#and that little exhale

[backjustforberena]

Serena Campbell’s reaction to seeing a soldier with Cameron aka Serena knowing Bernie is hurt.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

thinkin' about Bardaby and his illusion smoke...

[deadpanwalking]

Pale Fire poem is bad, right?

No, not exactly. The actual poetry is still enjoyable because John Shade's narrative voice is compelling, and the elegance of the poem's structure sets it apart from doggerel verse. It resembles Nabokov's own English language poetry, but the difference is that “Pale Fire” is (by design) inextricable from the context of the novel, Pale Fire. When you try to analyse it on its own, it becomes somewhat banal, an elevated iteration of Footprints in the Sand: a man reflects on his life and searches for meaning in the wake of a tragic loss, suspecting his dead daughter is trying to communicate with him, but ultimately concludes that even if the dead do speak to us from beyond, it would not be through visions and hauntings, but in ways that surpass human imagination by orders of magnitude.

John Shade is a fine poet—but Nabokov is a brilliant novelist, so both Shade and his poem became moving parts in a clockwork universe. Would you think twice about his poor Aunt Maude if you hadn't deciphered his verse about her aphasia and linked it to the transcription (pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told.¹) from Hazel's “failed” seance that Kinbote dismissively included in his footnotes?

¹ The bolding is mine, to show the three repetitions of “atalanta” (both forward and backward) that correspond with Pale Fire's motif of threes —Shade wrote the poem in three weeks, Kinbote wants you to read the commentary thrice for every time you read the poem, the Zemblan fairy tale that mentions three hundred camels and three fountains, etc.

The transcription itself is from the third night of Hazel's séance. It's a message from Maude's ghost, who remains afflicted by aphasia. Brian Boyd describes it more succinctly than I can:

But as we reread we can now see instead a message to Hazel to tell her "father (pada: pa, da, padre) he is not to go across the lane to old Goldsworth's, as an atalanta butterfly dances by, after he finishes 'Pale Fire' (tale feur), at the invitation of someone from a foreign land who has told and even ranted his tall tale to him.

So the ghost is not only real, but is—coming back to the clockwork universe metaphor—also unwittingly moved by the same metaphysical harmonic oscillator as the rest of the characters, a small part of a mechanism so complex that the paranormal is merely another component. You can't derive any of that from the verse, but when you reread it within the context of the book, you see all the intricate ways that this force operates within the poem—that's when it becomes good.

[cypresstrees]

the temeraire books are a serious wartime period series with themes of duty, agency, and consequence. but also for a little while there a dragon floats in the air attached to a rope and is dragged across australia exactly like a live balloon on a string

[everye]

tw blood, gore

NIGHTMARE

that day has finally come.

the time is neigh.

everyone will be realised, from pain and suffering.

our salvation is at hand.

this is the day of reckoning.

when all our sorrows will be washed away.

when we return to the TRUE PARADISE !!

my daughter will be ..

the mother of GOD !!

alessa has been trapped in an endless NIGHTMARE from which she never wakens.

however ..

[basilone]

follow-up to this gifset

[chaldeanu]

unfortunately and to no one’s surprise, i’m still stuck on rewatching this scene. in fact, i have only just woken up — dazed. and i may need his tits on my face 😔

[lovelydrusilla]

15 YEARS OF THE MENTALIST Day 7 — 23/9/2023: “we deserve a soft epilogue, my love.”

[unproduciblesmackdown]

"...my one year anniversary being on testosterone!!! I had a vision of capturing my total gender euphoria [...] My trans and nonbinary body is divine I honor my body as it is now, and as it will be as I continue to become more and more myself..."

[bottombaron]

I think that Guillermo, at the end of Laszlo's 'Roast' party in episode 7, will reveal his secret.

The party will most certainly devolve into a roast of him instead, because of course it will. Because Nandor won't be able to make clever jokes or get anyone to laugh and in order to save his ego he'll do what he always does in those situations and sacrifice Guillermo in its place. He'll say unnecessarily cruel things because he thinks no one person can be more important to him than the fear of his own weakness. He'll pile it on too. One thing after the other. Maybe the other vampires invited to the roast will laugh along because familiars are easy marks. And the heat will build. There's only so many lashes Guillermo can take on behalf of Nandor's pride. And Laszlo, Nadja, and Colin are starting to grimace and wince.

And that's when Guillermo will do it.

He will stand up, with the chair he was sitting in making a horrible noise across the wood floor like a record scratch. To let you know that the party has been violently cut short.

