#and then i wasn’t at odds with myself

[pheadrus]

Please share your trick 🙏

It’s a very specific stress related illness anon so this probably won’t be much help but I guess it fits a framework I’ve found coming up a lot with anxiety so maybe as a general rule it’s useful?

basically I hold like all my stress in my pelvic floor and I couldn’t work out how to stop but I realised my fear of the symptom of its dysfunction (which was needing the loo all the time, absolute hell) was what was stopping me from relaxing and so was stopping me from being free of that very symptom. I had to basically stop freaking out and let the “bad thing” happen in order to begin to develop a healthy relationship with it

And I’ve found in general with anxiety I need to forgive myself for not being able to forgive myself if that makes sense? I was so angry with myself for not being able to escape this dysfunction but if I forgave myself and let my body feel my pelvic floor even when it wouldn’t be nice, that was the first step to learning not to stress about it. I was trapped in the cycle of being anxious and trying to ignore that i was anxious but that just made me more anxious, so my general advice would be to let yourself feel and acknowledge the anxiety you do have bc denying its existence just gives you one extra thing to stress about

[excelsior9173]

I JUST REALIZED I AM FINISHING MY BACHELORS DEGREE TODAY

what the fuck. five years of work, so so so many tears but also so much pride. i’ve worked my ass off for this! there were many moments along the way that i thought i couldn’t do it but here i am! writing my last final tonight. actually crying happy tears right now, i am so proud of myself.

i need to figure out how to celebrate now lol (gotta write this last final but like. can you blame me for jumping the gun a tiny bit?)

[newfeeling77]

i wish i had gotten properly medicated n therapized earlier 1. bc it hasnt even started yet i had one therapy appointment and i wont be feeling the effects of medication for another month and a half and 2. im already feeling regretful of the time i wasted these past few months being depressed. not unhappy just apathetic and frustrated. bc objectively im having a good time n learning new things and making friends like its a really good semester but i havent been able to enjoy it bc im currently incapable of enjoying anything. i can appreciate things, i can acknowledge the positive aspects of my life but they dont give me any positive feelings. instead im just angry or overwhelmed all the time

[hella1975]

i got home from work last night and when i was getting dressed in the bathroom i literally fucking passed out i have NO idea why i was literally stood there and then it went black and i fell and whacked my head and my only reaction was ‘wtf’ and i came out and said to my sister ‘hey did you hear that crash just now?’ and she went ‘no fuck off’ and i was like ‘….. i mean i just fucking fainted but okay’ and she paused for a second to frown at me and just went ‘you should tell mum’ and i went ‘no <3’ and that was that and idk why that’s so funny to me but it is

[queen-asiad]

This sucks…….

[irlnikeiyomiuri]

guys did i ever tell u abt my bestie in 8th grade. we were so fucking close genuinely attached at the hip and then we went into ninth grade and covid, and then i saw him again at senior hoco and it was great and then i saw him at senior prom and it was fucking nasty he ain’t even greet me even though we hung out w the same group of people the whole night.

[roseverie]

wow i went to look up buccal fat (english is not my first language) and literally could not find one search result about just what it is, it was ALL, every single result, about its removal. it was creepy tbh

I agree! it’s all just “extract your buccal fat”—

and then people love to say all these articles/posts about it girl aesthetics, “how to be and act like an it girl” are not harmful and that their “just having some fun”. I don’t see anything fun in this endless cycle of changing yourself to fit with ephemeral trends/aesthetics in order to be considered cool. Every aesthetic is practically now a performance manual rather than just being about fashion

[arthur-r]

my baby sister is having a happy fits dance party in the yard i love her so much. i wish i could join her but i am stuck on this couch

[thebeautifulfantastic]

i hate this “coming back home” business. i hate this “you’re a teenager AND an adult” unrealistic expectations, double-standard shit. i hate that no matter what, in conversations where i try to approach an issue as calmly and diplomatically as possible, i still get called out for being too emotional. i hate that i’m expected to know how to clean a house (or at the very least my room) and keep it that way, but i can’t make decisions about my own screen time. i hate that i can’t express how i feel freely, even if it’s messy, because other people get “overwhelmed,” or because i’m something that doesn’t matter — but maybe for me it DOES? i hate that simply because my problem might be more inconsequential, it means whatever i’m feeling about it is also unimportant. i hate that when all i want is to be validated, all i get is a constant feeling of failure. i hate that when it’s convenient for you, i’m an adult, but when it’s important to me, i’m still a child.

