#and mostly I’m angry at my own dumb self because I didn’t communicate well or clarify and yeah truly that’s on me

[insanechayne]

~ ~ ~

[aiyexayen]

I haven’t known true peace since I realised that Wei Wuxian actually believes this. He’s not just saying dumb shit here, or oversimplifying things to be dramatic--he truly thought of it this way, even back then. Even though nobody else did.

This line has always confused me and maybe I just haven’t given it enough thought. Maybe it’s obvious. But everyone has such a different perspective at that section of the story, including the audience. And that’s part of the tragedy of it all, really, is how much the situation was twisted up--both on purpose, by the Jins, and by simple circumstance--to the point that nobody was on the same page. But the extent of Wei Wuxian’s didn’t really hit me until recently, when puzzling back over this particular scene.

(In my defense, it was easy for me to miss until now, because it’s mixed in with Wei Ying admiring Lan Zhan admiring the moon and followed by Lan Zhan calling Wei Ying out on his “I’m fine” bullshit before carrying him down the stairs.)

At first pass, all I could think was, “Wei Wuxian, are we even watching the same show?” He and Jiang Cheng were rivals as much as they were best friends as much as they were brothers, and frequently at odds.

They never really had a “them two against the world” vibe outside of their Twin Heroes of Yunmeng promise. Wei Wuxian loved the world, and making friends, and did so freely and gladly. He and Jiang Cheng really only ever stood together against really blatant enemies like the Wen before and during the Sunshot campaign, and by the time the Jins and the rest of the prominent sect/clan leaders were at their throats, things were definitely falling apart.

They not only had a fraught childhood together in that household to begin with, but they also haven’t been truly on the same side since the fall of Lotus Pier when it all came to a head; the slow dissolution of their close bond is a huge underlying theme of the story as we suffer through the emotional torture of watching their desperate love create a wider and wider chasm between them, littered with broken promises and unspoken words as they slowly forget how to know each other.

And they really never stood together against Lan Wangji?? Ever?

While Jiang Cheng was regarding him (and every other human being and activity) as a rival for his shige’s attention and proof of his own social ineptitude (a potential cause for worry in his earnest role as sect heir and representative of his clan), Wei Wuxian was utterly enamoured. By the time Wei Wuxian had his rounds of falling-out with Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng regarded him as an ally who stood by his side for months and kept his hope alive while helping him scour the land for all traces of his missing brother and was really confused why Wei Wuxian was being a jackass.

In-between all this, they travel and fight together--all three of them--on more than one occasion, and even go to war together.

We’re frequently shown glimpses, scenes, framing, setups, that show us Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji standing together without or apart from Jiang Cheng as well. Because reasons.

From Lan Wangji’s point of view, he was never not on Wei Wuxian’s side when it counted. He just had trouble communicating this effectively at times, especially while Wei Wuxian was in a constant push-pull with himself and everyone else about what he should be allowed to want and have.

From Jiang Cheng’s point of view, Wei Wuxian was failing to be on his side again and again, and it was never really about his own loyalty, because he was the only one still keeping their promise.

And certainly by Jin Ling’s one-month celebration, they both seemed to be on the same page that they were coming together as Wei Wuxian’s important people, if not actively friends by then, and that they were of one mind in getting Wei Wuxian back around his family and back into society. One of the most shattering things anyone has ever had the nerve to tell me straight into the void that once was my heart is that they (along with Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan) were probably so excited to see Wei Wuxian and proudly show him how well they were all getting along.

So I, humble viewer of episodes, watch all of this happening, and then narrow my eyes at Wei Wuxian in disbelief. Who does he think he is? Jiang Cheng, always at his side? With Lan Wangji, always opposite?

Why does this moment of self-reflection even exist? When he could have taken this opportunity to have some kind of flashback about Lan Wangji and the moon, as the rest of us are? Is it just to torment me, in particular?

But then I thought of three things. One, his point of view at the time. Two, his point of view in this episode. And three, the phrasing of what he’s saying here.

The phrasing feels important. Wei Wuxian simply says he thought Jiang Cheng would be at his side/on his side/by his side, and he thought Lan Wangji would be opposite. Opposite doesn’t necessarily mean a direct rival or enemy. It can mean standing for the opposing viewpoint, or having an opposing position.

Given that he’s directly comparing it to how he feels right now, it makes sense. As of this episode, he’s just had his real first encounter with Jiang Cheng, and it was pretty horrible. He had to deal with Jin Ling and his curse, between now and then, but that isn’t really going to be what’s on his mind.

I might be like, “Ah, yes, running away from Jiang Cheng to go fuck off with Lan Wangji, typical Wei Wuxian scenario, even if I support it especially in this particular instance.” Jiang Cheng might feel that way, too, right down to “Thank fuck he ran away like he always does and didn’t call my bluff about killing him a thousand times over because that would have been embarrassing.”

But to Wei Wuxian, the circumstances are completely different. He’s not running off on an adventure after which he absolutely intends to return home. He’s leaving with what he sees as confirmation (which he was trying to avoid) that Jiang Cheng truly hates him, and the knowledge/reminder that he may never see him again because he will absolutely try his hardest not to. And he’s returning to Lan Wangji, who is his adventure, but also, increasingly, his home.

He can’t really think of it in those terms, yet, though. So he thinks about it as sides.

Even though they and Jiang Cheng are never truly pitted against each other in the present any more than Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian were ever pitted against Lan Wangji in the past (that is to say, one or two tense scenes and mostly a lot of wibbly gray areas indicating that there’s a lot more going on in everyone’s heads), Wei Wuxian sees Lan Wangji on the “Wei Wuxian Should Not Be Dead” team and Jiang Cheng sulking on the opposite shore.

Or, at the very least, the teams are “Leave Wei Wuxian Alone” and “Wei Wuxian Needs To Fucking Stop.”

Which reminds him how different it all used to be.

And even if we’re like, “Was it, though?” that’s not his perspective on it. He didn’t see all the pieces that the rest of us saw. He never knew the lengths Lan Wangji was going to in order to try and help him, the rules he broke. He never saw the punishment Lan Wangji endured for simply visiting him. Even Jiang Cheng saw Lan Wangji stand up for him publicly after the heart-wrenching scene in the rain. Wei Wuxian never did.

He only saw Lan Wangji trying his damnedest to get him to give up demonic cultivation. He only heard Lan Wangji’s attempts to convince him to get better that he never really understood. He only ever perceived resistance and disapproval.

Wei Wuxian was expecting Lan Wangji to come and personally try to stop him at Nightless City. Wei Wuxian woke up alive and took one look at Lan Wangji (and softly gayly smiled and took a second look for good measure) and took off. Wei Wuxian woke up again with all his memories and the knowledge he was loved and missed after sixteen years and asked if Lan Wangji had ever really believed him. Wei Wuxian has been slowly coming to terms with the fact that Lan Wangji wholeheartedly and unreservedly does, now. So, to him, it’s the idea that Lan Wangji has “switched sides” as it were.

And Jiang Cheng?

Wei Wuxian thinks he and Jiang Cheng were unquestionably on the same side right up until Jiang Yanli died.

Jiang Cheng was angry, was upset, was in pain. They fought. Promises were broken. But that didn’t mean they were on opposing sides, not really, surely.

They were on the same side about questionable cultivation methods not being questioned as long as it made Yunmeng Jiang strong where it was currently weak. They were on the same side about it not being anyone else’s business. Their fight was faked, even if the separation had to be real.

Wei Wuxian was still standing by Jiang Cheng’s side in prioritising Yunmeng Jiang’s political standing. Jiang Cheng was still standing by his side in caring about their home and their sister. He brought shijie, who brought soup. And something about their public break and Jiang Cheng’s account kept the other sects from piling on Wei Wuxian right at the start.

At Nightless City, while he expected Lan Wangji to be there countering him, he did not expect any of Yunmeng Jiang to be there to actually fight him. Of course Jiang Cheng was there--how could Jiang Cheng not show up? One of the great clans? And they’re not really supposed to have anything to do with one another anymore, right? Wei Wuxian was a traitor to Yunmeng Jiang, right? Of course Jiang Cheng had to show up.

But as long as Wei Wuxian was in control of the resentful energy and puppets, not a single Yunmeng Jiang disciple, let alone Jiang Cheng himself, was so much as looked at sideways.

Jin Zixuan had been killed. Jiang Yanli would never forgive him. His found family full of innocents had been slaughtered by power-hungry hypocrites. The entire cultivation world was after his soul. He was a dead man walking. He’d been hallucinating for hours. His mind was mostly gone.

And he thought, “Lan Wangji is here to put an end to me at last. It is time to fight.”

And he thought, “Jiang Cheng is not truly part of this. I must not touch Yunmeng Jiang.”

Both of these things wound me deeply. The first, because it’s demonstrably untrue. The second, because it might not have been nearly as true as everyone (including Jiang Cheng) wishes, though at least we’ll never really have to know, will we.

And then Jiang Yanli died.

We can see the story happening in stages, the various breakdowns and buildups and breakdowns again. And we always knew this ending was coming. But to him, that’s the moment everything truly, truly broke.

Though, I feel the need to point out, hysterically, he still wasn’t opposite Jiang Cheng even then. Because Jiang Cheng, he believes, wanted him dead (even if he couldn’t do it by his own hand) just as much as Wei Wuxian wanted himself dead. And Lan Wangji did not want him dead. So he stood in solidarity with Jiang Cheng one last time, did right by Jiang Cheng and Yunmeng Jiang and their family one last time, as he yanked his hand away from Lan Wangji.

Only now, in the present, are Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng truly in opposition. And only now are Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji on the same page. Supposedly.

One of Wei Wuxian’s particular character journeys post-timeskip is finally having the concept of interpersonal nuance smashed into his head in a way that still allows him to be himself and follow his own moral codes and build relationships in his own way. His assorted encounters with Jiang Cheng leading up to their reconciliation (as well as the juniors and the sect leaders and other characters) all demonstrate that nicely.

But in this scene, it really is that straightforward to him. Hell, it’s even presented such to us for a hot minute.

If for no other reason than the direct parallel of Lan Wangji finding out about Wei Wuxian’s fear of dogs and protecting him both physically and emotionally without question, and Jiang Cheng already knowing about it but using Fairy against Wei Wuxian until it triggered him into a panic-induced ptsd flashback seriously what a fucking dick move though.

So, perhaps it’s understandable, between Wei Wuxian’s misconceptions of the past and his current experiences in the present and the fact that these are the only two people left to him in all the world.

He believes the bitter irony of fate has dictated that he can never have them both. He was only ever going to have one of them and he never considered it would truly be this one.

And for just one moment, before he can be glad of his gain, he has to mourn the inevitable loss that comes with it. For that one moment, even seeing Lan Wangji so beautiful in the moonlight, so openly and invitingly waiting for him, that’s all he can think about.

It haunts me.

[katzirra]

Waiting for the place to give me my file list from my hand drive recovery. Made an omelet with asparagus and bacon, and gave the boys a tiny bit for being good this morning and letting me sleep in past 8:06...

Hannibal woke me up with very loudly aggressively loving face rubs which is new, and has been demanding attention all morning by soft paw grabbing and holding my hand while cooking, also new. Usually he's very independent and wants nothing to do with us.

Still concerned with his audible breathing when he's SLIGHTLY distressed, for a cat with obvious anxiety, and when he's picked up or sitting/laying weird. It's very noticeable, and I'm wondering if it has to do with his nasal bridge being a tad flat.

Trying to manifest a good mood. I'm having a big existential crisis about being alive.

Which, I'll just throw that under a cut and pair it with an apology. 🤙✨

I feel like I have no purpose or meaning. Having a lot of those "why bother/what's the point" moments about a lot of things which...the depth of those feelings isn't just apathetic like most people experience? For me it's very much a red flag, so that's been fun. Usually it's doing something as simple as doing something nice for myself, thinking why bother, and having to ARGUE with myself why it matters. Like...having to validate EVERYTHING I do these days is exhausting. Honestly, it's been a low simmer scary JUST KEEP SWIMMING the last few months. But everything I feel is too much to talk to anyone about, and it doesn't HELP me to. It's me. It's my brain. It's scary and I don't like looking the beast directly in the face when people want me to open up. My demon, my problem, trust me when I say I'm trying and that I'm sincere when I say sorry I'm not all here or present.

I'm, like torn between wanting to message my friend first to talk about shit, but I'm also refusing because I was hurt and the comment about shit being too much to read just resonates in my brain yelling "you're not worth their time and effort, you dumb bitch!" because my brain has a FIELD day with that shit. Its.... Kicking a dead horse, repeating myself anyway probably. It hasn't seemed to stick after the last year of me apologizing monthly because I'm just a shit friend who is too busy working and trying to not kill myself. Suicide ideation is a thing, and it SUCKS when it's as invasive as it is for intruding thoughts. But I'll keep apologizing because I feel guilty for not being good enough. Present enough. Engaging enough. Because maybe that time it'll stick??

They'll probably be better off without me making them feel bad because I don't put in enough effort I guess? Which also just hurts because I know online I'm standoffish these days, so I put the extra effort into being a good host I thought and I hoped that mattered. I just feel like no matter what I'm doomed to disappoint them? So I don't mean they'd be better off in a dismissive way, it's a legit...way I think. Like I'm obviously causing distress, and yelling at me won't fix it because it makes me recoil emotionally. So maybe I'm just a bad friend in reality and it is what it is. I'm sorry so many people have fucked me up about inter personal relationships?? I don't know what to do this time because that stupid fight cut me very deep in core values in myself.

It...Fucked me up. And whether that's important to them or not, or whether it has an repercussive weight, whatever. We've both been hurt by people, and been there as much as we'd let eachother. I've tried to be crazy supportive in the last bout of shit they went through. Because I love a bitch, and they matter immensely to me, and I know I suffered alone through a LOT of things like that and know it sucks. I offered my home, attention and time any time I could give it.. Being told i don't give as much as them set weird on my heart in light of that. It hurt.

Idk...And maybe I'm just some dramatic bitch or whatever I guess. Doesn't matter. I matter, my feelings matter. I'm mentally ill and I fucking bust my ass to deal with it, AND be a loving and supportive fixture in people's lives. I suck, sure. But I'm ALWAYS there for people.

I mention I'm depressed or angry at life, sure, but the layers of distress aren't...on display? It's my shit to deal with, if I bring it up, it's for benefit of people knowing why I'm withdrawn usually. I don't talk about myself much anymore because everything is too much and I just start venting. And people don't care that deeply about how fucked up my head is. Or I over share too much. Or yeah, it's a lot to read and I start babbling because the cork is off and I HURT inside just being alive anymore. I don't feel like I'm living my life for me these days. I don't feel alive. I feel stagnant. I'm biding time for SOMETHING to happen??

Yet I'm constantly apologizing to people for not being able to do basic shit, that I'm upfront about being difficult for some dumb reason. I'm always having to explain myself to people. I am in this bubble so often of feeling like I was made wrong, a mistake, missing something important.

Or that I'm a bad person. I'm too open, too closed, withdrawn, outgoing - I can never seem to get the ratio right. And its the kind of discussion I feel leans into self pity and attention grabbing but it's...something I internally struggle with every week and keep to myself.