And Laszlo will do a panicked head shake, maybe try to salvage the situation from the precipice that Nandor has unknowingly brought them to. That Guillermo is about to jump off of. With all of them helplessly attached.

Guillermo was put in the audience on the other side of the room. Already segregated from the rest of the group. He's in a room filled with vampires who were just laughing at him but now look. Nandor's peers. The whole vampire community is here, watching him.

Guillermo's vampires sit across from him at a long table with a podium, like a panel of judges. Like he's a prisoner standing before the pulpit awaiting a verdict. He's got one last moment to either swallow the pride he just started to embrace on a float earlier that year and sit back down, let himself be ridiculed like always but live to see another day ... or burn it all down like it deserves to be, with his plea of guilt.

Holding a struck match, Guillermo will finally speak the truth to Nandor. To everyone. The real truth. The one he hasn't spoken out loud yet. The one nobody knows.

He will say, "I have a joke." And everyone will listen.

"I paid to have some barely-turned, low-rank, nothing of a vampire. Who hasn't even been one longer than I have been a familiar…to bite me. And turn me. In the back room of a gas station where he works. And he did it."

"I've been turned by a vampire that wasn't my master. That wasn't you."

Guillermo's jittered, bitchy energy tapers. He no longer fidgets or looks around at the faces slack-jawed at him. He's gone cold.

Like a killer, he delivers the next blow straight at his master's heart, sitting across the room at the podium, similarly frozen in place.

"But that's not the joke."

"The joke is, I may not have known how taboo it was…that it would be such a big deal to everyone else…but I did know…" (he licks his lips and despite his unshakable intent the uncontrollable emotion he always carries inside him threatens to undo his composure. Still, he keeps his voice loud and steady. Mostly. His attention is focused. His eyes start getting a little wet, but he hardly notices. He's going to follow through.)

"I didn't even really do it because I wanted to. Not then, or like that. (Not with him). Not for the same reason I had wanted to do it before. Or the reason I told Laszlo and Nadja I did it."

"See…the joke is…"

(His voice has become softer. It still carries across the room easily. There is no one else in the whole house but Guillermo and Nandor.)

"I did it because I knew how it would make you feel."

"I did it because I wanted to hurt you."

[thespineoftherighteous]

Neil Josten the kinda guy to have inside jokes with himself

[a-little-unsteddie]

E X H A L E

It finally became too much in late December, after weeks of being unable to find anything to do to relieve the tension, and he snapped; Steve got into his car and just started driving. He didn’t really pay much attention to where he was going, just so long as it was away from Hawkins, away from his empty house with too many empty rooms, away from the horrors that lurked beneath the ground—just away.

or,

Steve goes to Indianapolis after the events of S2.

Read chapter one on AO3 now!

this has been such a wild ride of ups and downs and i’m so excited to finally be posting this! thank you so much to my artist, Silian, for doing such amazing artwork for this project! thank you to @sailing-through-hawkins for betaing for me!! i appreciate you both so much!

and obviously thank you so much to @steddiebang for hosting this awesome event!

[misspaddockverse]

Lance Stroll is taller than Daniel Ricciardo!!! This information has changed my life and I’ll never be the same again.

Here’s the proof (I also didn’t believe it at first):

My perception of reality is forever altered

[thesilliestofgals]

Watching the Owl House concept pilot and reading the leaked concept bible... WOW, what could've been, huh?

[justneury]

- Past Jacob/ Jacob zone 1 post -

He sends you to fix the lights in the mines, but now you have a... *little* problem.

Small lore dump down here!1!

Jacob was originally an elsen who lived in zone 1, where he learned about mechanics and electrical issues from books he got from an Elsen who sold them.

He was always interested in the subject, and, it is something different than being a miner, or... working in Shachihata, or in Alma.

It was all trial and error as he learned.

The bad thing is that it made him one of the only Elsen electricians and mechanics there were, and well, sometimes he had to go to the mines when the lights didn't work and... He had to fix them.

The bad thing is that these mines are infested with spectres... and he got hurt a couple of times.

But Jacob cannot deny the order, he is afraid of Dedan. He is afraid of disobeying him or, as usually happens, to accidentally make a mistake because of his own clumsiness and be scolded... He doesn't likes to be yelled at, nor be disobedient to his Guardian...

(You get the point of why he moved to zone 3, lol. Obviously Is more than that, but, that's another topic for later.)

[fearandhatred]

my friend and i were discussing That One Aziraphale Gif and how aziraphale is somehow not human, not gay in the sense of the word, and naturally sexless, but he's also simultaneously the horniest bastard on television