[leahcee]

working to unmask and really be myself around my friends and I kinda started today with my two old friends with retail bc one of them texted in our old gc.

[thedragonitus]

I just had like an existential episode while trying to draw what the fuck

[ifeelfreewithoutmyshoes]

I am once again baffled by peoples bad takes online

[ariaste]

The Magic Trick You Didn’t See: Being An Analysis of Good Omens Season 2

(or: Neil Gaiman, Your Brain is Gorgeous But I Have Cracked Your Sneaky Little Code And Have You Dead To Rights*) (*Maybe)

***

Soooooo I just spent the last 48 hours having a BREATHTAKING GALAXY BRAIN EPIPHANY about Good Omens Season 2 and feverishly writing a fuckin16,000 word essay about the incredible magic trick that @neil-gaiman pulled off. 

Yes, it’s long, but I PROMISE your brains will explode. Do you want to know how magic works? Do you want to know what Metatron’s deal is (I’m like 99% sure of this and it’s EXTREMELY FUCKING GOOD)? Do you want to know about the Mystery of the Vanishing Eccles Cakes and the big fat beautiful clue I found in the opening credits? Do you go through the whole inventory of Chekov’s Firearm & Heavy Artillery Discount Warehouse? 

Here is the essay, go read it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/193IXS11XN46lziHRb6eUpM17yK0BQkRqke1Wh64A_e0/ When ur done u can tell me I’m an insane crackpot, and u know what, i won’t even be offended

In case you don’t know whether you want to bother reading the whole enormous thing on google docs, I’ve put the first couple sections of it under the cut. JUST TRUST ME OKAY, HEAR ME OUT, THIS IS VERY EXTREMELY COOL, NEIL IS GOOD AT HIS JOB--

Proem

A dark theater. The rustling of the audience: clothes, breathing, whispers of anticipation. The lights come up. A man enters, stage left. He is a magician—a master magician—and he performs for you a magic trick so good and so subtle... that you don’t even notice you’ve seen it. 

You know there must have been a trick—after all, you came to the theater to see a trick performed, didn’t you? And he claims to be a magician. So there had to be a trick somewhere. There had to be.

But maybe there wasn’t. Maybe there was just a man on a stage, talking to you, telling you a story with a strangely unsatisfying ending you didn’t quite understand. 

I know. This is a weird beginning to an analysis essay. But hear me out, because I have to explain the mechanisms of the stage before I can show you what the trick was, where the trapdoor was hidden, and how Neil Gaiman pulled the whole thing off so gently and elegantly that you didn’t notice a thing. Ready? Here we go.

The Facts As We Know Them

Let us begin by establishing a baseline—some fundamental, logical assumptions that underpin the magic trick. These will seem obvious as soon as I say them, which is precisely the point: They are self-evident, loadbearing foundations for my entire argument, and if I don’t point them out, I’m going to sound like a crackpot conspiracy theorist. (Which! To be fair, I might be. I could easily be wrong about all this—but I don’t think I am.)

Our baseline, loadbearing assumptions that preface my Grand Unified Theory of Season 2: 

1. Neil Gaiman is extremely good at his job.

2. Neil Gaiman loves these characters and wants with all his heart to do them justice; likewise, he has a great deal of respect, love, and admiration for Terry Pratchett and is striving VERY HARD to write the show the way Terry would have been happy with.

3. The devil, as they say, is in the details: Neil Gaiman and the entire Good Omens cast/crew are fully capable of doing extremely subtle detail work, as conclusively proven in Season 1 Ep 6, specifically the whole sequence of the body-swap scenes.

With me so far? Great.

