#but this is my only real and meaningful thought

[fallstaticexit]

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AN: TW this post contains a homophobic slur.

Transcript under the cut

Professor Munch: Everyone, this is Nancy. She’s one of my favorite students. I am so glad she can join us this evening to observe our weekly GSA meeting.

Nancy: And what is a GSA?

Morgan: It stands for Gay–Straight Alliance. It’s just a safe space for queer kids to hang out and talk about real world issues.

Knox: Yeah, we go out and do stuff off campus. It’s pretty tight.

Nancy: Queer? So...this is a club for homosexuals?

Darling: [sucks teeth]

Knox: [chuckles nervously] I mean, sure I guess? Me and Morgan are bisexual. That means we dig the fellas and the ladies, heh.

Professor Munch: What’s important is that this space is for everyone, from all walks of life. We support each other here, no matter who you love. We keep each other safe. That’s why I invited you to sit in on our session. I figured you could use a friend or two-

Nancy: Ugh! Oh my God? You think I’m- I’m not like that, ok!?

Nancy: I am not a homosexual! What the hell made you think I’d want to be apart of something like this?

Professor Munch: No, dear- I’m not implying you’re like anything! This club welcomes all people. I thought you could use the support. Why, your brother started the very first GSA at this school-

Nancy: Oh, don’t you fucking dare! My brother wasn’t some depraved pervert and I’m not a d****!

Darling: [jumps up, chair scrapes hardwood floor] What the fuck did you just say? You can’t come up in calling people that shit!

Nancy: I-I didn’t! All I’m saying is that I’m not like that! I’m not like you-

Darling: Not like who? Not like a d?****?

Darling: What the fuck is your problem? Munch, who is this bitch?

Professor Munch: Easy, Dee. Calm down-

Darling: Don’t fucking tell me to calm down! You let some straight white girl walk in here and say something we heard screamed at us our whole fucking life! Say it again! I dare you!

Professor Munch: That’s enough! Please! Let me handle this.

Nancy: [between sobs] M’sorry...m’so sorry...

Professor Munch: [sighs] Just, take some time to think about this, Nancy. Look inward.

Nancy Narrates: [Look inward] x3

Nancy: If it’s ok...I’d like to apologize.

Professor Munch: Everyone? Is it alright if Nancy speaks?

Morgan: I don’t mind.

Darling: [sighs] Whatever man.

Nancy: [exhales] When I first heard that word, I was 11 years old. My mother found letters I wrote to my pen pal. She mailed a photo of herself from her birthday party, she wore this really pretty yellow dress with little blue flowers on them.

Nancy: Yellow is my favorite color, so I said she was as pretty as a sunflower. My mother tore up the letter and made me rewrite it. She looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘do you want someone to read this and think you’re a-’

Nancy: She said it again when was 14, a girl from my ballet troupe was only brushing my hair. She pulled me from the class. She said it again two years ago, when she found out that I fell in love with-

Nancy: I know that word hurts because it’s been said to hurt me even though I’m not... It doesn’t matter if I’m not, I shouldn’t have said it. It was a horrible thing to do. I am so incredibly sorry.

Professor Munch: Thank you for sharing your story. This is what GSA is about. Coming together, creating a community, and creating safe spaces. Dee, is there anything you want to say to Nancy? Anything you’d like to speak on or about how you feel?

Darling: Nah...

Nancy Narrates: [I knew that an apology alone wouldn't suffice to mend the situation. When it came to friendships, I didn’t know how to genuinely make amends, but as a Landgraab, I knew that I could leverage my wealth and status to create a meaningful impact]

Morgan: You got us the biggest hall on campus?! Nancy, this is sick as fuck!

Professor Munch: [laughs] I’ll have to agree with Morgan for lack of a better word. This is sick as heck! I don’t know where to begin to thank you for this gift.

Nancy: It’s the least I could do. Now you can stop meeting in that tiny corner in the commons.

Darling: Charity work for your little sorority, huh? What’s with you, yo?

Nancy: What do you mean?

Darling: You’re so rich, you just buy your way through shit?

Nancy: It’s how I was raised.

Darling: I can’t figure you out.

Nancy: I promise, I’m not a bad person.

Darling: We’re not like everyone else on campus. We’ll show you something real. You gotta be real with us too.