Oh Kat, get a psychiatrist - I dont know that it would help, honestly. I know 90% of my thoughts and fears are irrational, and pointless. But I know they have valid backing in trauma that I have mostly dealt with, and am unlearning. But I also know I see through people, can identify those markers, and understand outcomes way too easy and that ALSO makes people mad. So. What the fuck is a shrink gonna do for me? My depression is a background white noise to this stuff, and it's honestly just bullshit I deal with. I'm not keen on medication, I'm sure it would help quiet my brain, but I've been dealing with this shit almost 20 years now, ita just the added drama and bullshit from people that exacerbates the emotional brain rash, for lack of a better phrasing. My issues are all behavioral and some depression and anxiety in the mix that I manage.

For all I'm told people understand ahit wrong with me, it sure is something I repeatedly get bitched at over, honestly. And I partially get it, I also find it frustrating. But I've been battling depression since I was 12/13 and learning to stop thinking certain things only since 21, and that's the harder part. I'm not the person people think I am, I wish I was anymore. That bitch died in 2011/2012. That fissure in my foundation fucked me UP. The shaking I had one or two years ago, didn't help.

To be transparently honest the whole shitstorm two weeks ago really hit some raw nerves I'm trying to deal with, and not doing well. Because the more times that nerve is hit the more I don't feel like a valuable person and that I'm wasting people's time. But the reason I'm yelled at is that I am a valuable person, and they want more of my time in a way?? I don't know what people want from me.

Waves hand dismissively - they're being sweethearts by the back door for now.

I'm in a weird place emotionally and mentally. I don't feel alive. I don't feel real. I don't feel valid or... I don't know. Nothing I say or so actually matters in my own life or experiences. I can be an amazing person with communication and intention but it doesn't matter if the other person doesn't care, it's like arguing online.

You can have a valid discussion and someone can just say "you're a fucking moron, I'm not listening to this" and you can't do anything.

I just wasted two hours organizing my thoughts qnd emotions into a post that I'll delete in a week. What a great use of my time. I'm juat exhausted.

I turn 31 tomorrow and is rather be dead lmao. I'm so tired of the weight of being alive and aware of the world and people around me. About being considerate and kind to everyone and it's never god damn enough. I bleed myself dry emotionally for everyone and run my mental battery into the ground qnd it's never enough. It's never going to BE enough. I don't want mental.break downs and emotional roller-coasters. I want friends that understand I'm scatterbrained and severely damaged and abused and I'm TRYING. I'm sorry it's never good enough.

I'm so fucking tired these days. I just want to disappear. I want to have an actual breakdown and cry

I haven't actually cried in years. I.... Mm. I feel like.im a shell. I'm so tired. I'm trying AO hard to be a good person and functional and I'm just constantly having more dished and I'm just...what is my purpose qnd point these days. I can't even make people happy.

Tomorrow I'll turn 31. It'll be like any other day. 👍✨

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales: Challenge of the Senior Junior Woodchucks! and Quack Pack! Review/Thoughts

Hello errybody, I’ve decided being a huge fan of this verison of Ducktales, and someone who likes reviewing stuff and going on and on at length about it, to review this season’s episodes as they come out, both to get me writing critically again, and to get more non chat content on the old tumblr.  First, while you likely don’t care a little about my history with the ducks; While I , sadly though i’m trying to correct it, haven’t read MUCH of Carl Barks classic donald duck comics nor that of his avid fanboy and clear sucessor in quality and talent Don Rosa, I did read Rosa’s utter classic “The LIfe and Times of Scrooge” mcduck in high school and the story stuck with me sense. I’ll go into Life and Times another day hopefully, but naturally when the reboot was announced I was excited.. a great voice cast, and donald,my boy, as part of the main cast. The show has been a joy to behold and with steven universe having taken a bow JUST a week ago and Covid ravaging our lives, it coudln’t of picked a better time. But do these episodes keep the momentum from an utterly marvelous second half of season 2? The short answer is “Fuck yes” but the long answer is under the cut. 

Challenge of the Junior Senior Woodchucks! While “Challenge of the x” is a popular snowclone title I can’t help but think of superfriends with the title... or now I thought of it shortly before writing this, hearing “Meanwhile at the legion of doom” when they cut to fowl.. or rather “Meanwhile at FOWL” but in that same announcers voice. I”m a dork, that should be obvious But I was hyped for both episodes: Violet is a faviorite mine, I ship her with huey so them interacting for the first time was wonderful to me, and.. okay the subplot didn’t hook me and we’ll get to that, but we had her dads and one of my other faviorites (I have several, get used to it now) , Lena , at least putting in an apperance. And honestly.. the main plot lived up to it. As I said I didn’t really dig the sub plot, more on that in a second, but I REALLY enjoyed this. From the begining Huey was my faviorite of the three triplets, easily, as it’s fairly easy for me a grown ass dork with anxiety, self confidence, anger issues, depression and constant self doubt, to relate to a little duck with the same and I’ve loved Danny Pudi since community, so naturally I was excited for his turn for a spotlight season.  And again the show didn’t disapoint.. Huey has a rather decent arc with some unexpected turns: First unexpectly, the trailer lied as while Huey and Violet look ultra competiive, theirs no real confilct..s econds after that bit the two shake hands (after a good 20 seconds of adorable and hilarous failure to do so that fits both like a glove.), and try to be good sports. The problem is instead internal: As Huey muses to his siblings (Webby very much included, getting her own great bit of encouraging Huey while also assuring Violet she’s also great he just needs it more, which is accurate) “If i’m not hte best junior woodchuck who am I”. Like Louie last season towards the begining (when he didn’t have a clear purpose in their adventuring dynamic) and towards the end (When della nearly took it away from him), he’s nothing without his sense of who he is. It’s easily why he’s the one to comfort him when his other siblings are either torn between two friends or you know, Dewey. Louie knows what it’s like to be rattled about who you are.  And WHY Violet outclassing him rattles him so much is intreating and to me makes a ton of sense: Huey’s identity to me is so wrapped in his intellegence and woodchuckery because , besides being oldest, it’s what he HAS on his brothers. When you think about it, Louie is the charmer, Dewey is charsmaticin his own way and loves hogging attention not to mention being fairly athletic... to stand out Huey NEEDS his brains to be the one with facts, and plans and his book.  He may not be the first on the front lines but he’s the first to solve a trap or figure out where they are if scrooge or his mom hasn’t already.. and if someone’s markdely better at that, and worse in an activity that’s wholy his own and now it’s been revealed impmortant to his mom.. just who is he.  The poor kid simply breaks down at the thought and takes bigger and stupider risks, which is sad to watch.. and thankfully lightned by his delightful mental brekadown in the form of the stephen root voiced JW Guidebook, a talking hallucination who gives huey his knowledge and edge back in the contest.. but it’s STILL not enough. And that’s when the other intresting bit comes into play: Huey.. has a moment of weakness. Despite the guidebook saying to always save your fellow woodchucks when violet gets stuck slipping in a tree.. he does nothing and leaves, despite JW  , whose now become his concious, begging him not to. It’s a sad, well done moment, and one that makes the story richer. Naturally violet escapes and when huey falls off the lava bridge to the finish line in a nother moment of desperation, and after a returning JW burns because apparently ducks and sabrewings are fireproof but imaginary manfestations of knowledge arne’t, she saves him... and is a good friend and woodchuck in NOT chastizing huey for his moment of weakness earlier, but comforting him, revealing she’s tried three times before and adding some more depth to her character: Despite her awkardness with people, she’s a kind, caring person, and gives Huey the lesson he needs: faliure, and the ocasional bout of moral weakness, is okay.. what matters is you learn from it, dust yourself off and keep going. Huey bows out due to this, as while violet is more than willing to let him pass with her, Huey knows he hasn’t earned it, yet, but he can keep trying and that this is her moment, not his. And in that, I feel learns that he dosen’t NEED recognition to be his best self.. he just needs to be a good person and a good woodchuk. I’ts a damn fine story and despite not being the intended premire, works as a great one.. mostly. And also yes I ship them.. as much as two ten-elven year olds can be, but they are adorable and geninley have a good repore.  And before I get to the dispaointing subplot, i’d be an idiot if I left out Violet’s family: We meet her dads, hilariously wearing shirts that say i’m with dad which is also really fucking adorable, and have our first onscreen conformation that Lena’s now her adopted sister, with Lena loudly screaming it in one of the best lines of the episode.. it’s clever to me: it over the top makes sure that we know yes, these men are gay and her parents.. but in a needed way given disney’s tendncy to dance around that or loudly proclaim a minor character no one cares about is gay in a way they can edit out. It’s a great step forward for the channel and the company and good on the crew for going ahead with it and good on disney for not beign dumb about it, nor, like again they have a bad habit of doing, loudly shouting about it to the media. Excellent work. 

Now i’m done rambling about Huey’s psyche and america’s new faviorite gay couple, I gotta get the suplot out of the way: while the whiporwill is freaking adorable as is dewey’s bond with it, otherwise this plot is.. really damn weak: it has some good jokes (Louie’s blunt no when Scrooge asks if hte family wants to fight a bear, Webby’s disapointment when she finds their not walking in the path of literal giants, Donald’s runner with the spy drone mosquito (and Della’s instiance to just let it suck his blood), and Della proving she has the family temper with her own donald brand angry dance) it’s just.. not enoguh. It feels like it’s an oblogiatory plto for the family and while it does set up the season’s overaching plot with a strong character, as it’s intresting learning that Scrooge had an idol at adventuring and thus is following a legacy himself, overall the subplot itself is just there and distracting from the much more intresting A-Story. That being said it was at least sorta worth it for the ending bit where huey and violet suprisingly find launchpad at the end of the trial in a cave.. as do the duckfamily, both groups crying out “Launchpad?!” with launchpad giving out a hilarious “that’s me, i’m launchpad” and while the setup for it was weak, the idea of the family going around the globe to find missing mysteries wile fighting fowl over them is a great concept. Overall a really damn strong start to the season with a weak b-plot and i’m gald even if this isn’t what htey planned to start with it’s what they went with.  Quack Pack: Quack Pack.. is one of disney’s secret shames.. I mean it’s not SO secret as it’s on D+ while this show’s predecessor wonder over yonder and superhero fantasy classic american dragon jake long are not for reasons I sitll don’t get, but that’s a rant for another day. It clashed badly with ducktlaes,was meiocre most of the time (It helps the two episodes I did watch were donald focused as he, a nicely redeisgned dasiy, and their co-worker kent were the highlights), with the boys somehow being more obnoxious than they were at their worst in the original ducktales.  Now that’s off my chest the episode itself.. is really damn good and a nice take on sitcom parody, with the family getting ready for a photo. Dewey’s “since the internet” line in paticular killed because, having watched boths ome of the best sitcoms (roseanne, designing women) and some of the absolute worst (My wife and kids, last man standing,home imporvment etc), most modern ones i’ve seen, even the good ones, have kids written this terrible way. Otherwise though it was highly enjoyable and having Jaleel “Urkel/Sonic the Hedgehog” white here to take the piss out of his former genre as Gene (and doing such a great job I really want to see Gene back next season), is the icing. That and Huey going half insane trying to figure out what’s going on, as well as the unsettling reveal of the studio audience.  Really the ep is a laugh fest, as well as the glorious arrival of goofy who to my relief, wasn’t a hallucination.. which itself is a great gag as is the offscreen internal thought of “okay so now htey ahve to take goofy with them on this deadly adventure all the way back to the states?”. The using of the adults old designs, as well as having dewey do the triplets dance and wear an outfit similar to theirs from “Mr Duck Steps Out” (Which I saw earlier this year and other than daisy’s horrifying early voice it wasn’t half bad). It’s just hard to go into and throughly enjoyable. But analysis right the real meat is in my boy donald: Going into the ep I genuinely expected Dewey to be the obvious source of the wish: while knowing gene was involved meant it was easy to see it was his fault HOW was a good question.. but having Donald do so and throughly enjoyable, and naturally gives us two great gags int he rwo: Donald’s VERY donald response “I wish for that 6 times a day! how wsas I supposed to know I was rubbing up against a magical lamp” and everyone spouting off their catcphrases, all either actual ones, basically something she does all the time turned into one (della) or poor beakly who gets “i’m not a spy” for some reason an dis cross about it. But the fact Donald not only figured it out quickly but wants to stay.. is perfectly in character. Donald in general, and especailly here, dosen’t WANT to be an adventuer anymore: he does it for his family, but he’d probably perfer the tgif lifestyle where problems are minor and solved with heartwarming lessons.. not full of lingering restiments, damage you caused, or loosing a decade of your sisters life and having to struggle to care for her kids. The rest of the familys looks when he gives his reasoning say it all: they really get why he wants this.. but Huey, who nicely got to be the one to break the sitcom news to them on top of everything else, makes an even better one: their lives are who they are.. this.. isn’t real. LIkea tgif sitcom it’s a plastic imitation of life that’s nothing like it: it’s comforting sure since hte real world is fucking complicated and miserable at times.. but hiding from it dosen’t fix things.  And while Donald, of course angrily denies this while his family ends upf ighting the studio audience, it’s Goofy, loveable guest star and everyone’s other faviorite dad, who gets his friend to see the truth: eveyr family has thieir own normal. He and max are  widower and his kid. Just a family of three (I”m counting PJ since , by his tene years at least, Peg is missing, though Iw ish she’d come back as her and goofy would be cute and she deserves better than Pete but whatever, and his dad is an emotionally abusive douchehead). But their happy, they make memories even if goofy like donald can’t walk five feet without the universe, and that’s what counts> it’s a touching sentiment and i’m happy Donald now has a friend whose also a parent and probably made similar sacrifices, and some Donald hasn’t had to just yet and probably won’t now dellas back, but made it through. So donald helps his family fight the  humanoids, take sa picture and it’s just a genuinely sweet ending... a great episode with a great concept that also opens the door for the return of the world’s other best dad more times. And again I want to see him smooch pete’s ex wife. This is the hill I will die on apaprently.. and with that I leave you. it was a good start a fun thing ot dive into and I hope for more.. oh and before I go, while i’m not a GIANT max and roxanne shipper, Idon’t dislike the ship I just don’t hav ea large attachment, it was absolutley WONDERFUL to see that they went to prom together. Okay i’m done, until next week, courage and stay safe. 

[thisnerdsadventures]

i graduated.

i graduated yesterday from MIT!! with a BS in computer science and engineering :)  a few of my friends and i celebrated over zoom with my mom in the background as they played video after video on the commencement live stream while only taking 10 minutes to scroll through our names lmao. the ceremony was done and done after 12pm PST, and i spent the rest of the days watching suits.

cw: protests, police brutality

I wanted to spend a good amount of this post talking about how it feels to graduate and what I’ve learned over the past 4 years. I’m still going to do that, but I want to start with how I felt this morning, as I watched protest videos on Twitter and tapped through an endless stream of call to action posts on Instagram. In the hours around commencement, I didn’t feel as happy as I should’ve, probably because the world we are graduating into is an actual Hot mess. We should’ve graduated onto Killian Court, with the sun out and hope and optimism with the world smiling upon us, but instead we graduated at home, separated by a global pandemic that our country refuses to take seriously and surrounded by protests and anger and racism, sent out into a world where people refuse to take a virus that has killed over 100,000 people in the US seriously and where a white police officer can literally kill an unarmed black man on the streets in broad daylight and nothing will happen without an actual public uproar. 

