#and not in a 'its meant to be unsettling juxtaposition' kinda way

[master-gatherer]

So they used AI to make the credits for Secret Invasion

And it looks like ass

[inkdemonapologist]

In the audio logs, it felt weird to me that Sammy is creative and diverse in just about everything, except for the few phrases (most notably "sheep" related ones) that he wildly overuses. Did that feel weird to you? Am I reading too much into this? Is this a sign of the abuse and cultic mentality (mantras in lieu of thoughts) or just Sammy being better at music than insults?

Ohhhhhh "mantras in lieu of thoughts" is a REALLY neat take, I could definitely see that for like, "he will set us free" and similar. BUT GOLLY the weird sheep obsession has been a THORN IN MY SIDE in trying to make sense of this man and the canon sure hasn't made any effort to illuminate where this came from so here's...... a possibility Ive been thinking about lately!

- we know from the employee's handbook that he used "sheep" as an insult when he was human

- but in prophet mode it doesn't seem to be an insult? It's not a compliment, it's sort of condescending, but he uses it in a pseudo-soothing way. Less "you idiot" vibes more "now settle down little one this is for the best"

- him calling Henry a sheep makes sense to me actually. He doesn't have a name for this guy, so he just immediately assigns a fitting noun for someone he sees as lost and also about to be sacrificed and uses that (This is maybe just a thing he does; see also: Art Department).

- his use of the sleepy sheep poem in Chapter 5 is interesting since he says it sort of sarcastically, like, he's intentionally making an ironic callback to his freakin catchphrase. ITS WEIRD b/c it like feels like Sammy's making a Bendy reference.

So, okay, the sleepy sheep poem is probably not for Sammy himself, it’s usually used for other people, something between soothing and warning as he does his Prophet Duties. Maybe everyone else already picked up on this (or maybe im comin out of left field here), but I had a WHOLE REVELATION about the one right after his Ch 2 monologue -- he does his "time for sleep" thing and then immediately starts screaming into the PA system about summoning Bendy, which seemed like a hilarious juxtaposition until I suddenly remembered that ink creatures can die when the Ink Demon spawns near them. For Sammy to warn them, essentially, to hide & go dormant or risk death before he calls on the ink demon....... makes a lot of sense???? HES ACTUALLY KINDA LOOKING OUT FOR HIS FLOCK????

He's also muttering this as he walks the halls, and I've pondered for a while the idea that he might use his position as Ink Demon's Prophet to maintain some safety and authority in this place -- if he claims to have the Ink Demon's favour, after all, then he is best respected and feared. I'm delighted that BatDS implies Sammy was actually quite vulnerable in the Studio and literally none of the powerful ink creatures respect him, because I see a lot of his trappings -- the little sheep chant, the mask -- as perhaps being things meant to set him apart from the Lost Ones and make him important and unsettling, someone the lost ones and searchers will respect and not attack and maybe even defend (especially when you consider how freaked out he seems to be when you knock his mask off). You hear his sing-song chant and you see Bendy's visage and you know that's the prophet, acting in service to the demon, and you don't get in his way; you keep your distance.

Worth noting that when Henry doesn't respond the way Sammy would expect his flock to -- instead running after him and calling out to him -- Sammy immediately flees, hiding out of reach and staying silent, no longer calling attention to his presence until he feels he has the upper hand again.

With the way he's seized on this specific rhyme and even makes a sarcastic reference to it, my current best guess/headcanon is that this was either lyrics somewhere in Sheep Songs, or is a bastardisation of a song or line from Sheep Songs, so the reason why it feels like Sammy's making a reference is that he literally is, taking a line from the cartoon he worships and turning it into a ritual that basically signifies "back off and let me do my thing and you may be spared."

Hard to say whether he picked this because he already used "sheep" in his former life as a condescending shorthand for the sort of people most likely to end up as Lost Ones and it just got out of hand, or if he picked up the whole sleepy sheep poem from the cartoon and then started referring to his followers as sheep because of it. I have a Convoluted Personal Headcanon that the song's lyrics were originally meant to tease Sammy Lawrence, if Jack thought this guy unironically calling him a sheep was awfully funny, and saw an opportunity to poke a little fun at his friend in the lyrics of a cartoon that was about both sheep and music, and so Sammy's attached to the song for reasons he no longer remembers... but there's not any actual evidence of that I just think it's a fun thought.