Nancy Narrates: [I found myself wanting to do exactly that—to show them the real me, whoever she was]

Siobhan: I’m planning a party for the Thetas Friday night. Perfect opportunity for you to bond with your sisters.

Nancy: I’m a little busy Friday night...maybe next time?

Siobhan: Being apart of a sorority is more than just the cute merch and bragging rights. We’re involved with the community and with this campus. As a pledge, I do expect you to commit to these things.

Nancy: I know and I will. I just need to take care of something.

Siobhan: [sighs] Don’t let me down, sister.

[the group murmurs excitedly]

Professor Munch: You did all this, Nancy?

Nancy: I hope it’s ok I’m here. I figured you could break in your new room with a movie night. Everything is already taken care of, and I bought a ton of movies ranging from comedy to horror and everything in between. They’re all yours to keep! Same with the popcorn machine. I know I’m using money again to impress you but... I guess I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be real. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it all.

Morgan: Yeah, not so fast. Stick around, watch a movie with us!

Nancy: Are you sure?

Knox: Of course we’re sure, squirt.

[ninyard]

hi nin! could you maybe… possibly… perhaps… elaborate on your thoughts about jeremy giving kevin a praise kink… perchance…

okayokayokay im going to try my very best to answer this one without going into writing something wayyy too long as per usual (i dont think i succeeded) or just writing full blown keremy smut (wish me luck)

SO

kevin is not used to being congratulated or praised for how he plays; the master always has something to critique him on, the ravens aren't exactly fond of compliments, and something about the "son of exy" "one of the best" "unbeatable" comments from the press or the media never feels,, legitimate to him. maybe the first few when he was a kid and doing well on his high school teams or when he started becoming a big name in exy, they were really meaningful to him, but it kind of lost it's novelty after a while. there's only so many "how does it feel to be the best?" comments he can hear before they start to feel almost like an obligation from them to him. these interviewers, these journalists, these commentators; they don't know him. so, the older he gets, the more he feels like his talent isn't really appreciated. he rarely hears a "good game!" from anyone that matters to him. he rarely hears a "you played well!" from someone who can look him in the eyes and truly, truly mean it.

then; maybe it's in his first year with the ravens, and its the first time kevin has played against usc (or, maybe he's younger, and it's the first time he's played on a national level with his high school team, playing against jeremy's high school team, and their friendship starts when he's 16/17 instead of older) and kevin hears it all - kevin day, son of kayleigh day, amazing, talented, brilliant. he smiles and thanks whoever he has to politely, and goes on about his day. meaningless and unimportant formalities that are just that. but he meets jeremy knox, who he's heard rumours about, who the whispers have claimed is one of his biggest competitors in the league, and kevin is,,, taken aback. from the moment he lays eyes on him, he's smiling, shaking hands with people much older than himself without a twitch or a deep breath to calm him down. kevin watches as he turns his back, and how his smile stays wide on his face, more than just a media-trained look into cameras and into the faces of the people more important than himself.

jeremy looks around the court as the two teams are having their warm-up time, until he locks eyes with kevin and his already wide smile gets wider. he practically bounces across the court, and shakes hands with riko first, as riko whispers to kevin in japanese to not let this dumb surfer waste any more of their time. then, he turns to kevin, and takes his hand sincerely into his. he looks him dead in the eyes, shakes his head like he can't believe this is happening, and tells him, "it is an honour to meet you. there's very few people out there that play like you can."

riko is jealous, of course he is, and kevin feels weirdly almost embarrassed by the compliment. he thanks him genuinely and tells him that there's no need to be so kind, but jeremy, with his hand still in his, he says something else like "there's only kind things to say about someone like you," or that it wasn't kind; it was the truth. he tells kevin he's excited to play against him, with an obligatory compliment sent to riko, too, but kevin could tell that it was his one that was genuine.

the game goes on, kevins team wins, they're crossing the court after the game and jeremy takes a second longer with his hand in his again, "that's how exy is meant to be played," his smile is toothy and real, "i've never met anyone as good as you,"

oh, kevin walks off that court trying to hide the blush that covered his cheeks. when they found a way to reach each other afterwards, and they stay in touch, meeting up every once and a while when games and banquets and events allow for it, kevin is almost infatuated with jeremy's kindness. everything that leaves his mouth, every compliment that he says feels so heartfelt and thought-through and real that he feels like he's never heard these praises that he's heard a million times before. and it's not like jeremy is kissing up, either, the compliments are casual and appropriate for the conversations that they have.