Frustrated, helpless, sad, angry are a few of the things I’m feeling. I feel frustrated because I know the community I grew up in and currently am in is a part of the problem. (For those of you who don’t know, I grew up in Orange County, California, which is surprisingly conservative for California, and has a lot of middle to upper class Asian and white people who are the types to denounce things like affirmative action, black lives matter, taxing the wealthy. Obviously not everyone here is like this, but actions like this make me remember why i wanted to leave :/ -- https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/gt7ift/oc_sheriff_department_raises_blue_lives_matters/) And I feel helpless because I don’t know how to help - if we were back on campus, we’d take the T out to Park St or even just walk there to Boston Common protesting, marching to City Hall, but we’re dispersed now, and not as many of us can drive out to the nearest big city protest, esp with COVID. So it begs the question of what we can do from our laptops, our homes?

Here’s some links that I’ve seen recently and have found really great:

Where you can donate, and where you can learn, a summary.

The Minnesota Freedom Fund is an organization that helps pay for immigration bonds and bails, but I think they’ve recently posted that they’ve gotten a lot of donations, and are now encouraging people to donate to other local organizations [x] and George Floyd’s family [x]. 

As an Asian-American, I recognize the privileges in society that we benefit from, and it’s our responsibility to stand up in solidarity now and actively fight anti-Blackness today. Here is an awesome Medium post I read yesterday, listing out some of the ways we can help -- https://medium.com/awaken-blog/20-allyship-actions-for-asians-to-show-up-for-the-black-community-right-now-464e5689cf3e

One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is how much anti-blackness actually appears in our own families and communities - I know I’ve heard many many racist comments from the people around me, so now more than ever, it’s important to have these conversations and educate one another on how we can do better. Another thing I found really interesting was reading about where the model minority myth came from, why it exists, and the damage it does. NPR article. tl;dr educate one another, educate oneself

I also just stumbled upon this google doc that is so in depth, so if you want to read more about more actions you can take, look here -> [x]

welp. that’s all i can really say on that, or at least I think the links do a better job.

1) So going off of that, the first thing i guess i can say MIT did for me was instill a drive to action. I remember before college, I was mostly in this socal bubble, shit in the world definitely happened (ok maybe not global pandemic level) but we didn’t see its effects as much. When I moved to Boston and started meeting people from different backgrounds, that changed. These people here are so inspiring in the way that they don’t sit around or mope or ignore the problem, they choose to do something about it, whether its a pset, the next MIT admin shitshow, or COVID. They go up and beyond what’s expected for them to make the world the better place, and I think that’s something i learned to do a bit of.

2) Another thing I learned was to forgive myself - we all have to forgive ourselves for being less perfect and for whatever dumb stuff we’ve done in the past. Like you might not even realize it’s happening to you, but taking stuff out on yourself way harder than you should might be a product of you just being angry at yourself for mistakes in the past. Everyone wants to be perfect, that’s just a product of who we are as people, a product of the environment we’re in. But the sooner we forgive ourselves for not being perfect, the faster we can move to growing and being better.

3) We are all pretty valuable people. It angers me to no end when people settle for less than they should, whether it's out of fear that something else might not come along, or they just don’t know their own self-worth. A big example of that is how often people will accept lowball offers and fail to negotiate salaries at all. And it drives me up the wall that it happens to people I know and love because it makes me wonder if they can see how much they really are worth. So much of our time at MIT is spent just wondering if we’re enough. But once you leave the MIT bubble, you realize how open you options are, and that maybe we should spend more of our time advocating for ourselves and believing in our own worth than letting people define that for us.

4 and 5) i learned that moving too quick to label people as completely good or completely bad never ends well. Same goes for companies, organizations, issues, everything. This was a hard lesson to learn, I had to learn it, relearn it, unlearn it, learn it again, and I made mistakes after mistakes after mistakes. When confronted with a bit of bad, I closed my doors, thinking I had all the good in the world I needed. But what I really needed was perspective. That maybe there was some x, y, and z, and those were bad, but there was also a, b, c, d, f, g and those were all so, so good. I can get pretty angry in the moment - I did this again just the other day, when I was projecting my anger towards someone to the whole two year relationship. But this time, I had another friend watching my situation on a balcony three floors up who heard and listened to all the good they had done for me and reminded me about it. This is why its points 4 and 5, that its also so important to have friends around that will listen to you, not just during the bad, but also the good, so they can tell you when you’re being irrational and to really be there for you when you dont even know you need someone to be there.

6) one of the things i learned the hard way was how to know when someone is your friend, and how to know when friends truly have your back. something that my experiences have shown me (and 11.011, ngl) is that when it seems like someone has your back, they might not, and when they have to choose sides, they may very well not choose yours. But here’s the thing I have learned: when faced with that, good close friends do not leave. They show up. Do friends fight? hell yeah. and they apologize and grow from it. They confide in you and answer your call at 1am. They know you better than you know yourself, so when you start losing sight of your true self, they remind you. There is no condition to your friendship, no prereq. When a crisis happens like COVID, they show up, they help you pack, they calm you down when you’re panicking, and if they’re not there in person, they reach out, they ask how you’re doing, and they offer support. When you graduate, they send you surprise gifts or join your zoom party or at the very least, remember the date and text you congratulations. Turns out, good, real friends are hard to find in this world, but it’s important to remember to not give up on finding them. it might take a couple years longer than you had thought it would for finding friends in college, but that’s ok. someone once told me that although the journey was hard, it led me to this point, and that that’s what made it worth the struggle.

So yeah, graduating was a lot to deal with. I’ll be back in the fall for my masters and im starting my internship in 2 weeks, so there will still definitely be updates on this nerd’s adventure!

[light-of-being]

a very fkin long and incomplete exposition of my flaws as a human being

I've not really spoken about the probably most consequential event in my recent life (the ending of a long term relationship), and that's because I haven't really thought about it very much. At least, not in a clear-headed space not entirely filled with rage, fear, or initially, longing. So, I've mostly just been waiting for the intensity of those responses to wear out before I can go back and make sense of things in a sorta 'safe' way.

(These days it's mostly anger and/or hurt. Sometimes twinges of hatred, but those fizzle quickly. I know that attitude isn't 'true'. I tried to hate him, I really did. Things would be so much simpler that way — an obvious villain of pure evil, a mistake worthy of contempt. Put him behind me as someone I regret meeting and consider everything only as a flashing warning sign of what to avoid next time. But real life never is that easy, is it.)

Regardless, reading about miscellaneous psychological ~stuff, I realised that I know for sure now that there are sides of me that only come out in a close relationship, as they postulate. It's unfortunate that my exposure to this was only in such a toxic environment, and I'm not sure if or when closeness has any chance of happening again.

I suspect, based on what I have/haven't felt with him vs others, that I can (at least at this stage of my development) only really feel 'seen' by an antisocial/narcissist/schizoid (or something in that general direction), just hope to god it's a mature one next time. I might want to interrogate and possibly change that fact, I'm not sure it's at all a healthily arrived preference. But...

there is a degree of normalcy and social belonging in others that becomes a wall

I can relate superficially, cognitively and even 'deeply personally' (tho is all y'all's deeply personal shit necessarily relational?), have a good time and even feel 'connection' but there are parts that seem simply insurmountable.

The lack of relating to many things is the unifying factor between me and the specified groups: the shared experience of not having shared experiences

But yet, a more acute awareness of superficiality, and the drives and mechanics of human interactions, attitudes, identity and constructs, not taken for granted as default but built from the ground up (Most often out of either necessity or a desire to manipulate them, but still).

Actually, most straightforwardly, the shared experience of experiencing oneself as an outsider to society — whether people personally, accepted norms or expected attitudes towards self and other.*

Anyway, that was a whole semi-tangent I went off on (useful and relevant to the initial thought but not the point I was planning on).

Important point was...ah yes, insights!

...into how I behave under genuine relational circumstances. Due to aforementioned toxicity, I'm not sure how generalisable they are to relationships overall, but they should generalise to feeling-states.

1.

(a) Fear. Defensiveness.

Switches off my brain. Obvious? No. I have been actively strategic while having a gun pointed at me. I thought I had that down. Turns out, I cannot dissociate myself out of an argument most of the time.

Turns out, just the fact or even prospect of arguing activates panic and brain goes out the window. Which is really fucking stupid as an occurrence because how many of these could be prevented with a bit of mindfulness and thoughtful responding. But getting emotions to chill out for long enough to do that is tough.

(b) I am a stubborn dumbass. Kid me argued until they were attacked so harshly that they absolutely could not continue. The alternative presented was to just keep silent, one I did not then and do not now accept. Discussion where both parties partake in good faith have generally been fruitful, only neither of these situations were that. Both involved one person trying to dominate at all costs. To which I suppose keeping silent for the moment and then running tf away is an appropriate response. Idk. I'm not sure if this is a 'normal situation' to which I respond unhealthily, or an 'abnormal situation' in which you just do your best to survive. Arguments are normal. Idk if other people have a less aggressive approach that is less outright terrifying, in which I can modulate, but it does seem like people want to prove you wrong and get angry, which I perceive as aggression.

2. 

Which brings me to boundaries. Can I shut things down when I'm overwhelmed. In the present case, the answer was no. They both didn't stop and the fact that I asked for this was interpreted as admission of defeat.Oftentimes, getting out of the situation was more of an ordeal than dealing with it. [We stayed at a hotel the one time and he did things that made me very uncomfortable (in like a “things that I shudder at thinking about even now” kind of way; not sexual btw which this has made it sound). I thought I was as clear as I could’ve been by saying, “I’m going to legit have a breakdown if you keep doing that” but apparently it came across as a joke (gotta improve on communication as well). He stopped and apologised when he realised I was crying, but later blamed me for not being more assertive and laughed at my ‘exaggerated’ response and “meltdown”. At this point I wanted to leave and go home, but he withheld [my copy of] the key. He insisted and manipulated and coerced for discussion, said I could have the key if I “really wanted it, but do I actually want that”, until it was just easier to give in. The helplessness and feeling trapped of that evening haunts me to this day, and I want to be very sure to never be in any situation where that is even a possibility again no matter what.]

I need to get better at knowing what is and isn't okay and being strong enough to enforce that.

3.

(a) Attachment is a bitch. Utterly unfamiliar sensation, one I don't know my way around at all. The rarity of relation makes it seem so fucking precious, so fucking necessary to protect even to my detriment and his. Dare I tip the boat or will it sink. Should I be the dancing monkey to keep it from sinking. Should he.

(b) The feeling of giving a damn what someone thinks of me is also foreign and difficult. It also seems hella intensified by virtue of not existing elsewhere. Disapproval feels devastating. Criticism becomes attack. Everything feels like a continuous effort to establish worth. I'd imagined acceptance could be taken for granted, but I questioned it the whole way (obviously doesn't help when he demands changes).

(c) I have trouble distinguishing between personal issues and insecurities and legitimate reason to be upset. I think this is typical. But with trial and error, one can probably pick up on what you carry with you across differing people and circumstances. I don't have that data. I have nothing to compare against. I also suspect some parts of this is him treating legitimate reasons as being my distorted perceptions, which I'm pretty sure did happen for a few things that I believe are 'objectively' shitty.

5. 

I trust. Too. Fucking. Much. I take shit at face value. This is very often dumb and...bad in literally every sense, but I don’t yet know how to identify preemptively when that's the case. I also fail to be adequately 'suspicious' I guess to be alert to minor inconsistencies later on. Lies are especially devastating. I built my reality around you using that fundamental premise. Now you tell me it was false all along. Where does that leave me? I go back to substitute and nothing makes sense. I don't know if the initial statement was a lie or the claim that it's false was. I don't know if everything I remember is just distorted somehow. I don't know what to do. (aside: gaslighting? I’m inclined to say “effectively, yes”. The best explanation I have is that for many things he rewrote the narrative in his own mind and does not remember the things that blatantly contradict it. For other things, I cannot see that being possible and am forced to think it’s just pure lies). All of this could have been prevented if I accounted for people being dishonest.

6. 

(a) I lose sympathy. Genuinely did not ever expect this to happen. Enough hurt, enough deception and I stop trying to understand why. I assume malice. I expect malice in future interactions and misread situations as a result. In the beginning I made fucktons of effort to be understanding of things far from my typical range (hello, admissions of past violence and present homicidal ideation. Hello, talking someone out of real intention of ruining a person's life over a minor slight). Honestly, I think I overreached. Some of these things were not things I should have tolerated, accepted even. When I started walking on eggshells to not have him ruin my life, too, that was probably when I should've gotten out. He claimed that the people he cares about are exceptions. That's probably true, otherwise I would currently be in a ton of shit. But at some point I did stop believing it.

(b) I don't really think that most of the things that happened were malicious. Some, he admits, were. But mostly he wasn't out with the intention to hurt me, but he also didn't make the effort...not to. Even with me repeatedly complaining about things, he was defensive or dismissive, considering me talking about an issue to be me creating issues in his life. This is super shitty, his damage is caused by a stubborn ego fixation and sheer passivity, thoughtlessness (he has agreed to all of this in our final conversation), but it isn't exactly intentionally malicious. If he genuinely didn't believe there was a problem, that is an issue, and the fact that he utterly failed until the end to even consider the possibility of a valid complaint, is a very real flaw. He is bad insofar as "he is lazy and incompetent at being good". Which I can understand but nevertheless protect myself from. Ideally, sooner. At the point where I start feeling like someone is being shitty more often than not, something needs to happen. A discussion, a reconsideration, a run-as-fast-as-you-can... Something.

Idk. This isn't everything. But yeah.

.

.

.

* These 3 PDs are often used in illustrating the idea of pathologising difference: few of the criteria are about subjective distress and many about extrinsic value judgements of what a person should be like (lol, my clinical psych final had an essay question on this). I don't necessarily agree but it does speak to a shared thread of...something. That said, this characterisation is tbh still too broad for my liking. Importantly, it is definitively applicable to autistic people but I do not in general relate to that in the same way. Some specific manifestations of it, yes, but I have seen far too many excessively... 'human' autistic people to include the whole category. There are probably folks in the PD categories who are also like that but I think much less common.

