye mask and the shades from this artwork, and Hoshi’s glasses are inspired by this one!🌒⭐️

Designs… (I don’t have a name for her yet but) the pigtails girl’s shapes are a combination of curves pointing downwards and curves pointing upwards. The idea ended up being that she’s on Eclipse and Lady DeVoid’s side so (after reading this post by Kiana about how most of the characters had Aika’s design as the springboard and are designed to complement eachother) I wanted her design to complement those two’s, with some influence from Zira. I like that the strands of hair on her forehead and the shape around them mirror both Zira’s hair and DeVoid’s horns haha. Plus, I was trying to figure out how to design her glasses and they ended up being kind of the inverse of Eclipse’s eye mask, which is very nice. Eclipse and DeVoid seem to be associated with sharp curves and circle shapes; maybe her outfit could be a lot fancier…

As for what her role might be in the story… I dunno, if she works with Eclipse and DeVoid, and Eclipse is all ~theatric and grand~ then maybe she could be like… his assistant… or something? Who knows. Or, I say “observer from afar” so perhaps she actually gets along with Zira well and they’d watch on the sidelines while Aika and Eclipse duke it out…?

Eclipse… Moon… Umbra… man what if I just name the pigtails girl Yueshi (月食, lunar eclipse)(for both the moon motif that Zira and Eclipse have, and the darkness motif that Eclipse and DeVoid have haha)

Shooting star and telescope don’t feel quite right, but with the circular shapes and the lunar eclipse, I could kind of see her having some star trail motifs with her sweater…

I guess Umbra would be the same type of elf (? darkness/concept personified?) as Lady DeVoid but I’m not sure haha. We don’t have much information on DeVoid other than the fact that she is darkness itself and that she lost most of her powers which she can’t remember how to use. Banished by a Star Guardian, revenge, recruiting Eclipse to help spread the darkness particles to destroy the Star Guardian… If she has a similar backstory to MLP:FIM’s Princess Luna then does that mean she was originally Aika’s teammate or something? haha

About Umbra’s hair… (Feel free to correct me for any inaccuracies.) I think from the reference photos I was trying to draw box braids but got so focused on also making the braids look like moon phases that I’m not sure if it’d still be box braids in the end? They seem more like cornrows now, at least for the side ones?

Here are some earlier versions of the OCs! and more rambling about designs

Well, initially I scribbled down Yueshi so I could experiment with values because I was thinking about how light-coloured pants draw the eye too much if the outfit or the top half of the character is darker. (Half way through she ended up looking like a IDWTBAMG character so I tried to match the proportions with Aika’s turnaround.) But I suppose if there’s enough contrast for the upper half (and IDWTBAMG’s stark black design style gives a lot of contrast) then it works out better. I think the combination of making Yueshi’s hair and the top half of her sweater black and the circle shape white worked out okay. Initially she had large round eyes so I tried giving her round glasses too but since she ended up being a fan character in the universe, it was too similar to Aika and Zira.

Umbra’s design kind of popped into my mind today so I tried to scribble it down and experimented with hairstyles. But green and purple are already associated with Zira, and that shade of lavender is more like Eclipse so I guess I’ll fiddle around with her colour scheme more. Maybe there’s not enough of the signature black there, and both could use some more details to match the level of details in the canon designs… (If Yueshi works under DeVoid then she’d probably get a fancy outfit too.) Then again, Umbra is more like Miss in terms of detail so it seems she’d be a background/supporting character or something…🤔

(I can’t seem to escape the puffy sleeves/cone shape silhouette🤔 Gotta diversify. Also, not sure if it’s ‘cause of the project’s style or if I just really love circles in character design haha)

[incesthemes]

there is interesting johndean subtext and insinuations across kripke era, usually through an antagonist insinuating parent-child sexual violence in order to exert dominance over dean. this type of mockery exploits that ambiguous relationship between john and dean and reminds dean that he never had a normal relationship with his father, and that makes him gross and wrong. it doesn't actually matter in the end whether john was sexually abusive to dean. the core of their relationship was damning enough: dean was made to take the place of john's wife—to comfort john and raise sam—while simultaneously being his son. the codependent nature of their relationship implies the incest that underscores their dynamic. again, this is regardless of what literally occurred between dean and john because there is enough doubt toward the nature of their relationship that multiple antagonists can use it against them.

sonwife, brotherhusband—dean is stuck in a liminal space between family and lover and is unable to put his feet firmly on just one side and instead has to accept both together or abandon both together. he doesn't get to have a relationship with his family without it being simultaneously incestuous. he plays the role of wife to john and mother to sam as mary's replacement; he therefore becomes more than a son and transcends the boundaries of the familial into the incestuous. it's baked into the dynamic and he can't hope to escape the liminality in which he's stuck without abandoning his entire family altogether.

this ambiguous relationship is further acted out with sam, where people perceive them as lovers rather than brothers; where their mutual devotion trumps, neglects, and disallows any other close relationship outside each other; where their physical closeness is viewed through an unusually sexual lens despite no literal sex acts between them taking place on screen. once again dean is stuck in a liminal space, paralleling the ambiguous and uncertain relationship he had with john.

in the end, sex (and sexual violence) is just a symbol of this codependency and uncertainly incestuous dynamic. sex acts in kripke era end up being symbolic: misinterpretations of sam and dean's relationship; accusations of sexual violence; literal, on-screen sexual moments between the brothers and someone else. it's a literary device that highlights the incestuous themes of the show. dean hand-picks women for sam to fuck because it allows dean to be symbolically part of sam's sex life. henricksen accuses john of raping dean because it is a symbol of the unhealthy, codependent relationship dean had with his father. the samulet stays on during sex because sam is symbolically integral to dean's sexual gratification (seen too in the way both dean and cassie in 1.13 appear to kiss the amulet at least once in the dark room). sex is used to signify more than what's literally on the screen, and the connections between the literal sex acts and the blurred lines of dean's familial relationships allow for a reading of incest between both john and dean and sam and dean.

it never mattered whether johndean or samdean had a sexual relationship in the canon because that was never the point. the point is the liminality that permeates the narrative. sam, dean, and john all stand upon a threshold between acceptable and taboo. the point of it all is the doubt and anxiety, the are-they-aren't-they that is never answered. the absence of incest within the text invites the understanding that the incest was, in fact, always there.