but kevin is a teenager with a bare basic understanding of his sexuality and his body in general, and he's really not sure why when jeremy compliments him like this, he feels like that. he's not sure why he feels this twist in his stomach when jeremy texts him after a televised game that he played well, that he did a good job, that he's so good at what he does and so brilliant to watch. to make a long story short, kevin realises he's turned on by being praised because of jeremy, because of how he talks about how kevin plays, how he compliments him in a way he's never been spoken to before. (of course he feels guilt and shame the first time he,, imagines jeremy telling him he did such a good job. but he also feels how it feels to picture him saying that to him. and the times that he thinks of jeremy are the times he remembers, the times he thinks of over, and over, and over, and over and-)

(the other option is another thing im working on right now - when kevin is trying to figure out his sexuality, and finds himself in an experimenting kind of phase, jeremy is the only person he trusts to help him figure it out. jean is there, of course, but he's too,, close to the nest. he's too close to riko. jeremy doesn't even intentionally praise him, but he feels how kevin stills and how the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand up when he says that he feels good. jeremy is the one who brings it up sometime afterwards, asking if he wants to be praised, and he has to be the one to explain to kevin what it means - an explanation that becomes a demonstration that becomes a Praise Kink that kevin didn't even know he had)

[ketchup-monthly]

i finished My Adventures With Superman, and this is my only takeaway

[starculler]

strap in for this week's fic flavor: the failsafe episode of season one of the young justice cartoon except the simulation just won't. fuckin. end.

(fics that inspired this at the end)

If I ever did sit down to make my own fic, I'd split it in 3 parts:

The Simulation: bits and pieces of the 40 years Dick lives after most everyone he knows has died

The Return: the immediate aftermath and healing from the trauma of having not-quite-actually lived a whole life only to wake up and find out it was all fake. nothing traumatizing about that whatsoever.

The Unintended Consequence: aka the twist I'd love to add and would hint to in the second part - finding out the simulation, through martian mind fuckery, pulled from the real world (and in many cases, from real minds). Dick meets a bunch of people he didn't think were real outside the confines of his simulated life. A bunch of rowdy, heroism-inclined teens across the years get to meet the sibling/friend/mentor figure they all dreamed up one night.

(actual idea snippets under the cut)

.

Dick Grayson is 14 and most of the world's heroes have died. He planned a suicide mission that left him the sole survivor of a doomed team he helped found. The invasion may have been stopped, but is this really the price he wanted to pay?

The first face he sees in the infirmary is Roy's, and he has to close his eyes and just breathe for a few minutes because for one painful moment he'd thought it was Wally. But this isn't the world where his best friend miraculously survived alongside him. This is the one where he got his best friend killed and didn't even give him the courtesy of following behind him. Behind them.

.

Dick Grayson is 27 and has lived longer without Bruce than with him. The invasion's anniversary is always a tough day for him, but that morning seems especially harrowing. He'll get shit for it later, but can't resist stepping out onto the balcony of the manor's master bedroom (Bruce's old bedroom) for a smoke -- his first since he'd promised to quit if Jason, just 15 then, did too.

"Bad habits tend to pile up," he'd said, a rueful quirk to his tired grin. He'd tapped the cigarette twice on the railing and added, lower, "and this one's especially nasty, huh."

He inhales, watches the sun creep across the horizon, and lets acrid smoke burn through his lungs for a long moment before blowing it out in a small cloud. His eyes water, but he doesn't cough. It tastes just as bad as it did the first time he smoked one, not even a year after the invasion and treading water as Robin proved insufficient.

There hadn't been enough heroes to go around then, and Dick had been trained by one of the best. It hadn't been fair, but it had been his plan that had ultimately stopped the invasion. His shoulders everyone's expectations fell on.

He takes another drag, then smudges the lit end against the rail he's leaned on when he hears a boot scuff purposefully against the roofing above him.

"Todd and Pennyworth will be upset with you."

He doesn't turn around. Damian doesn't jump down to join him.

.

Dick Grayson is 54 and wakes up in a room full of ghosts. He hears his long-dead father-figure tell his long-dead team about a simulation they weren't meant to win. A training exercise gone wrong and only half a day spent under their mentors' careful, if slightly panicked, supervision.