[carcosuh]

❀ *ﾟ lucy hale. female. she/her. ⇝ hey, isn’t that carcosa lusk? i think that the twenty-five year old from breaux bridge, louisiana works as a bartender, but outside of that they spend a lot of time at henderson. i hear they are self-critical + blunt, but they are also known to be independent + adaptable. consider giving them a visit at their home in desert oasis apartments and get to know why they’re called the phoenix. 

hey, sugar plums !! you can call me ari and i’m very excited to be here ! i can’t wait to read about all of your wonderful muses, as well as introduce you to my three precious hot messes. if you’re interested in plotting with carcosa, please feel free to hit that heart button or slide into my dms at any time !

just a quick heads up: carcosa’s intro is probably gonna be the longest because her backstory is the only one i’ve ever fully written out in great detail, so apologies in advance for the length !!

stats

full name: carcosa odette lusk

nicknames: cars, cosa

height: 5′0

occupation: bartender

relationship status: taken ( in a relationship with CYREK PALLAS-DEXICOS )

date of birth: december 29th

zodiac: capricorn

mbti: infj

ennegram: type one ( the reformer )

alignment: lawful neutral

temperament: melancholic 

positive traits: independent, wise, rational, focused, adaptable

negative traits: self-critical, anxious, blunt, stubborn, misguided

biography

tw for brief mentions of domestic abuse

carcosa was born to norma and marty lusk, a dysfunctional couple that knew more about ripping out each other’s throats than raising a kid. most said norma came out of the womb untamed and vicious; a love for drugs and a terrible temper some of her most memorable traits. marty was just as unpredictable and angry, a devoted member of a feared mc who always seemed to have more redeemable qualities than his wife. they had her young; only keeping her because “abortions were too damn expensive,” as norma would kindly put it. her parents had always been attracted to the outlaw lifestyle, never cut out for the role of law-abiding citizens. breaking the law was more fun than following it, and while marty at least gave some sort of half-assed attempt at cleaning his act up when their little bundle of joy came along, norma didn’t bother. poppin’ the kid out meant going back to business as usual, as far as she was concerned.

by the time carcosa was three, slamming doors and screeching tires were a routine in her home, as well as the occasional visit from law enforcement whenever her parents’ spats pissed off the neighbors. she grew up used to one parent or the other taking off for days at a time after their nastier bouts, always telling herself that they’d come back eventually. though she quickly found herself thankful for the days when it was her mother that had stormed off, realizing how much easier things were when she and her father were left to their own devices. she’d always ask her father why he and norma were still together if all they did was fight, her question always met with a chuckle and something about lawyers costing more than they were worth.

once carcosa hit five, temper tantrums became a common thing whenever it was her father’s turn to leave. she’d wail and sob, begging marty to stay, or at the very least, take her with him. norma despised this, hurt and furious that her own daughter would favor and cling to him. when carcosa spat her first “i hate you” at the age of thirteen, the insult was met with an empty beer bottle to the head, leaving her with a scar just above her right temple. a painful and bitter reminder to never speak those word again. marty took the child for a few days after flying into a rage, promising norma that he’d kill her if she ever touched his kid again. after that, marty did his best to keep carcosa close to him. he took her along wherever and whenever he could, giving her little glimpses into his life with the club. the young teen was fascinated by the rough and tough lifestyle, finding some sort of comfort amongst the leather and rumble of harleys. it was better than being home, and the days when marty left her behind always caused  a riff in their relationship, carcosa left to wrestle with the idea that even still, there were times where her father would pick the boys over her.

at sixteen, carcosa did everything in her power to ensure the fact that she’d be home as little as possible. if she wasn’t out and about or working, then she was with her father or burying her nose between the pages of a book. crime novels and mysteries were her only method of escape when she couldn’t leave the four walls of the lusk home, giving her some sort of solace from the constant battles. it was also at this age that carcosa began to find so much wrong with the life she’d once been so captivated by. she didn’t believe in that “white power” horseshit, didn’t have the same morals (or lack thereof) that some of the members seemed to carry. rolling with an mc was nothing like in her books or movies, but rather a slippery and dangerous slope. she still loved her father and the men he called his brothers, understood that in their line of work you did what you had to do. but by the time eighteen rolled around, carcosa had it sealed in her mind that she wanted better than the lives her parents lead – something that she could be proud of.

life took a turn for the worst at twenty-one. marty lusk had turned himself over to local law enforcement, confessing to several weapons charges, including the trafficking of firearms. carcosa shattered, knowing that the charges stacked against her father ( plus his prior convictions ) meant that it’d be quite some time before she could see him without a wall of glass separating them. she demanded to know why he’d do such a thing. why he’d just give himself up – why he’d leave her, though some small part of her already knew the reason. “i did it for the boys,” was his dignified answer. she was heartbroken and confused, wondering why he’d throw everything away for a god damn club. how could he protect them, but leave her in the dust? perhaps it was never meant that way, but the damage had already been done. just like that, her father had been ripped away from her, leaving her with a junkie for a mother and feeling as if once again, she was only second best when it came to the club.

it’s taken some time, but as of current day, carcosa’s mostly worked through her misplaced anger towards the mc. she forces down the twinge of bitterness, reminding herself that whether she likes it or not, they lost marty too. besides, who has time for resentment when you’re constantly chasing after and cleaning up the messes left behind by your addict of a mother? currently, carcosa works as a bartender in order to make ends meet. despite norma’s blatant disapproval ( and some of her own buried resentment ), she still finds the time to call and visit her father whenever the chance arises. she’d never have the heart to completely cut the old man off, their talks and his occasional words of wisdom sometimes being the only thing that keeps her sane. however, there are times when he asks his daughter for not so small favors pertaining to the club, his loyalty never faltering from behind bars. with reluctance, carcosa finds herself carrying out these deeds, if only to ensure her family stays in the mc’s good graces and marty remains protected while serving out his sentence. but each time she’s asked to get her hands dirty, carcosa runs the risk of ruining the better life she’s so desperately trying to build for herself.

bonus information

after marty’s incarceration, carcosa inherited his old beater of a pickup truck. she may or may not have to sit on something in order to see over the steering wheel, but it’s probably best not to mention it.

she LOVES mystery and true crime novels.

her favorite artist of all time is johnny cash. 

she originally wanted to major in criminal justice or forensic sciences, but with her unstable home life and the majority of the financial responsibilities falling onto her shoulders after her father’s arrest, dreams of community college eventually faded into the background.

i’m dumb and forgot to mention it in her bio, but carcosa and her family moved to nevada when she was twelve. they left the swamps of louisiana and headed for the deserts of nevada so that her father’s mc could build a new charter, with marty’s help of course.

wanted connections

literally any and all connections are welcome for this sweet baby ?? i’ll probably update this later with a few loose ideas on some connections i’d love for her to have, but if something specific popped into your head while reading that MONSTER of a bio, please don’t hesitate to shoot me a message !

[tanyaryanmusic]

To All the Buttholes I’ve Loved Before.

I’m so glad I had the opportunity to date so many buttholes. 

Buttholes are such an important part of the self-development process. They highlight all the areas in that we lack. If you have trouble drawing boundaries - no problem! A butthole will come a take advantage of you until you figure it out. 

You struggle with being a constant people-pleaser? You will eventually come across the forever un-pleaseable butthole. 

Doesn’t matter what the goal of your personal journey into self discovery; overcoming your issues with confrontation, temper, drama, perfectionism, your value and/or self worth. There’s a butthole for that. 

Of course I didn’t always see it this way. I went through a stretch of disliking, and in some cases, loathing these people for a period of time. I would relive and replay all the ways they had wronged me, hurt me or taken advantage of me. Then that got kind of boring so I decided to reflect on their impact. I was able to take away valuable and insightful lessons that helped me to understand myself and the world a little bit better. And even if in most cases I learned maybe a little too late, I still learned. 

I’m not sure who coined the term serial monogamist, but I think that would describe my dating habits as well as any. I have dated enough to fully emerge myself in the experiences of various nuances of men on the butthole spectrum: 

There was the one that was so sweet and sensitive but turned out that his ‘sensitivity’ was actually a stealthy form of manipulation, and for bonus points, he was also a low-key misogynist racist. NBD. Then there was the passive aggressive who wanted time, love and attention but could not request this directly so he used the silent treatment to get his way and to avoid conversations he didn’t want to have. Then the ‘I-can’t-live-without-you, you’re-my-whole-world’ one that slowly got me to do everything for him because he needed me and I was ‘always so much better at it’ than he was. That was actually super clever. Well done. 

And then there was that one guy that when we broke up he called my home phone number 28 times in the middle of the night. And my cell phone 16 times. (No exaggeration here people. I’ve never seen anything like it.) And he left voicemails and texts that rom-coms base their desperate post-breakup characters off of - calling the first time just sad… the second one was more desperate. Then it was fiercely angry with horrendous name-calling. Then apologetic. Then sad again. And so on. I am absolutely one to indulge in the occasional hyperbole, but this was legit what happened. I suspect there are some deeper issues there. 

Anyway. If you get the chance to reflect on these experiences in an objective manner, you get to pull out all the skillsets that they left you with. In many of my own experiences it came down to me learning to honour my value, draw boundaries, and have more self-respect. 

If you get really keen on being objective, reflective and learning; you can also take away how you, yourself were a butthole. I am fully aware of the level 10 butthole I have been in certain circumstances (none of which will be listed today, because I know you think I’m perfect and I would hate to disillusion you). I also see the miscommunications that happened, and how things sort of got muttled, and therefore people got hurt unnecessarily. But hey, we’re all a little tougher now with a better sense of humour. Right? Or perhaps, the less desirable outcome, in which we’re all a little more jaded with a bitter sense of humour. Either way.

Each of the experiences with these buttholes (and my being the occasional butthole) really helped me to identify the man I chose to marry. They created this metaphorical checklist that I was able to go through. 

Oh, you do that thing where you twist everything up and have no responsibility for anything? … nah. No thanks. 

Ah yes, I am familiar with this technique. This is the avoid-it-until-she-gives-up technique. Nope. Next!

Hm, I am noticing how defensive and mean I get around you. I don’t like this version of me. Peace mofo, I’m out.   

As awful as it sounds, there was a period of time when I was dating the man that became my husband that I was practically waiting for him to do something ignorant. But he just never really did… Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like he’s perfect. It’s more that he’s accountable. He has his moments, and he’s the first to tell me he’s sorry, or that it’s not my fault or that he just needs a bit of time to figure something out. If he’s been a bit insensitive or I have felt hurt, I tell him. He listens to me and he always apologizes. (And he doesn’t say dumb stuff like: “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Or “Calm down it was only two fries!”)

My husband respects the shit out of me. It kills me that his mother has passed away because I always want to thank her for whatever she did to make him the man he is today (I do regularly thank his dad), and I want to take notes so I can one day raise a human to be so considerate and kind. 

He cherishes me. He makes me feel important to him. I feel valued, trusted and loved. 

I once told him about my insanely unreasonable fear of getting locked out of the house. That day (THAT DAY) he went to Home Depot and changed the deadbolt out for a mechanical deadbolt so I didn’t have to worry about losing my key. I didn’t ask him to do that, he just did. ‘Cause he’s awesome. 

He always cleans the kitchen if I cook. And often will help me clean the kitchen if he’s cooked. He does the laundry, he plans dates, and buys my favourite snacks when I’m PMS-y.  He also buys me flowers every time he comes home from a long stint at work. 

But most importantly, I can be all the weirdest versions of myself. He supports me with my experimenting, pushing boundaries and trying new  things. I am allowed to feel all my feelings, and I feel truly safe knowing that he’s not threatened by my experiencing emotions. My favourite part of our relationship is that neither of us holds the other one to blame when we are sad, upset or hurt. Even if it was their doing… we don’t say “You hurt me” … it’s “I’m hurt.” 

I know that we’ve only been together for a short time but this isn’t the first time I’ve been in a relationship for 2 years, and this one is different. At this point in previous relationships I am usually acutely aware of things that are making me feel stifled and uncomfortable, and simultaneously naively optimistic that all that garbage will get sorted out - and then it doesn’t, and maybe it lasts a few months more until it inevitably comes to a strained end. I’m just really grateful to be this far in and there’s no garbage. There’s effort, communication, and the occasional disagreement. But it’s pretty mellow. And I love that.

There’s a Buddhist quote that discusses finding your person, I’m going to paraphrase it because I can’t remember it and Google was NO help. It says something along the lines of: when you meet your life-partner it won’t be all sweaty palms, heart pounding and fireworks, instead, it will be this noticeable sense of calm. AKA it won’t be this dramatic hot/cold soap opera. I think we base our expectations of love on movies, TV and storybooks - which is a distorted adaptation of reality. It’s not to say you won’t get butterflies or nervous - sometimes I still do with Brin! But mostly he makes me feel ease. And it was like that from day one. Easy.

There are many people with a long dating history of failed relationships that will tell you there aren’t many good ones left. They’re the first to tell me that I really lucked out with how awesome Brinley is. Don’t worry all, I am well aware that my husband is straight-up the tits. But I want to get across something I feel is very important. I truly feel that I was able to identify my husband as someone to spend my life with because I reflected and learned from my past relationships. I was willing to look myself in the face and acknowledge where I needed to adjust and shift for my own personal growth; and I was able to very distinctly know what I wanted in the human being that would become my life-partner. I became so clear on this that I had decided I would rather be alone and happy by myself, than to settle for a relationship that only filled me up part way. 

Before I met Brinley I made a list. A list of qualities and traits that were all inspired by the previous relationships that I had experienced. It was a pretty detailed list. When I completed my list, I read through it, and my first thought was: “Wow. If this person exists. He’s a pretty remarkable person.” It made me reflect. If I find this incredible person, then I ought to be the most incredible version of myself that I can be. I ought to be willing to return these same qualities. It’s not terribly fair to ask someone for this level of investment if you’re not willing to come to the table with similar value. So I started doing my best to develop in my own areas, asking myself harder questions: Are you ready for your person? Truly. The person that you know you want. The one that is going to treat you the way you deserve to be treated. Are you taking care of yourself? Are you comfortable being all of yourself? Are you responsible with your money? Are you brave enough to own your feelings and your mistakes? Are you able to stand up for yourself?  All of this inquiry gave me the motivation to invest in myself. To hold myself accountable to rise and expand on who I am. To acknowledge my value and observe my deficits with kindness and patience. 

So thank you, Buttholes. You were the reasons I was able to make that list. The reasons I knew exactly what I appreciated in a long-term relationship and the reasons I knew exactly what I didn’t need. You helped motivate me to step back and evaluate myself and acknowledge my various strengths and the I’m-working-on-them parts. You helped me to understand and appreciate what a truly incredible person Brinley is. Without the contrasting experiences of your Butthole-ism I may never have been able to fully appreciate the gift that my husband is. 

Thanks Buttholes. I only hope I was able to do the same for you. 

[lalainajanes]

96 & 81. I’m a new fan of your writing! Ugh I love klaroline so much

96 Scars + 81 The Missus and The Ex

She’s known Klaus forabout a year, has recently been out on three excellent dates with him, when shefinds out his deep dark secret.

She'd have beenpissed it but it’s too freaking hilarious for her to work up any righteousindignation.

One quick Google andCaroline gets why he’d kept his mouth shut. She’d made some questionablechoices at nineteen, ones she’s really glad aren’t immortalized on the internetforever.

Klaus Mikaelson, ubersnob about popular culture, prickly unless sufficiently motivated, and scornfulof vast swathes of humanity, had once starred on a reality TV show.

And not just anyreality TV show. He’d been on what had essentially been a Jersey Shore rip-off.Just set in a swanky London apartment and with fancy accents. It had onlylasted one season.

The partying anddrunken fights and hookups appear to be pretty much the same.