The Elephant In The Room

Season 2 was... odd. It was odd, wasn’t it. This isn’t a matter of whether you loved it or hated it—there was just something odd going on.

I spent the entirety of my first viewing very much enjoying myself and being very happy to be back with these characters and this world, but I was also liveblogging to my groupchat as I went, and a theme soon began emerging:

“Neil, what are you doing? Where are you going with this?” “What in god’s name is going on here? I’m so lost lmao.” “What is going on with the music situation?” “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE NEIL” “zombies, ok, I trust u to pull this all together in the end, Neil, but I still don't know what you're up to” “What is going on LOL” “Incredibly what is going on here” “NEIL! WHAT IS HAPPENING!” “Literally what is happening” “Neil Gaiman why have you constructed a regency au for mystery VIBES reasons” “just????????? lesbians????????? dancing what's HAPPENING. just all the background characters are gay here ok sure sure sure NEIL GAIMAN WHAT IS HAPPENING--” “mmmmmmm neil what u doin”

All these are copied verbatim from my liveblogging, and apparently I am not the only one to have this reaction. And to be clear, I was having a good time! I came out to this theater to see a magic trick, and this Neil Gaiman guy on stage is a master magician—but I didn’t see the trick, even though there must have been a trick. 

At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the season. I wanted to like it! Indeed, there were many things that I liked about it! But I felt a bit muddled and jumbled up and confused—I felt like there was something I didn’t understand about it, and so I couldn’t yet understand how I felt about it either.

I started chewing on this question in a friend’s DMs: Why is season 2 so fucking odd? What is going on here, Neil? What are you up to? The matter of whether he was up to something was never in question. I knew that he had to be up to something. Writers are always up to something, and as I watched season 2, it was as if I was watching Neil scamper around the room with a mischievous expression as he messed with things here and there and made little tweaks and adjustments to the arrangement of all the Chekov’s guns he’s stockpiling on the mantelpiece. 

You see, Season 2 has some very bad writing in it. HANG ON, DON’T ARGUE WITH ME YET! THIS IS NOT A JUDGMENT CALL!! This is the rug that the trick’s secret mechanism is hidden under!!! This is the hidden mirror that makes the trick work!!!!! This is the trapdoor in the stage!

Yes, of course I will explain myself.

Neil Gaiman is a master magician, but I am a pretty damn good magician myself—I’m a professional fantasy author who has published nine books, and I teach workshops for apprentice writers online and at universities—and if there is one thing I have learned about the process of achieving mastery of your craft, it is this: 

Regardless of what medium they’re working in, the apprentice artist is concerned primarily with achieving realism via an expansion of their control—control of their brush strokes as they paint a photorealistic eye; control of their deck of cards, the mechanisms of their magic tricks, and where the audience’s attention is being directed; control of all the little factors of voice, plot, character, setting, suspense and surprise that go into writing a good story. However, the master artist has achieved that control—so much so that it often looks effortless to an untrained eye—and sometimes the master artist returns to a messy, amateurish style simply because they have control even over this too. 

As an example, consider Picasso and his entire body of work. He begins as an apprentice focused on achieving control, doing portraits of people that look like people—like what we expect a portrait of a person to look like. Then, as he grows in skill and gradually achieves mastery, he pulls away from realism. He develops a style, he experiments with faces that don’t look like any human alive  colored in ways that do not appear in nature. He expands his control. His work becomes abstract. Towards the end of his life, he starts experimenting with what’s called “Naive art”, something that a 5 year old could theoretically draw... but you have to achieve mastery before you can do it on purpose and have it look good. 

On one hand, Neil Gaiman is extremely good at his job. On the other hand, Season 2 has bad writing in it.

What does that tell us?

Well, we know from our Baseline Assumptions that Neil Gaiman is simply too good of a writer to fuck up through garden-variety clumsiness and lack-of-control the way an apprentice writer would. Additionally, he cannot fuck up by accident in this case because I am positive that the man is scrutinizing his work on Good Omens far too closely to let anything slide—for Crowley and Aziraphale’s sakes, for David and Michael’s sakes, and especially for Terry’s sake. The stakes are sky-high, and he cares too much to write a weird, kind of “bad” season by accident.