[tchaikovskaya]

lol not to be depressing and all but 

ive been on tumblr since circa 2010/2011 and i first started on here bc i saw on an e/a/t/ing disorder forum i religiously lurked that tumblr was the th/i/ns/po watering hole of the internet and i was like 👀 and made an acct and nearly immediately fell into the b&w thinsp0 depression photoblogging community

after a couple months of trying to do a sideblog but failing bc my dashboard was too ~diverse~ and the juxtaposition stressed me out, i made this acct in 2013 (?) bc i wanted to reblog color photos (lmao) and memes and stuff. (also ran a Ridiculously popular sideblog for a time that was 100% fashion editorials and runway detail photos and 0% personal, and im using the word ridiculously here not to mean “very, extremely” but “laughably, comical”, but Thats Not Relevant To The Protagonist’s [my] Journey!) and i sort of gradually started using this one more. 

since they were different accts i had to log out and log in to them all the time so i would be “gone” for increasingly long spans of time until i basically exclusively used this one. i would go months at a time without logging on to my old Depression Account. and those gaps in time just made it so jarring to see that content

well firstly, so many of those blogs disappear on the regular bc tumblr deletes them or the blogger deletes them (usually bc they go into treatment or bc their parents find their blogs lol rip) or they otherwise just become inactive. so eventually none of my “friends” or familiar faces were regularly on there.

secondly, i think something about me changed? its not that i was mentally any more healthy than i had been then (lmfao) but as i got a little more mature i realized that so much of my compulsion to externalize my emotions that way was rooted in some sort of need to feel validated by similar people. it was performative in a really dumb way. i even lied about how severe my behaviors were bc i wanted people to be sure that i wasnt just faking it (which ironically meant that i was !!!!) and at a certain point it just stopped mattering to me if other sick teenagers online thought i was one of them....?

i dont remember when i deleted it, but im pretty sure it was after i finished high school. i was so emotionally attached to it, i didnt want to let it go for some stupid reason. i have not kept in touch with any of my “friends” from that. for some of them, i have no idea if they’re still alive, and i have reason to seriously doubt it. thats kind of unsettling to think about. i wish i knew their full names so i could google them and find out but i also am kinda grateful i dont. i dont want to know. 

idk why ive been thinking so much about it lately but when teenage girls follow me on here i think about myself just a few years ago (but feels like forever ago) and i get so sad :(((( thats so so so young :( :( :( i hope That Community isnt as robust now as it was when i was in it :(

[pelikinesis]

sesquipedalia

i forgot the word ‘sesquipedalian’ for a good half an hour, and it bothered me more than i imagined it could. the context and reason for this has to do with the only time I have ever said the word ‘sesquipedalian’ out loud, along with the juxtaposition of the last two stages of my life and all the fun worms grubs and bubbles that come slither-floating up out of the heavy moss-covered rocks they were happily cohabitating beneath for all this time.

i should specify that I’m not the kind of guy that would be upset about forgetting a word like sesquipedalian merely due to being the kind of guy who not only came across such a word but then chose to commit its definition to memory. anyone who has ever accused me of being intelligent has likely arrived at such a conclusion based on behaviors and habits of mine that are prompted first and foremost by perfectionism. or maybe i should say that an appetite for knowledge is kinda similar to other kinds of appetites, in that along with the appetite are preferences and habits--related, but not to be conflated as a single undifferentiated attribute.

anyways, so the first and probably only time I ever said the word ‘sesquipedalian’ out loud (aside from recounting this story in person or on the phone) was at the tail end of a grad school seminar which ran from 6-10pm. i forget which one, but the professor who taught it was unanimously considered to be the most intelligent in the whole department, at least as far as I heard. 

The utterance was prompted by him recounting an anecdote which quickly turned effectively tangential once he realized he wanted to use a word, and could recall the definition, but not the word itself. And yes, the word was ‘sesquipedalian’, so we’re about to come full circle in a way.

The reason I mention this professor being considered the smartest in the department is because whether out of confidence or pride he put a halt on what he was saying instead of moving on, instead speaking, mostly to himself I suspect, about how it was the perfect word to use in the situation.