Klaus had sportedhighlights and worn baggy t-shirts and baseball caps and belted his pants toshow off his boxers. Teen!Caroline probably would have thought he was hot butpresent day Caroline has a plan to slip some cheap ribbed tanks and self-tannerinto Klaus’ birthday gifts.

His exasperated faceis super cute.

She’d taken thebombshell pretty well and Klaus had endured her giggling over old pictures (toa point but Caroline wasn’t going to complain about him kissing her as adistraction).

When she’d gottenhome it had been impossible to resist pulling out her laptop and looking forclips.

And when it turnedout the series was all online? Well, she’d ordered takeout and settled in for amarathon.

Six episodes in andshe’s kind of obsessed. The version of Klaus on her screen is fascinating. Shesees tiny glimmers of the man she knows but he also seems to be a bit of ajerk. He sneakily leaves little sketches of his roommates on their beds. Thenot so flattering ones cause some drama and the good ones end up pinned in thecommunal kitchen. He oozes cockiness and has a tendency to flex when he’sshirtless, sometimes walks in a way that could only be called a swagger.

He flirts shamelesslybut his interest in one of his housemates seems genuine. Unfortunately, she’salready in a relationship.

Caroline has amillion questions, starting with why in the world had he ever even auditioned,and she’s considering making a list.

Caroline (9:14 PM): I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were involved in AN ACTUAL LOVETRIANGLE!

Caroline (9:14 PM): I’m kinda jealous.

Caroline (9:15 PM): I’m think I’m rooting for Lucien though. Sorry. He’s just so freakinginto her.

Caroline (9:15 PM): Making out with Aurora’s visiting BFF was a dick move, btw.

Klaus (9:17 PM): Sadly, that was far from the worst of my poor decisions.

Caroline (9:18 PM): Oooh, ominous.

Caroline (9:18 PM): I’m excited.

Klaus (9:19 PM): I don’t suppose I could convince you to stop watching?

Caroline (9:20 PM): Are offering me sexual favours? ;)

Klaus (9:20 PM): Obviously.

Caroline (9:21 PM): Sorry, I’ve gotta pass. Something tells me you’re going to be pretty easy.

Caroline (9:22 PM): But don’t worry. I promise not to hold anything you did 9 years agoagainst you.

Klaus (9:23 PM): I appreciate that.

She starts up episodeseven. It opens the morning after Klaus’ attempt to make Aurora jealous, thecamera lingering on him in bed, very naked under a single crumpledsheet.

Is it pervy thatshe’s ogling him? Probably, since he’d been practically a baby.

Klaus is awakenedrudely by Aurora upending a large-ish bucket of water on him, he leaps from thebed, shouting slurred profanities.

Screw it, Carolinethinks, as she turns up the brightness on her screen and leans in, eyeing theareas where the wet sheet now clings. No one has to know about the ogling.

Aurora and BabyKlausengage in a fight that is loud and rambling and Caroline thanks whateverproduction grunt had been tasked with painstakingly subtitling it. Aurora triesto cite friend code, Klaus counters that she has a boyfriend so it really isn’ther business what (or whom) he does. He scoffs at her assertion that he’d beentrying to hurt her, smiling cruelly and informing Aurora that she’s just notthat important.

Caroline winces whenAurora bursts into tears. Klaus’ regret is plain but he storms away withoutapologizing.

She fast forwardsthrough some plot involving other housemates, pauses when she sees Klaus again.He’s at the club they seem to hang out at most, the kind with pumping music andflashing lights. Caroline assumes the venue had some kind of deal with theproducers. He’s slamming back shots, his mood less than festive, and Carolineassumes he’s about to do something dumb.

Approximately thirtyseconds later the camera captures him punching Lucien.

Angry drunk boys, sopredictable.

It’s chaos on herscreen, other people seem to pile on and the cameras are constantly jostled.Caroline can barely make out who is who. Aurora’s red hair is distinct, andshe’s in the corner of the frame, yelling, having climbed on the bar.

When things calm downKlaus is bleeding. His hand clutches his opposite arm and the sleeve of hisshirt saturated and dark red.

Caroline (9:45 PM): No fair. You totally have a way cooler how I got this scar story thanme.

Klaus (9:46 PM): So you’ve never needed a dozen stitches after a bar fight?

Caroline (9:47 PM): Nope. But I guess I’ve still got time.

Klaus (9:48 PM): It’s good to have goals.

She feels a littleanxious watching Klaus get loaded into an ambulance, seeing him in pain andstruggling to answer the EMTs questions. Silly, since he’s perfectly fine andjoking with her via text, only a few blocks away.

The episode ends withthe ambulance door closing, his roommates huddled together for warmth on thesidewalk watching it drive away.

Caroline checks thetime, debates moving on to another episode. She doesn’t actually have to go tobed for another hour so she could watch some more. She knows Klaus andAurora must hook up at some point - Caroline’s watched plenty of reality TV andKlaus’ show was less subtle than most.

She hasn’t feltjealous yet, doubts she will. She’d lose her shit if Klaus were to up and getweird about her high school boyfriends. They weren’t any of his business andCaroline’s not going to make a fuss just because she can see one of Klaus’ pastrelationships with her own two eyes thanks to the magic of technology.

Veering in a more romanticdirection with Klaus has been really good, and he’d made it clear it wassomething he’d wanted for a while. His past has no bearing on their present.

Besides, Carolinekind of likes Aurora, or at least the version the cameras capture. She’s a littledramatic, sucks at any and all forms of housework, but is at least willing tolaugh at herself. Plus, the poor girl’s family seems nuts - a phoneconversation with her parents had been icy and her brother had appearedonscreen only to lecture her about how unbecoming it was to associate withpeople beneath her and how Aurora was shaming the family.

Caroline doesn’t havesiblings but her knee jerk reaction had been a big fat yikes.

Plus, it’s not hardto see the behind the scenes manipulations. Aurora’s confessionals often havingher comparing and contrasting Klaus and Lucien, waffling about her feelings,and Caroline can easily envision the leading questions that she’d had to dealwith.

The results ofshoving young, attractive people together, forcing them to interact, andsupplying copious amounts of booze, are pretty predictable.

See: the bajillionvarieties of Real Housewives.

There’s no wayCaroline’s curiosity will survive not knowing how things end but she can wait abit. She shuts her laptop and stretches out the kinks in her back, grabbing herphone once more.

Caroline (9:56 PM): Do you want to get lunch tomorrow?

Klaus (9:57 PM): So you can interrogate me, I presume?

Caroline (9:58 PM): Yep. You don’t have to answer anything if you don’t want to though. I’mjust super fascinated by how that guy became, well, you.

Klaus (9:59 PM): Not sure how to take that, love.

Caroline (9:59 PM): I meant it in a good way. I like you. The you I know.

Caroline (10:00 PM): Past you seems kind of exhausting and I want to reach into my laptopand shake him sometimes.

Caroline (10:01 PM): Mostly because his commitment to hats is out of control.

Caroline (10:01 PM): Please tell me you got rid of those.

“Oh my god, I need tostop,” Caroline mutters. She closes her eyes, huffs out a laugh. Maybe sheshould have just gone to bed. She resists the urge to apologize for rambling.No need to call attention to it.

Klaus (10:02 PM): The only hats I own are functional, designed for warmth

Klaus (10:02 PM): I like the you that you are now too.

Klaus (10:03 PM): I can meet you at 1. Does that work for you?

She smiles down ather phone, taps out a quick affirmative. Retro trashy reality TV can wait,she’s got a fourth date outfit to put together.

[inopinion]

Date at the Docks

The Virals Series by Brenden Riechs and Kathy Reichs --- > needs more fanfiction, so I’m here to help.

Thanks to a tuna fish sandwich, I did not have to face down an entire evening of wedding planning. Kit had a simplistic desire to be married in a place of natural beauty, and so he proposed we drive out to Cape Romaine Wildlife Refuge. Whitney, of course, wanted something more traditional with a modern flair and thought Boone Hall Plantation and Gardens would be exactly the southern charm she needed. She’d made an appointment with their event planner, had planned a picnic, and packed the bug spray. Diner was to be al fresco at the end of a self-guided walk of the refuge. I was still in mildly hot water over my attendance record being mailed to his office rather than where I could intercept it. My grades hadn’t dipped more than a couple percent and so he was holding me hostage on principle. Plus he thought wedding planning as a family would be the exact start we needed in this new life of togetherness. Blargh.

But, like I said, thanks to a tuna fish sandwich and Hiram’s impossibly sensitive stomach, Mr. Blue had to wait at the dock for an additional twenty minutes. It was exactly the time I needed, as the text came just when Hiram staggered to the docks.

Can’t miss the appointment at the plantation. Feed yourself. No going out.

I texted back: Hiram should be here any minute, maybe five more?

He replied: Can’t. Late as it is.

Kit accepted most of my excuses on face value, it was one of the better aspects of our relationship, but showing some interest in the activities of Whitney’s designs got me bonus points, so the small white lie really hurt no one.

“Never again,” Hi groaned. We hadn’t even cleared the dock before he was over the edge.

Shelton and I shadowed the two middle-school kids that also lived on Morris to the front of the boat.

“So, what’s the plans for the weekend? Bank heist?” Shelton adjusted his glasses and kept one eye on Hiram’s folded form.

“Calculus. I haven’t started the assignment yet.”

“Oh, tisk tisk. It’s a killer. Took me all night last night to get through half. I’m gonna be hitting up the Call of Duty tonight though, little treat for keeping my nose clean for two weeks.”

“Have fun.”

“Yeah. But we’re going out tomorrow, right?” Shelton alluded to the pre-planned boating expedition to our favorite beach on loggerhead.

Even without my abilities, I felt like I needed to see Whisper and her pack. Like watching them would help me remember that connection. There was a good chance I’d come away upset or crying, but still, I needed to see them. “I assume so. I haven’t heard otherwise,” I shrugged.

Shelton raised an eyebrow. Ben was our ride, always, but he’d only managed to slip a few texts to Shelton on a friend’s phone in the last two weeks. His resilience through the class skipping wasn’t quite as high as mine and an emergency conference with his parents rendered him without a phone, without a car, and without a social life. It’s been a bit of a hard start for our relationship, as in a non-starter. It still stung a bit that every message seemed to go to Shelton, all three of them. I shouldn’t mope about it, but still, I was feeling more than uncertain about what exactly I should be expecting now that we’d assigned the labels of boyfriend and girlfriend to each other.

Another volley of overly loud vomit kept me in the here and now. I’d be at the docks in the morning, waiting to see what had changed from our last group ride out to Loggerhead. At least if it got weird, I’d have Coop and the wolf pack to keep me distracted.

Unfortunately, Friday nights had little in the way of televised entertainment. So while I attempted to procrastinate and put off the complexities of nested integrals, I made plenty of headway, enough to question if I had the right assignment. I even sent a confiramtion text to Shelton and got a positive response. But by seven o’clock, all my problems were done and what remained of my weekend assignments was seventy pages of reading for AP English. I turned my attention to The Age of Innocence and let the TV play in the background.

An hour, eight o’clock and I could imagine Kit and Whitney taking in the beauty of the refuge and I sort of wished I was there. Sort of, not really, okay I would love to see the refuge and I wouldn’t mind a little more time with Kit. Besides, the wedding was important to him and he was undeniably important to me. As my stomach growled, I could even admit I wished I had a little bit of Whitney’s picnic basket.

Lazily, I palmed my phone up off the table and gasped. It was still on silent from school which had meant I’d missed a message from Ben.

At my dad’s tonight, you around?

What did that mean? More importantly, in two weeks of radio silence, did I even want to come clamoring to his sudden beck and call? Shouldn’t I at least feign being angry? A glance at the time stamp - 7:12 - and at least I wouldn’t look desperate replying.

I wrote: Just finished some homework. What’s up?

What’s up? Yeah, that’s how you hook ‘em. I waited. Two minutes. Three. I turned on the notifications so I’d at least hear it and went to address my hunger in the kitchen. I made a sandwich, tossed a couple slices of meat to Coop and eyed the baking show on the TV with little interest. Still, no reply. What a start, maybe an ending. It hurt, not that I’d dare let it show, because what was there to hurt over?

Three fast raps on the door and butterflies swarmed my stomach and floated up into my throat. Was he skipping the electronic communications? Ben had cut off shorts and a trim, black t-shirt that looked slightly too small for his frame. It might have fit him in the spring or at Christmas, but he’d grown both taller and stronger in the time I’d known him. His hair was tucked back behind his ears and a slight pink coated his cheeks. Those long lashes saved him sweeping away those prickly thoughts I’d just been fostering.

“So, you wanna come out with me?” He fought the smile that threatened to crack his face.

“Yeah, sure. Where?”

“Just the dock,” he shrugged, then added, “Is that okay?”

Ben looked legitimately worried, like I wasn’t known to hang out on docks with moody boys and would be offend to partake. Coop rushed the door.

“Lead the way.”

His hand slipped out of his pocket and extended for mine. Would I ever get used to it? His elbow bent and pulled me into his side, which seemed like an expert move, had he used it on other girls? How many other girls? Why was I having dumb, over analyzing thoughts in the first place. I turned by attention to the feel of him: warm and solid; the smell of him: men’s sport deodorant and docks; and his body language: stiff, but not anxious. I took a deep breath of the salt air and shrugged my shoulders a few times to relax. It was Ben, just Ben. Just Ben-the-boyfriend doing the first boyfriend things… no sweat.

On the dock, he had one pole already cast into the water, another, presumably for me, sitting on the dock. Three buckets and a cooler. An already opened bottle of fancy root-beer was next to one bucket (his seat).

“So, what I miss? Felonies? Misdemeanors?” he asked, dropping my hand to take his seat and open the cooler.

He pulled out another bottle and dug his keys out of his pocket, digging deeper for his pocket knife. He used the bottle opener even though it was probably a twist off. But, sure, cool points, I guess.

“I’ve been on psuedo-house arrest, so not much. Wedding crap, homework, mostly. All-in-all, quiet. You?”

“Well, grounded. Redefining nothing.”

“How bad were the grades?”

“Three B’s. Nothing major. I’ve done worse at Bolton, but apparently the standards are different now that I’m at Wando.”

Ben lifted the second pole and offered it to me. I examine it and confirm it’s the same one from the last time we went fishing. The lure is the same shiny disk and feather combination. I lean over and look at his bucket. Nothing in it but water.

“We can toss them back. But I was hoping for dinner,” he smirks. “You remember how to cast?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Setting the feed, holding it with my finger I pulled the pole back and launched the line out beyond the dock into the deeper water. Ben’s lips were tight and his smirk never slipped. “What?”

“Nothing. You fish how ever you wanna.”

“What I do?” I insisted.

“Nothing. Just… I mean, fish like cover. Under the dock, by the boats, but you try the open water,” he waved his hand at his own line that dipped below his father’s ferry boat.

“Fine, I’ll reset it,” I started reeling it in. “Call it practice.”

“Sure, practice,” he sipped his soda and then got quiet. “Not the best first date, eh?”