Which leaves only one option: He did it on purpose.

(Am I sounding like a crackpot conspiracy theorist? Baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I’m gonna get SO MUCH MORE CRACKPOT.)

If he did it on purpose, then the natural question to ask is: WHY!?!?!??

It’s a great question. Not “Why?” in terms of why he as an individual person with emotions would decide to do that, mind you. More like, “What purpose does this serve for the structure of the narrative?” There is a story he is intending to tell, and out of all the choices he could have possibly made, for some reason this one was necessary and correct in order to achieve that end goal—so what was that reason?

See? Intentionality. He knows exactly what details he left in, and he did it on purpose. (Editing! It’s important!)

So there has to be a reason. It’s like when a master magician “casually” rubs an itch on his nose—why did he do that? What is he sneakily slipping into his mouth by hiding it under the excuse of this little gesture that does not even register to you as meaningful? (If you haven’t watched enough stage magic to know what I mean, watch this.)

This question is, of course, impossible to simply answer out of thin air without any further evidence. It is a dead end—so we must adjust the question and come at it from a different angle.

The one I settled on when I was chewing on this was: Well, okay, what do I mean when I say “bad writing”? What is it about S2 that makes it feel so goddamn odd?

The Pledge, The Turn, and... The Conspicuous, Expectant Silence

There are three parts to a magic trick: Pledge, Turn, Prestige. 

First, the Pledge: You show the audience something ordinary. Second, the Turn: You make that ordinary thing do something extraordinary, like vanish. Third, the Prestige: You bring the ordinary thing back.

To quote the 2006 film The Prestige just after its explanation of the first two parts: “You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back.”

You have to bring it back.

When I teach apprentice writers, I call this a “setup-payoff cycle”. Achieving control and dexterity with this tool is crucial, because the setup-payoff cycle is the engine of the story—it’s what makes the story run. You can have a setup-payoff cycle at any scale—I have read ones that were a single sentence long; I’ve read ones that were two books long. Additionally, all jokes, no matter how long they are, are structured on a setup/payoff cycle. These cycles work precisely the same way a magic trick does:

You set up the audience’s expectations. (Optional but generally considered stylish and elegant: You give those expectations a firm jolt to throw the audience off-balance.) You pay off the audience’s expectations in a way they weren’t expecting, while saying “TA DA!!!!” really loud with your arms flung wide.

Audiences really like this. A setup-payoff cycle executed just right makes the audience’s brains light up like Times Square and hammers on their mental “reward” buttons like nothing else. It’s like you’ve personally handed them a cookie and a gold star. They go wild for this.

Here’s an example of a setup-payoff cycle, though it’s not a perfect one—and you’ve probably heard it before, so you’re not going to be throwing chairs and tearing down the theater from sheer glee:

The Setup: Knock knock. Who’s there? Banana. Banana who? The Jolt: (the joke starts over and repeats several times without reaching the payoff (aka the prestige) while the audience grows more and more annoyed and frustrated about the unfulfilled expectations, until finally...) Knock knock. Who’s there? Orange. Orange who? The Payoff: ORANGE YOU GLAD I DIDN’T SAY BANANA?

Good Omens Season 2 feels so fucking odd because the setup-payoff cycles are incomplete—nearly all of them are, and the ones that do close the loop do so in really weird ways which, as a professional author, make me feel kind of, “Bwuh?????? But where’s my cookie? Excuse me??? Sir???? Neil????? My cookie, tho???”

When I realized this, when I finally put my finger on why the whole season was giving me some uncanny valley heebie-jeebies, a chill ran down my spine. (The rest is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/193IXS11XN46lziHRb6eUpM17yK0BQkRqke1Wh64A_e0/ I’M GOING TO GO STARE INTO THE ABYSS NOW BYE)

[fingertipsmp3]

My mom: how did the three of you manage to make going swimming, eating a meal, and buying milk take 4 hours?