I should also mention that this is the same professor who wrote, in a textbook he authored, a particular sentence about the difficulty of operationalizing the variable of “Intentionality” in regards to the study of emotional abuse. Here’s the sentence: “[Intentionality] is an intrinsically spontaneous epiphenomenon incapable of post-hoc verification.”

That sentence happens to be one of my favorite sentences in the English language, for reasons that transcend irony and authenticity. It’s the most absurdly-constructed sentence I’ve ever read, and yet I always find myself marveling at how its crafting makes perfect sense. I absolutely understand why he choose each and every one of those words and in that order, and yet the fact remains that NOBODY TALKS LIKE THAT. 

And also, I had to spend about as much time and effort into discarding my preconceptions of what each of those terms meant so that i could fully absorb the individual definitions from the subject of psychology, and then combine them procedurally to understand the meaning hidden away in this Rubik’s Cube of a sentence.

All this to say, a good few minutes passed while my professor was low-key beside himself trying to remember the word he’d forgotten, because everyone else in the room pretty much assumed he’d get it in the next five seconds. Ten. Twenty. Forty-five, huh. And all my classmates were looking around at one another, just as confused as me, except for one thing. I knew none of them were going to guess the word, and I knew I had an idea of what it was, and I was gonna take a shot at it because that would move the lecture along. Even if I was wrong, that still might help jog his memory towards the word he was thinking of).

But when I raised a hand and said, “...is the word ‘sesquipedalian?’” like a freaking Jeopardy! contestant, he gave a pleased affirmation and moved on with whatever he was originally trying to say. And thus the class proceeded to its conclusion with the aid of an exchange which permanently cemented me to the rest of my classmates as a total freaking nerd.

And I remembered all the details about that story, but couldn’t remember the word. I have a general understanding about how the memory retrieval process works, namely the part where it doesn’t always succeed without a hitch, and that’s pretty normal. But, for those thirty minutes spent on various online thesauruses (thesaurii?), I wondered if this meant my thinky-whatsits had significantly atrophied. 

And even though I honestly don’t consider “intelligent’ to be one of my defining attributes as a person (I’m slightly less uncomfortable with ‘analytical,’ but i can think of plenty of significant moments that suggest otherwise and I say that both with and without a trace of irony), forgetting the word ‘sesquipedalian’ was quite unsettling. In the case of my professor, I imagine it might have been connected to the fact that he was contemplating retirement, and all the accompanying questions it raises about identity amongst other things.

in my case, well...one of the reasons I don’t respond all that well to being told I’m intelligent (I don’t respond particularly gracefully to compliments of any sort for reasons, but this one has an exclusive dimension to it) is because i don’t actually know how smart i am. and sure, that’s a pretty dumb way to put it, but I had to type ‘sesquipedalian’ a whole bunch just to make it to this point in this post, so whatever, dude.

And understanding and coming to terms with my intelligence--in its current state, in its capacity for growth, and its limitations--is one of those really freaking important things i need to do before i can make any long-term plans about my future. and I know at a certain point I’ll need to take my shot on a leap of faith and roll with the punches while living on a prayer.

but the thing is, even though forgetting the word ‘sesquipedalian’ made me feel for a bit like i’m not as smart as i used to be, and bringing with that insecurity the much more substantial one of not being smart enough to accomplish what look like appealing and worthwhile life goals to me, one thing i’m even more convinced of is that i’m not as brave as i used to be.

I’m reminded of the first lines Thanos says in Infinity War. “I know what it's like to lose. To feel so desperately that you're right, yet to fail nonetheless. It's frightening, turns the legs to jelly.” And in the end of Infinity War, Thanos wins. The heroes fail, after dozens of movies over dozens of years seeing them triumph when things seemed bleakest time and time again.

Of course, there’s another movie after, and heroes win after all. I really enjoyed Infinity War, because that first time i watched it with my friends, as the credits rolled, i knew they felt the way I’d felt as I woke up every morning for the past 2 or 3 years. Except my experience of failure was neither vicarious nor fictional.

i guess I should tie this into talking about my book coming out next year, but part of me thinks I’m going to post this on my wordpress and then I’d have to think about how i’d do it to avoid making it sound like all the other times I’ve talked about my book there since that’s the whole point of me making a wordpress in the first place.

plus i’d have to properly capitalize a whole bunch of words since in tumblr no one capitalizes shit.