I watched the lure under the gentle waves then pop through the surface. Was this a date? A first date? Did this count? It was after school, almost dark, no parents, no friends, he even brought refreshments. His hand curled into a fist on his knee, those Blue-moods coming to the surface. “It’s a very Ben first date.” I offered, kindly and with a smile. For good measure I pulled the pole back and released it, landing off the end of the dock.

“What’s a Tory-date? You know, for next time?”

“You have to ask?” I raise an eyebrow and glance at Sewee parked in it’s slip down the dock.

“Always wolves with you.”

“Use my predictability to your advantage,” a small nudge from my knee and he slid his bucket closer to me.

“How’s this supposed to go?” Ben asked, looking at the water, watching his line. We’re shoulder to shoulder like we have been on countless occasions, but I can’t recall ever having quite the same queasy feeling.

“I dunno. New to me.”

“I sorta didn’t think much past this.”

“Well, this is nice,” I declared, sipping from the soda in my hand. I see his on his knee, palm up, offering. His fingers are slightly chilled from the glass.

“So, why’d you text Shelton?”

His hand flinches in mine. “Only number I have memorized. Two-zero-zero-seven. Double-oh-seven. I had to borrow a phone from a friend. Only let me the once because he almost got it confiscated.”

“Oh. Okay.” More silence, the lapping waves, the bugs coming out for the night. Coop dashed through the grass and onto the dock, sticking his head into the space between Ben and I.

“Chaperons,” Ben groaned, pushing Coop away and getting licked for his effort.

“Oh, yeah, did you get rules?” I asked.

“Rules? About?”

“Me.”

“Oh, no, not specifically about you, just about girlfriends, but I don’t even know if my mom remembers it.”

“You’ve dated before?”

“Like middle-school, before Bolton. You?”

“Nope, not really, well, about the same, I guess,” I blushed at the memory of those make-out sessions behind Dunkin Donuts.

“So, rules?”

“Oh, Kit made sure we had the talk and everything. Apparently, seventeen-year-old boys are single minded. I think my existence sort of freaked him out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Kit was seventeen when—you know—I happened.”

“Oh. Right. Well, I mean, that’s not gonna happen like right away or anything.” Instant awkwardness. I created instant awkwardness.

“Look, it better to be upfront about things, right? Talk about them? Anyways, Kit says we can’t hang out alone at each other’s houses, curfew—strictly enforced—and he wants to know if we go places where we’re going and when we’ll be back.”

“Okay. Sure,” Ben nodded. “But this is okay, right?”

“Yep.”

Then Ben’s arm moved around my shoulder, a smooth movement that tickled my stomach back into butterflies. “And this is okay?”

“Mmm-hmm.” My breathing stepped up and the sweat kicked on. His face next to mine, his arm pulling on my knees, rotating me on the bucket so we faced each other, his right knee between mine. “This is okay?”

Dear God, Ben had moves. Good moves. Moves that melted me and made my skin pimple into goose bumps. I nodded. Leaning forward our lips touched just slightly, enough for his breath to puff onto my chin. Then the line jerked and his pole fell off it’s prop. Stretching low and fast like a cat, Ben gripped the pole before it fell off the deck. I laughed at his sprawl, his bucket rolling into the ocean and riding on the waves four feet below. He cursed and reeled, keeping the fish on the line and eying the bucket for drift. I reeled in my own pole and while he fought his fish into the dock, I used mine to hook the handle on the bucket and drag it over to the ladder.

“It can’t be that small,” Ben groaned, the silver fish coming up in a leap. “It fought like a monster.”

“Making fish stories?” Kit approached. Coop trotted up the dock to great him.

“Hey, Tory, it’s nine-thirty. You got until ten.”

“Yep, sure thing,” I chirped wondering exactly how much he’d seen. Thankfully, it was getting darker by the moment and maybe my flush would fade before Ben had the fish unhooked and back in the water. Kit lingered, like he wanted to burn my scarlet permanently into my skin.

Coop circled around me, watching Ben’s fish come up over the edge of the dock. It flipped and kicked it’s tail wildly, still fighting in the air. Ben grabbed it and balanced his pole against his side. He grinned while he examined his catch.

“What is it?” I asked more to pull me away from Kit who just wouldn’t disappear.

“Croaker,” he held it up, holding it by it’s mouth.

“Cute.”

“People usually say, ‘a beauty’ but I don’t think ‘cute’ is really a term for fish.”

“Maybe I wasn’t talking about the fish,” I grinned. Ben rolled his eyes and tucked his hair behind his ear. Definitely cute. “Well, mercy or no?”

Ben glanced at the bucket and then back to the fish. “It’s not my favorite,” he lied and tossed it back into the oceans.

He wiped his hands on his pants, glanced at the path up to the condos and found it vacant. “Before anything else gets in the way—” he took the two steps he needed and crushed his lips into mine. His lips were tight with an exhilarated smile and his hands firm in how they held me still. Maybe it would be an awkward transition, but having that first real kiss out of the way was a big start.

[cassandra-acton]

ONE-TIME THING:

I’ve been thinking about Cassie’s staff recently, so this happened! Meet some of them. Eric is going to be a gem of an NPC character, so keep an eye out for him in future self paras. Also mentions some other shenanigans, so enjoy that. 

Date: March 7th, 2018. Warnings: Shouty, sweary Welshman. tw: nerd mention.

“The man’s like a fucking balloon animal with moving parts and a face hole that makes occasional, meaningless noise.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

Enter Eric Vickery: the slightly sociopathic communications director that had stood loyally at her side since Election Day. There was no one in Parliament who had an even remotely comparable way with words (probably a good thing) and the fact that he sounded like he’d just drunkenly stumbled out of the Welsh Valleys made everything he said ten times more hilarious. The team had gotten lucky with him; especially when he made the bizarre decision to work with Cassie exclusively, instead of dividing his time between handfuls of London-based MPs like his counterparts typically did.

The man, edging into his late forties, liked to regularly remind her that she had potential, and she was sure he stuck around because he thought they’d be shooting for a ministerial position one day. Eric wanted a promotion, he would use her to get there, and she loved him for it.

“Leader of the Opposition,” Laura Monroe, her PA, mocked through a mouthful of pizza.

“Yeah, well, there’s a reason they’re only the opposition, and that reason is he’s a fucking cretin.”

It was a tradition that they had upheld every in-session Wednesday for almost two years. Cassie, Eric, Laura, and occasionally her Chief of Staff, Gary Hill, would gather in her office and make a night out of BBC Parliament’s repeat of Prime Minister’s Questions. They rock-paper-scissored who would be responsible for bringing the food, before showing up around midnight to settle in for two solid hours of soul-cleansing bitching. Of course, watching it back was constructive in other ways, but she wasn’t ashamed to admit that in a world where one had to hold back constantly, the bitching kept her sane.

“Why does he always look as if he’s about to choke on his own tongue?” Laura added.

Cassie scoffed, crossing her legs to get comfortable as she positioned herself in the middle of her desk. “Turn it up. I want to hear him trip over whichever bullshit line Karl Marx fed him this time.”

They’d massacred enough pizzas to feed a large family, and watched as her sister expertly dismembered every single critic from the opposing bench with an ease that Cassie could only admire. Elizabeth Acton was fucking good at her job; so much so that even Eric hadn’t a bad word to say about the way in which she conducted herself.

Suddenly, a knock at the door stole attention away from another one of Elizabeth’s ruthless comebacks. They’d barely heard it over the sound of the Conservative benches heckling the poor sod that had just been absolutely decimated on national television, but when the door swung open, Laura moved to mute the television momentarily.

“I—You said you wanted a transcript of the highlights from the last committee meeting as soon as I printed—“

It was James Gillespie, the poor, stuttering intern still afraid of breathing Eric’s oxygen.

“Beautiful. Leave the folder on the side, go the fuck home, and get some sleep. You look like you’re about to pass out, kid,” the Welshman ordered, words about as close to sympathetic as they ever came. Clearly, this registered in the young man, because he offered an uncharacteristic smile along with his usual silent and obedient nod.

Without another the word, the intern had disappeared as quickly as he’d entered.

Chewing on the end of her last slice of pizza, she shot a glare at her communications director. “Will you please be nice to the intern? I like James. It’d be rather nice if James stuck around. James is a good egg.”

“Oh, you do?” Eric enthused sarcastically. “Well then you’ll be disappointed to hear that he’s not Labour, so please avoid trying to fuck him.”

In a split second, her glare switched from playful to murderous. Eric took issue with how much time she spent working with Adam Hassan, and he made absolutely no secret of it.

“Nice.”

“Nice? Do you know how difficult you make my job?”

“I didn’t fuck Adam,” she informed, annoyed.

In that moment, she swore she could see his eye twitch. It wasn’t a lie. The initial ‘date’ he was having a mental breakdown over was so tame, it ended with a kiss on the cheek and slight confusion on her part as to whether she’d misread his signs entirely. Cassie felt stupid even thinking about it. She wished to God he hadn’t brought it up so she could avoid the internal cringing.

“You didn’t fuck Adam yet.” Eric corrected. “Not that he needs you to. The press is already on its hands and knees sucking Beautiful Perfect Angel Boy’s dick. You realize this is going to be a bigger pile of shit for me to clear up than you, Silas and your Roman fucking rendezvous?”

Okay, that she could understand him being upset about.

The press had picked up on it quickly and threatened with a God damn field day, but he had deftly stopped them in their tracks, like the genius he was, before the story gained momentum. If only he knew. Cassie felt a pang of guilt, and not the type that one might’ve expected. None of it was for Alice, and all of it was for the communications director she really did push to his limit.

“Thanks for smoothing that over, by the way. You are also a good egg.”

“No, I’m a miraculous egg, Cassie. I’m a miraculous fucking egg. Alice’s little fan club wanted your head on a spike and for a minute there, I debated how giving it to them would look on my resume.”

“You wouldn’t do that to me…”

There was an awkward pause. Cassie’s usually disarming smile had little effect.

Eric sighed out through his nose, and suddenly, all of the dismissive humour he was so famous for was gone. “Did you sleep with Silas?”

The seriousness of his tone was so unfamiliar, it stunned her into silence. Laura cleared her throat—in all honesty, Cassie had forgotten she was there for a second—before politely excusing herself as though she thought it wasn’t her business to be a part of this conversation. Eric probably agreed, because he waited until after she’d shut the door behind her to repeat himself.

“Look, you don’t need me to tell you that it’s a bad fucking idea, but if you screwed him, I need to know about it. God forbid this ever fucking surfaces, Cass, but if it does, I need to know the facts. I have to be equipped to deal with it.”

Even though she was sure her expression said everything he needed to hear, he waited.

The night in question had been repeating on her mind solidly since it had happened; mostly, because she didn’t even know how she felt about it. The only thing she knew for sure was that she certainly harboured no guilt. Yes, Silas was married, but he was married to fucking Satan. It was something to do. It was company. It was stupid.

Things between them hadn’t changed. They’d had sex, but they were adults and it was fine.

“It was just once,” she conceded, barely managing the words as she held up her hands in genuine surrender for fear of him biting her head off. “It’s not going to happen again. I made a mistake, okay? It was just a one-time thing.”

The man looked as though his brain had partially melted. Believing it already was one thing, but hearing it firsthand?

“Well, I guess that explains the eye fucking then!” Eric bellowed, gesturing both hands toward the still muted TV wildly. “What happened to doing us all the courtesy of pretending you fucking hate each other, huh? If you’re going to sleep with him, at least spare us the pining looks across the backbenches, Cassie, because I’m just a man. I like my food. I’d rather not lose it.” Sighing, he pressed his fingertips to his forehead, letting out an inhuman groan. “There’ll be gifs of that shit.”

Cassie froze, once again lost for words. What was she supposed to say? How was she supposed to defend herself?

“Eric, come on…”

“One-time thing,” he warned, sitting bolt upright and pointing at her. By this point, she’d noted his expression had made an uncomfortable diversion from its earlier anger. He looked…disappointed. Concerned. “You don’t fuck your career up for a married man, so you fucking promise me now that this is a one-time thing, otherwise I’ll rip his God damn dick off myself.”

Promise? What were they, ten? “Don’t you think you’re being a little overdramatic?”

Even she didn’t think that. In fact, she was cursing herself for saying it almost as soon as the words left her dumb mouth.

“He’s fucking married, Cassie!”                                      

“Okay, okay! Can you maybe stop shouting ‘he’s married’?!” The blonde whispered, eyebrows pulling together in an angry frown. “I feel like that might get some fucking attention, don’t you?”

There was a lengthy pause in which both parties attempted to calm themselves. Neither of them seemed to manage it particularly well.

“One-time thing.”

“All right, Eric,” Cassie relented with a sigh. It was hard to tell whether she meant the words, or whether she was just desperate to appease him, but she coughed them up all the same. “I promise.”

[sxmethingbreaking-a]

//I’ve decided I’m going to tell you all a story. It’s a story about racism, change, and having the space to grow. It’s also about me. I’m telling you this not to self-flagellate or incriminate myself in anyway, but as a lesson to other white people in particular.

When I was 16, I was obsessed with Japan- and it was 100% for the shitty weeaboo reason. I loved anime. My friends and I romanticized the culture but didn’t know jack shit about it. It was ridiculous. Well, my mother, being well-intentioned but uninformed, bought me a kimono. A real one. It’s still in the closet of my parents house. 

You might know where this is going. Yes, when I was 16, I dressed as geisha for Halloween wearing an actual Japanese-made kimono. At age 25, I realize how inappropriate that was.

But at 16? Of course I didn’t know any better. And how could I? The resources weren’t there. I was completely ignorant- nowadays it’s easy to say “oh just google why what you’re doing is shitty.” But that wasn’t even a thing to me then. (I mean, google was.) But how do you know what to google when no one’s even informing you that there’s anything at all to google? A 16 year old does not have the foresight to think “oh hey, what I’m doing might be hurtful.” No, I was a teenager and I wanted to wear the pretty kimono. That was it. That was the extent of my thought process. 

I was a color-blind sort back then. I didn’t like black history month because I thought it was unfair that only black students could win certain prizes for participating in school sponsored events, yet I was always horrified at learning about slavery and segregation. I claimed not to see color, that my POC friends were just “my friends,” but I still had the good sense to be really uncomfortable with obvious racial slurs.

In short, I made every mistake that white people make.

My point is, there are now thousands of people the same age as I was then, outright crucifying each other for making mistakes like that. What I did at that age was undoubtedly harmful, racist, and offensive. But I was so ignorant I didn’t even know I was ignorant. That’s not an excuse for the action, exactly. But had I been called out on it in the way people call each other out on this website- with aggression, name-calling, and this witch hunt atmosphere which degrades someone as problematic and therefore irredeemable- my god, I’d have been devastated. 

And do you know what I would have learned from that? Absolutely nothing.

Luckily, what actually happened was, I grew up. I went to college, I became surrounded by educated people. I took classes that emphasized diversity, I learned from seminars and professors about the more insidious, unconscious forms of racism. I learned about the damages of things like microaggressions and cultural appropriation. There were some amazing POC I knew who were so dedicated to educating others, and did so sometimes with anger, and sometimes with a more gentle tone. Both were effective in their own ways, but mostly because if someone grew angry with me for making a mistake, it was between us. 