Me: you’re forgetting that “the three of us” is one adult who dislocated her knee two weeks ago, another adult with undiagnosed ADHD, and a 2.5 year old

[dadbots]

Whimsical adventures of (May)hem… and hello, June!

[luveline]

Hi Jade!! I love your writing so much! you wrote a few fics of postprison!reid with kinda shy!reader like the one where she faints and I loved that dynamic and that Reid, do you think you could write some more? pls pls pls <3333333

cw non-consensual drug use /reader is spiked 

Spencer is quite gorgeous. He has a great smile, soft and a little shy without teeth, exuberantly bright like a commercial with teeth. He’s smiling like he can read your mind now, fishing for your hand, and taking it into both of his. Your pinky in one hand and your index the other, he wriggles your hand back and forth and laughs softly. “You don’t handle inebriation well.” 

“What?” you ask, startled. You can’t believe he’s touching you like this, casual, like he’s your boyfriend. Your hot boyfriend.

“You think I’m hot?” 

You squint at him. “What?” you ask. 

He covers your hand gently with both of his. “Nevermind. Do you want something to eat now?” 

“No.” You’ll throw up. Chunks, probably, your breakfast. And it wasn’t even a healthy breakfast. It was waffles and whipped cream and then a donut on the way to the office, Spencer will be able to tell, he’s too smart, he’s too everything. 

“I’m not that smart,” he says kindly. 

That’s a straight up lie. 

He laughs heartily, at odds with his quiet talking, and you’re so confused because it’s like he’s reading your mind? Can he read your mind? There’s so much stuff about yourself you don’t want him to know, your chest hurts thinking about it, you don’t want to tell him anything—

“I think I’ll go find you a hot chocolate,” Spencer says, the sleeve of his shirt falling down unbuttoned to his wrist as he stands. He pushes it back up. He is surprisingly underdressed today and you’ve no idea why. “Does that sound nice?” 

“I don’t think you should leave.” 

“I don’t want you to tell me stuff you don’t want to tell me,” he says. 

“But if you leave I’ll be by myself.” You sound strange to your ears. Crackly, like a garden fire.

Spencer perches himself on the hospital bed next to you. You’re sitting cross-cross on the tight white and blue sheets, waiting for something? Something was supposed to happen, you know that. A doctor was going to take your blood. You look down at the crook of your elbow to find they already have, a cotton pad medical-taped to the skin. 

“I’m not going anywhere if you don’t want me to go,” he says, taking your arm into his hands with the same care he’d shown your fingers. He lifts the corner of the tape and begins to pull it away from the direction it had been stuck in, stretching it, and removing it from you without any pain. 

“Where did you learn that?” you ask. 

Spencer holds your arm in his hand now the cotton ball is done. “Learn what?” 

You’re not interested in asking him again. Weirdly, your throat feels dry, but you won’t tell him because he’ll offer hot chocolate again and you don’t want him to go. 

“Hey,” he says, “not going anywhere until it wears off. Not if you need me.” 

How does he always know what to say? 

“You know, why don’t you get into bed and lay down for a little bit? You must be tired, sitting up. It’s so late.” His voice is a sheet of silk. 

“I thought we were going home?” you ask. 

“We can’t, bub,” —that’s a new one— “not for now. But we will tonight, I promise.” 

“Why not now?” 

He smiles sadly. “‘Cos you’re coming down, Y/N.” 

You frown. “Oh.” 

“I know.” Spencer wraps and arm around your back. “But you’re not alone.” He ducks in until your faces are almost touching. “You know? It’ll go away soon.” 

You don’t know why you say it, but you say, “You’re so nice to me. Even when you’re scary.” 

“Am I scary?” he murmurs. 

You look at him long and hard, feeling the warm rub of his thumb as he smooths a short line into your back. Spencer is intimidating, maybe, because you hadn’t known him when he got out of prison, and he's pretty like a model, or a movie star. But he isn’t scary. That’s not the right word. 

“No,” you say. “I guess not.” You pause. “I feel weird.” 

He doesn’t laugh like you, just hugs you tighter. “It’ll get better.”