I would have never have been open to change had I been crucified on tumblr by a community of other white people with guilty consciences coming at me with pitchforks. I’d have never learned anything if the only education I’d had was shitty vagueblogging about me saying something dumb (which I’ve definitely done.) Bullying people into submission does not promote allyship, nor does it incite real change in someone’s heart. It just scares them into thinking they can’t step a toe out of line without severe, and definitely unjustified, consequences. 

This is largely not directed towards POC. The last thing I want to do is tone-police, or tell POC their anger and hurt is unjustified. Neither is it your job to educate the misinformed. Of course it’s not. But what I will say is- check your behavior. Because the way tumblr culture- especially the white SJW culture- often handles these things? Is neither appropriate, helpful, or at all healthy. 

From one shitty white person to the next- calm the fuck down. 

[isaidn-blog]

ISAIAH MAXWELL Q & A

do you feel alright with the job position you have right now on the team? if not, what job would you rather have? 

“well, i actually quite like my job if you can believe it...” isaiah trailed off, his eyebrows coming together for a moment. he knew that’s not all they wanted to hear but he wasn’t so eloquent with his words when it comes to more serious questions like these. he mostly had to respond to questions about rivalries or how he plans to win a game and those are always the same and he sure as hell never had to go in depth with this. he could laugh it off and move on. he came up with a response and isaiah looked back up to the camera to look at the other. a smile graced his lips and he continued with his response. “i get to work with my best friend and voice my opinion all the time i guess. and it’s neat- really. you don’t have some jackass thinking he can bullshit some research, eli really makes the stories interesting and keeps me not actually wanting to rip my ears off. i know it’s fake, but something about the way he says it makes the job fun i guess.”

have you ever felt intimidated to talk to any of the original team members? why or why not?

"no of course not, that’d be silly. that’s like being intimidated by, like, a stuffed bear or a ghost or something like that... they’re just regular people who have been dumb enough to stay for as long as they did.” isaiah began to laugh for after, he couldn’t help to find it funny. if anything, he’d assume they’d be the ones intimidated since he had such a clear stance and opinion on them since the start. he told them up front he thought they shouldn’t have continued to do this and that it’s their fault blair anyone got hurt. it’s been tense with them but isaiah has never felt oddness or anything with them. of course, he’s also never felt the need to go and talk to them for anything, but it’s not intimidation. it’s just he hasn’t felt any friendliness between them at all really. they don’t mix well.

if another silverwood were to happen this time around, do you think you’d be able to handle it?

isaiah’s face fell for a moment before shrugging it off. for some reason that question hit hard. it was like it was loaded and meant to get some sort of answer. he couldn’t come up with anything clever for that, it was a bad event and he knew it. "no. there’s nothing to really say- i mean. what is there to say? the original crew hardly made it out of there alive, i would have not been able to handle that. if i was in that exact situation, i’d need julian there and have him figure out a way out. and even then, i don’t know what the outcome would even be.” the jock gazed his eyes down to avoid eye contact and to show the end of his answer. he had nothing more to say or add and he really wanted to get back to not this. he hadn’t thought this was going to be a topic when he agreed to this. he expected lighthearted questions or something he could breeze though. not this.

to continue with the previous question, would you go back to paranormal investigating if you had gone through something as traumatic?

he knew he hadn’t wanted to look back up when the other finished the question. his eyes remained fixed on a stain he found on the rug he’d bought for his dorm. that must be fresh because he couldn’t remember making that. he stared off in silence for a moment before giving off a shrug, something to ease some of his own eerie feelings as well as to make it seem like he wasn’t feeling so off about the topic. he tried formulating the vaguest thing he could come up with and began putting it to words. “i don’t know. sometimes you believe too strongly in a topic and it clouds the flight reflex or something. you trust liars and you do dangerous things. right? that’s a thing, i think.” isaiah started mumbling inaudible words trying to justify his response. that was not what he had in mind when he wanted to reply. he was thinking something simple like ‘i don’t know, probably not’ but he just gave off something he wasn’t meaning to and for some reason. he thought it worked though because, after a moment, the interviewer had begun their next question and he didn’t have to explain what trash that response was to them. he silently thanked god as he straightened up his sleeves to give himself something to do other than look up again.

do you believe original member cristian ramos was behind everything that happened to his friends?

isaiah seemed angry for a moment but his face returned to an emotionless relaxed one. trying to hide the fact that he was annoyed with the event and with the whole situation cristian hadn’t helped. "no, but he did pull a cowardly lion act and what happened could have been avoided if he hadn’t.” there was a moment and isaiah looked up at the screen again. he gave a long sigh before adding more to his answer. “i mean none of my business, not my side of the job. just an observation- the short answer is just no. i don’t think cristian caused this. that’s all.” why did he back out of what he had said? it wasn’t like he didn’t mean it. maybe it’s because he saw how freaked he seemed when isaiah had brought it up in the past. he was mad at the dude, sure. it was a given. but something about his face made him feel a slight tinge of sypathy for him. isaiah has had plenty of those days where he was so scared or upset that he bolted and wasn’t there from his team and while he felt bad, he wasn’t like that after. he didn’t make a big deal or anything, he moved past it and defended himself. just the poor kid. his face began to soften up some, regretting his first words. he wouldn’t be feeling any guilt if cristian hadn’t acted the way he did to isaiah. it’s annoying, really. but it was what it was and it will be forever exactly how it was until they do sit down and talk about it fully.

after watching the #patientsproject film, did you think it was fake? or that it wasn’t the spirits of the town?

"i think there were a lot of bad people there and it had nothing to do with so-called ghosts or anything that has to do with the paranormal. you can’t really claim it was something fake, you know? something happened but they were explainable things.” these questions weren’t getting any better, but at least this one allowed for isaiah to take a breath and relax for a moment. he shook his head and he calmed himself so that he could be relaxed. this was an interview and it was going online, he may as well try to be composed for as long as he was doing this. he didn’t want another roomates gone wrong video. he had to think before he spoke, but he also had to act like him. if there was any way or if it made any sense. did it make sense? he didn’t know. his hands came down to his lap where he began to clasp them together, something he did often when he was thinking, and he continued to look at the screen with the kindest look he could muster. “that’s really it, it was real, but the spirit theory is busted.”

one of the serial killers that attacked the group was able to escape. what would you do if he/she came back to try to harm the group again?

"what?” isaiah’s mouth dropped open for a moment to give him self time to process. he hadn’t heard the news yet and it was something he didn’t expect to hear. he brought his hand up to close his mouth and shook his head a few times. “well, i’d call the cops. is that a question? ah- i don’t know. i’m moving back home, wherever that is. i’ll call it a night, hang my hat. you know. make sure people i know are okay.”

what was your reaction to being accepted into the mysterybusters?

"a very interesting question compared to your last-” the male paused, how could he recover from the fact he just found out a serial killer could be out to get him and some of his friends or family. he coughed, trying to avoid the odd feeling just in the back of his mind. he forced on a smile and continued. “but, i wasn’t estatic. i kind of just was like ‘hey, that’s cool.’ and moved on with my day. being a driver originally was a bit weird when i applied for being something closer to the scenes, but i think i liked it a lot better.”

overall, how do you feel being in the group and investigating the supernatural?

"that it’s partially a waste of time, but i could see it being fun. we have halloween around the corner and maybe i’ll actually get a good scare.” isaiah said goodbye and logged out of the app they were using to communicate. that was interesting to say the least, not the best thing he’s done but it was something. he began to stand, making his way over to his closet to grab his varsity jacket and beanie before heading out the door. he actually had a sort of “study session” with ashley to go on and pretend that he wasn’t still bothered by what conversations he just had. it was easy to mask things with her, but she was smarter than she’d ever let on. she sometimes knew when he was stressed when even his coach or his other friends couldn’t tell and it was always a surprise to him that she did. still, it wasn’t going to be too hard. he put on a smile and headed out the door. for some reason, as he left the dorm, his computer light was still on; red, blinking, and somehow watching.

[semicolonthefifth]

I’m so angry, or, The Emoji Movie review/rant

You know I’ve seen a lot of comparison between “The Emoji Movie” and similar films such as “Wreck-it Ralph” and “The Lego Movie”. Mostly it’s a justified criticism of how “The Emoji Movie” has taken story bits from those two films, but I believe there’s something to learn from why those two films are considered beloved, but this one is so disliked (and with good reason). While these two films are, at their core, meant to tie into a product (“The Lego Movie” with Legos, and “Wreck-it Ralph” with video games), they are about a subject that holds a great deal of cultural significance. Legos is easy to see, it’s a toy that has passed down through several generations and has changed very little except for tie-ins to other products. Video games, while a relatively more recent creation and one that’s suited to a more specific audience, it has built enough of its own culture that holds a specific but nevertheless recognizable form of humor. These two films are about products that have a culture of their own, and these movies were careful in how they used them when integrating them into their own stories. “The Emoji movie”, on the other hand, is about a product that’s not only very new, but has very little to any culture behind it. This is especially true with the product tie-ins the film brings in (but I’ll get to that later). At best an emoji is a tool for communication, but for the most it’s just something that we add into messages or texts with very little thought to it; an emoji is specific to certain apps or phone products, and is almost always added in automatically as a substitute to an emoticon (whether or not the user notices). There isn’t any cultural significance to emojis. Video games are a part of several childhoods and have grown to be around even in adulthood; they have connections to their own language, events, and history that raise it beyond than just a product. Legos have an even greater cultural foothold, and is always tied to a sense of creativity and even artistry. Meanwhile an Emoji has no history, and its language is mostly just a shortening of existing language and nothing more. The only time an emoji holds any significance is if whether an important message is using it, or if there’s a movement to add or remove one from service. In short: “The Emoji Movie” is about a shallow, insignificant product that only the misguided sort of people take seriously. Also the movie sucks. SUMMARY: “The Emoji movie” is about an emoji named Gene, who is a meh. With the push from his parents, Gene is sent on his first day to be used as an emoji for a user names Alex, who has a crush on a girl but is unsure of what to say to get his feelings across. Gene is rather nervous, as he not only has a difficult time sticking to a meh face, but keeps shifting to other forms of expression, while all the other emojis stick to their own singular expressions. Things turn for the worse when Gene accidentally pulls the wrong expression during a scan, and causes terrible damage upon the station and brought humilation to Alex. Seeing Gene as a malfunction, Smiler (the Smiley emoji) decides to have Gene deleted so that he doesn’t cause further damage. With the help of a Hi-5 emoji, Gene escapes the app and ventures out into the phone to find a hacker that could help repogram him into the meg emoji he’s meant to be. However he has to hurry, as their adventure through several apps causes further embarrassment for their user, who is ready to take the phone into a shop for it to be wiped clean. Gene, Hi-5, and Jailbreaker must travel across the phone, dodging anti-virus bots sent by Smiler while also running the countdown to complete and total deletion. ANIMATION and VOICE ACTING and SOUND: Let’s get the positives out already. The animation is good. It is colorful, fast-paced, expressive and most certainly of high quality. I will be fair in saying that the animation is certainly no issue on this movie’s part, and that the animators have done a great job in giving these characters great expressive faces. However, I think that it would’ve been a smarter move had they shot the scenes outside the phone as a live action portion. Having animation transition to animation felt like a misstep, as both the phone world and the “real” world are similar in their movement and style. Voice acting is good too, but that’s sort of expected. Every actor does a good job in putting words to screen and getting those words to match to their characters’ lip movements. It’s clear and I can certainly understand every word of it. Sound is good too, as well as the music. I can hear it all perfectly fine, and it all comes in the right moments where it needs to. Everything you’d expect to work in any competent film does indeed work. In a technical sense, this film is good. “STORY”: I have some complaints. The story is an overly done adventure about someone who doesn’t belong to society and learns in the end that they should be themselves. It’s extremely predictable, right down to ending where Gene’s uniqueness is what actually saves the phone. It’s also predictable in that it follows the same story beats like “Wreck-it Ralph”. The main character is someone who doesn’t feel like they belong and is outed by the world they came from. They leave their app in search of self-improvement, only to come across a rebellious girl character that is outside the system and is willing to help the main character because they have something to earn from their mutual partnership. It turns out that despite being a rogue, the girl character is a princess that has been lost for a long time, and the ending is about a near total destruction event that the main character stops by sacrificing himself while also understanding that he should be fine with who he is. You could guess where the movie is going and be 100% correct as the scenes pass. You’ll know who the villains are before they turn, and you’ll know how the characters develop. At no point does it feel that the movie is taking a new turn (aside from the Emoji/phone app aspects), and it certainly borrows a lot from the movies I’ve mentioned. Worse than the story is the humor, which is mostly grown-inducing in its delivery. A lot of the time a joke is used to death, either that or is extremely predictable. If you’ve seen one “hilarious” emoji combination or joke, you’ll have seen them all, and like the plot you’ll easily call nearly every joke that comes. I chuckled once at a joke (immediately felt ashamed for doing so) and never did afterwords. The biggest problem is that this movie takes the idea of Emojis too seriously (as in at all). It treats emojis as this great form of communication that everyone uses and can make or break a relationship if used improperly. Written texts are old school in this movie’s world, which is ironic because in the film they show a deleted love message that, while cheesy, says far more than what a single emoji ever could in describing one’s feelings. It also tries to force a small but brief message about female empowerment by making a point about how women can only be a certain emoji before an update added some roles. In another movie (or literally any movie) a similar message can work (and has worked), however for this movie it’s tacked on and only adds further to the blatant “Wreck-it Ralph” influence. This film tries to be smart or progressive, when ironically the film would probably have worked better if it was dumb and didn’t take itself seriously at all. And let’s talk about the app tie-ins, or better yet product placement. The apps they visit are obviously a way to showcase products like “Candy Crush”, “Just Dance” and “Twitter”, and each one feels obnoxious and embarrassing. It’s not like “Wreck-it Ralph” where a specific game has a lot of history behind it, but rather that it’s just showing a product, maybe making a joke about it, and then passing on to the next product. General internet humor could be funny, but they pass by quickly and are relayed to the background for more popular (and branded) subject matter. When they go through Instagram, it’s meant to show how cool Instagram is; when they go through Youtube, it’s to show that cat videos exist. These aren’t jokes on what these products mean to us or the culture they wield (which all but youtube has), but instead to show that they exist. Worse yet, these product placements are, for the most part, integral parts to the movie’s story. They’re not just things we see in the background or for a moment, they are important settings and acts that change and direct the plot where it needs to. The destination is literally Drop-box, the place where the characters are trying to escape to and solve all their problems. It’s dumb. I’m honestly sad that I have to reduce my criticism to “it’s dumb”. Throughout the film I can’t escape how much I see this movie as a massive product placement. Not only for the product tie-ins, but for something as idiotic and shallow as an emoji. I’m almost ashamed at myself at whatever prompted the writers or studio execs to think that people find emojis to be important. Maybe it’s all the dumb movements I mentioned at the beginning that think removing or adding emojis is such an important thing to care. Maybe it’s the over-use, or (as the movie itself put it) this idiotic idea that emojis are a replacement for actual speech. Whatever is the case, at the end of the day it isn’t important, no matter how much the film tries to make it. This film insults me by its sheer existence. CONLUSION: “The Emoji Movie” was a dumb idea made into reality, and I’m dumbfounded by how much TJ. Miller tried to prop this movie up as being a “progressive film”. If you can’t tell, I’m genuinely angry from this movie. However, I can’t say it’s a bad movie. It’s not the worst movie. At the end of the day, it is a very bland, predictable product. But… What makes it a bad movie is not only the subject matter, but how much importance it takes in of itself. It’s incredibly shallow, and is blatant in how much it acts as a product placement. That, to me, is what makes it a bad movie. If it were literally about anything else, it would be a forgettable movie. Don’t see it, not even as a joke. Don’t give your money, or else you’ll have made room for an Emoji Movie 2. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to await the next Sony animation bomb: A movie about Jesus’ birth, from the point of view of talking animals starring Tyler Perry!        

[adventure-hearts]

analysing the tri.angle

Remember when people thougt we were getting a “love triangle” in Chapter 4? Well, that didn’t last long. What we did get, though, is far more interesting.

@skuag​ asked me to write about the parallels between Soushitsu and Episode 26 of Digimon Adventure, and so here’s a brief analysis of the Taichi/Sora/Yamato scenes in both of them. Beware of tri. spoilers.

Considering how every moment in tri. or takes us back to Adventure and 02, it’s hardly surprising that a Chapter focusing on Sora should have strong parallels to Sora-centric episodes from the original series, like Episode 26. In fact, both episodes focus on Sora going through a deep emotional crisis, and both include in a new Piyomon evolution. 

However, most crucially for many fans, tri. Chapter 4 also happens to mirror a very famous scene from Episode 26 — which happens one of the most famous moments in Taiorato history. The basic framework is the same: Sora is upset, and Taichi and Yamato try to comfort her, each in his own way. 

Let’s look at the similarities and differences between the scenes in Adventure and tri.

In Episode 26, Sora has an emotional crisis about her mum’s love and her Crest. Taichi and Yamato approach this in radically different ways. Here’s an example:

Taichi: “I don’t unerstand this at all! Man, girls are so much trouble!

Yamato: “Don’t make fun of her, Taichi.”

Taichi: I’m just kidding!

Later, Sora explains what’s going on and breaks down in tears.

Taichi: Hey, don’t cry! H-hey, Yamato… What should I do?

Yamato: If she wants to cry, then let her.

In short, Taichi doesn’t really understand why Sora’s so upset about this, but still tries to convince her PicoDevimon is lying and to cheer her up; on the other hand, Yamato just tells him to let her cry. This makes Agumon and Gabumon point out comment how mature he is (well… in comparison to Taichi). The basic idea is that Yamato is more emotionally attuned than Taichi.

Fans of Taichi/Sora and Yamato/Sora have longed used this scene to show why their favourite ship works better and/or to disprove the other ship. Indeed, the two boys react to Sora’s tears in opposite ways, so it makes sense that many people look at the scene and decide that this shows which of the boys "gets” Sora best — and, ultimately, which couple would be more compatible, romantically. 

Of course, the scene takes place between three 5th graders, so it’s hard to see it as an indication of romantic feelings of any kind. From my (admittedly biased) perspective, the scene mainly serves to indicate the differences between Taichi and Yamato, and to illustrate the different dynamic between each of them and an emotionally complex Sora.  For instance, a Taichi/Sora fan may find Yamato’s aloofness too cold, while a Yamato/Sora fan may read the exact same reaction as proof that he understands her on a deeper level. 

There are many possible, valid readings of this scene — enough to support your own opinions about the Taiorato “triangle”.

In Soushitsu, though, the circumstances are slightly more complicated. 

Now, Taichi, Sora, and Yamato are teenagers, with all the emotional and psychological transformations this implies. They now know each other inside and out. Sora and Yamato may or may not have a bit of a romantic past (at any rate, they’re closer here than in Episode 26: she’s dropped the -kun!). Taichi and Yamato are currently undergoing a bit of a rough patch in their own relationship. 

Even Sora’s reasons to be upset are slightly more reasonable than being angry at her Mum — Piyomon, the one person who puts Sora first, is directly telling her to leave her alone. No room for misunderstandings here. Meanwhile, everyone else is happily reconecting with their partners and blithely ignoring Sora’s suffering.

So, when Sora leaves the group and sits by the water looking gloomy, she has every reason to be sad.

Miraculously enough, Taichi and Yamato notice this, and decide to tackle the problem as a team. Their first approach is a complete failure. Yamato breaks the ice and asks Sora what’s wrong, and she coldly deflects. Since Yamato’s repertoire is probably exhausted at this point, he urges Taichi to try... but he only blurts out something about food. Yamato face palms. Taichi sighs and tries a more gentler approach to ask whats wrong… Sora just says they’re stupid.

Now, you can’t blame Sora for this. Taichi and Yamato are being obtuse as hell for not realising there is something wrong with Piyomon. But hey, to their credit, at least they noticed something — the other kids are fast asleep and don’t seem too bothered that she’s is going through a crisis. Nice friends you got there, Sora!

Which brings us to the second scene. Yeah, Sora is really upset about Piyomon giving her the cold shoulder (wing?). But she’s also upset that no one else seems to notice that this is happening. Everyone was apparently too busy to care about Sora’s issues — even Taichi and Yamato.

Sora: “You two sure can’t read the situation. You guys have bad timing and always fighting. Everyone only thinks about themselves!”

(I can’t help but to feel that this “everyone” is a little jab at the other five, as well. But it’s mostly about these two.)

Essentially, Taichi and Yamato’s attempts to comfort her utterly fail because they really are being selfish and unable to grasp the elephant in the room. Sora interprets this as them not really caring about her and her feelings. Because, if they did, wouldn’t they have gotten what’s really going on between her and Piyomon?

So, Sora is angry, she doesn’t communicate, and both boys are completely lost. And the main difference lies there.

Unlike Episode 26, Sora doesn’t say what’s bothering her. Taichi and Yamato can’t read her mind or the situation, so how can they provide reassurance? Taichi still can’t handle these situations well, but he can’t refute the reasons why she’s sad because he doesn’t know what they are. And Yamato can’t say “let her cry” because… well, now he doesn’t know what she’s crying about, does he? This time, crying may not be as cathartic as it was then. The same approaches may not apply here.

Mind you, the differences Taichi and Yamato’s personalities are still pretty clear — Taichi is more blunt and positive, Yamato is more emphatic but has trouble expressing feelings. And they’re both imperfect idiots.

But they’re all stuck in a rut — because Sora doesn’t come clean and explain, and Taichi and Yamato are totally lost. At this point, asking Takeru for help doesn’t seem a bad idea. Remember, in episode it was Takeru who knew the right thing to say, and he was the one who made Sora feel better. 

Similarly, in tri., Takeru is clearly better at expressing emotions than his brother. Heck, maybe Takeru is simply more sensitive and better at handling women people. Maybe Sora kinda needed to hear “I really like you” at that point? But alas, plot gets in the way and nothing gets solved until much later.

The third Taiorato scene in Soushitsu illustrates the crucial difference between these two stories. In tri., Sora gets over her crisis on her own. She doesn’t confess to Taichi and Yamato, and so they don’t help her get over it.

So, when Taichi and Yamato apologise for upsetting her (lbr, at this point they probably still have no idea what’s wrong or what they’re apologising for) … Sora can truthfully say everything’s fine — because now she is fine.

In my opinion, it’s actually a pretty brilliant conclusion because hey, yeah, these two are kinda dumb, but at the same time Sora understands that they do care about her. At least they tried. Anyway, now her problems with Pyokomon are over, so she has that emotional support, which she apparently can’t always get from her childhood best friend and her unclear-it’s-complicated best friend. Sora can stand on her own.

To me, the main difference between these two episodes is clear: in Soushitsu, Sora doesn’t get resolution by opening up to Taichi and Yamato and being comforted by them. She gets there on her own (with a bit of Meiko’s help, because at this point Meiko is the only one who actually seems to understand the Piyomon situation). The situation has parallels with Episode 26, but it develops rather differently. 

If you’re looking at the Taiorato scenes in Soushitsu to find clues about “which of the boys understands Sora better”, you’ll be disappointed. I think the point is that, at this moment, none of them do. It really isn’t about “Taichi / Yamato fits Sora better”. It’s about Sora overcoming an emotional crisis, independently.

Soushitsu shows that both Taichi and Yamato still have a long way to go before they can understand and communicate feelings. And, above all, it shows that they can be pretty self-centered when it comes to Sora. Their intentions are good, and their affection for her is palpable — but man, they do need to grow up and start appreciating her more. 

In the end of the day, I think most fans probably be happy with the shippy implications on both these scenes — sure, the text is super platonic, but it also highlights the appeal of all sides of the Taiorato tri.angle.

[theunnamedstranger]

Okay, let me preface this by saying that this is the absolute last thing I’ll say regarding this drama. For a few reasons.

1. Seashel’s just gonna resort to the same dumb ass insults that he’s using right now if he finds this post, and this will become redundant quickly.

2. Taitoki has apologized and wants to move on from this, and especially since she follows me, I don’t want her to have to see more of this.

3. Generally, I don’t want to spam my followers with drama they don’t care about.

So seashel can talk more shit if he wants to. He can hide behind his block like the spineless coward he is and hurl the same insults I’ve heard a thousand times from other people. I’m not dignifying him with any more responses after this one. He’s not worth my time.

With that being said, let’s pick this apart. Under the cut.

Are you seriously calling me a white knight just because I’m defending someone who happens to be female? Or do you just not know what the term “white knight” actually means?

Secondly, you agreed with my criticism of the absurd length of your review of that one bad space funeral game. Don’t sit here and act like it was me complaining like a bitch when you thanked me for giving constructive criticism to your review.

Look at this. Look at it. 

Now stop lying

I’m not even touching the matpatt post because it’s just you being a fucking sperglord and acting all surprised when you insulted a youtuber and his fans and got blowback from said fans that you just insulted. And then you have the gall to say that matt’s fans can’t handle a slight ribbing because they were mildly upset when you insulted them.

...Well, shit, I ended up talking about that post anyway. Oh well.

I don’t get offended by much of anything. Disagreement doesn’t mean I’m offended, despite what you seem to think. Fuckin’ hell, if anything I’m elated. Seeing you bend over backwards and jerk yourself off like this is legitimately curing my depression. It’s just so much fun to mock you. I love it.

I don’t recall when I ever made a point to you that demanded evidence, but you frankly have absolutely fucking zero ground to speak when it comes to providing evidence. More on that in a second.

You know what, you’re right. I had no involvement with this drama. As far as the claims put forward, I’ll just let Taitoki speak for herself.

But here’s two things I can say with confidence about this whole situation.

1. You blow everything presented out of proportion

2. Your evidence is abysmal, and, according to the apology video, outdated.

The evidence you give for Taitoki being a “pedophile apologist” is her suggesting to a friend that he block some creeper that was harassing him. According to Taitoki’s apology, she apparently got angry at one point and said some things that made her sound like a pedo apologist. But not only does she categorically deny actually being one, the snippets of conversation you provide as evidence don’t help the case in the slightest.

The evidence you gave for her harassing Lineder? You saying in skype that she made jokes about his depression on stream. You literally cited yourself as a source.

According to the apology, Taitoki apparently made jokes during a stream that Lineder didn’t seem bothered by, but was then approached by someone else and told that Lineder was indeed upset by those jokes. This smells exceedingly fishy, but out of respect I’m going to take it at face value. This just seems to be a lack of communication, and will hopefully be resolved soon.

So if we be exceedingly generous, Taitoki is guilty of saying a bunch of hurtful things and fucking up a lot with shit she says, unintentionally looking like a bully and pedo apologist in the process.

Why are you comparing this to Bard?

You know, that sniveling little shit who doxxed you, sexually harassed your friends and wouldn’t leave you alone for almost half a year afterwards? You’re comparing her to someone who’s only guilty of mean words on the internet? Not only that, you’re acting like Taitoki’s somehow worse.

This is why I compared you to Keemstar. You blow things out of proportion and stir shit up about people on the internet. Only instead of doing it for internet points, you genuinely believe you’re doing something righteous.

More lying. I haven’t followed you since the bard drama, and I gladly reblog your stuff without beef when it isn’t saturated in bullshit drama.

Not to mention I was on your side during the Bard and Sodapop drama, when you called out people who were actually bad. I also reblogged plenty of your art back before you saturated the blog with drama. You know this. Stop lying.

Oh boy, this final paragraph is where Seashel just abandons any illusion of reasoning and just slings insults at me like monkey shit. This is all fluff and serves no purpose, but I’m gonna have plenty of fun mocking this after the intellectual rigor that was the rest of that post. It’ll be like a day at the spa.

imagine actually getting out bandicam to record the fact that you got blocked

I do that with everyone who blocks me. It’s part of my “wall of shame” tag. It’s because I kept having problems with people who block me and then pretend they didn’t block me when I block them back.

AND THEN THEY USED HOMESTUCK REACTION IMAGES ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.

I’m mostly doing it because I started reading it again, and pesterlogs make for great reaction images, just in case you really wanted to know.

Honestly, mocking someone’s choice of reaction image is just the lowest possible blow you can ever hope to use. It’s not scraping the bottom of the barrel, it’s punching a hole in the barrel and wearing it.

It’s for this reason that I will continue to use homestuck reaction images.

In addition to that, an unironic MRA running an undertale themed blog - the concept itself is so beautifully cringey.

I don’t really know what’s so cringeworthy about being an MRA. I also don’t run and “undertale themed blog” The only things Undertale on my blog are

1. My blog theme

2. My icon

3. Art I occasionally reblog

This is literally “lol ur a furry/brony blog” under a different name. Please stop.

Also, you call me cringey? You’re an adult, right? Presumably old enough to vote in the united states? Because you don’t act like one. You can’t take any confrontation without SCREAMING AND YELLING and hurling your own shit everywhere, and you mock others for not being able to accept different viewpoints when you can’t either.

I’m still a teenager. It’s kind of impossible for me to not be cringeworthy. You have no excuse.

Also.

Papyrus was originally going to be an MRA/brony stereotype, according to the official artbook for Undertale.

I own this character, bitch

They’re either the best troll (no reference intended) I’ve ever seen, or an amazing lolcow with 0 self awareness. Either way it’s golden.

Why is it that whenever I make a serious point everyone assumes I’m a troll, and whenever I’m trolling people assume I’m being serious?

Also, how do I lack self awareness? Do you know what the phrase means? How complete is your understanding of the english language?

Also, your most recent posts at time of writing seem to be slandering me quite a lot, yet you refuse to use my actual username and just call me “the mra papyrus”. What, am I voldemort now? Will stating my name cause Ragnarok?

Anyway, I’m going to apply Ice Law, as Seashel once coined after the bard drama, and cease talking to or about him. This post is going on my wall of shame, and he will be on record as the most unbelievably cancerous people I’ve talked to on this website to date. Thank you Seashel, you reminded me of why I signed up in the first place.