He looks at his hands, watching the way his gloves crease when he flexes them in and out of tight fists. He looks at his team, their eyes a little haunted but shoulders slumped with relief even as they grumble. Batman's heavy, gloved hand settles on his shoulder and the weight of it is a nauseating mix of foreign-familiar.

He opens his mouth. Closes it.

Tears prick his eyes behind his domino mask, and he tells himself the suffocating, acidic void building in his chest is just some leftover side effect of the ordeal and not the grief-guilt of outliving yet another family (no matter that they hadn't been real in the end).

.

Dick Grayson is 16-going-on-56 and well used to the coincidences piling up between his simulated life and the real thing. Some of it -- missions and villains he remembers cropping up -- he's marked for Bruce to review and sort as he pleases. Some -- security for the cave, team building anecdotes, and training regimens -- he's shared with the team. And some he keeps only for himself.

Tim is one of those. He knows it's not fair to the kid (so much smaller now than he ever was when Dick lived his simulated life), but he can't help being selfish just for this. Tim is the one kid he's sure he didn't make up, and if Dick's taken to babysitting the kid just to be near at least one member of the family he built for himself in the wake of the worst days of his life .... Well, anyone who says shit about it can happily stand in line to have their teeth kicked in.

Despite this, it still catches him off-guard when he sees a familiar face pop up in one of Bruce's reports.

Jason Todd, caught boosting tires off the batmobile, is nearly the same age now as he was when Dick met him. He stares at the words, but none of them really sink in beyond the kid's name and address. He's moving before he's even made the decision.

He's used to the world kicking him when he's down - lived it for 40 frustrating years. But he has Bruce again. And things with Tim have been so good. And he's always been selfish when it comes to family. If he could just see Jason. If he could just meet him. If he could talk to him.

If if if if if--

.

Inspirations:

Circles in Shattered Mirrors by InfinityIllusion

Fine (But Not Okay) by CharlotteDaBookworm

Verisimilitude by mutemelody

[lala-blahblah]

I will never make this because it would be for an audience of one (me) but ever since reading "If we Were Villains" (story about serious drama kids in college who perform shakespeare and deal with a murder) I have been entertaining the thought of a crack fic crossover with High School Musical The Musical The Series where the staff decides they will no longer put on shakespeare after the tragic accident that happened at Thanksgiving, because Shakespeare plays would only increase the tension and drama. So they hire Ms. Jen who decides their spring play will actually be High School Musical (which exists in the 90s in this universe) and it ruins the vibe so much that everyone gives up on being dark and mysterious because they're universally pissed at Ms Jen for making them learn choreoraphed basketball dancing.

[puppyeared]

Atla live action 😐

[senselessalchemist]

finally have an actual job so maybe I can stop being a hermit and get officially divorced and feel sort of financially stable and possibly try dating again and get a cat ??? is that allowed? no I probably shouldn't unless I get a bigger place and can have two cats to be friends

downside is when the fuck am I supposed to draw dumb comics if I'm working for hours and hours a day? Hell and suffering on earth. maybe i should get an iPad or a whatthefuck ever and draw on the commute so I don't lose even more of my meager art skills

[1o1percentmilk]

something that bothers me is my inability to see people as people and rather more as a collection of themes/motifs/objects/skills

[thats-my-passion-right-there]

I finally saw the mean girls musical (the movie one) I have so many fucking thoughts oh my god

[yuribalisms]

Essentially what it is all boiling down to is I have fully realized I am bad at being a person, that will always be true, and I don’t know how to handle that

[niuxita21]

My life will never be the same again hbu

[omotelie]

WHERE’S MY FUKING CAPO

[toolusingmammalgirl]

Disconnected Thoughts on Art Reproduction:

Hokusai's Great Wave fascinates me because, unlike almost every other artwork in that bracket of fame, it was never a bespoke piece that was only later reproduced. It was a commercial print right from the start, and while versions of it can be identified as belonging to different print runs, there is no meaningful 'original' aside from the long-since-discarded printing plates.

Even better, this state has been imposed on artworks that were once unique. In 2021, the art collective MSCHF bought an Andy Warhol sketch at auction for $20,000, made 999 meticulous forgeries of it, shuffled them to destroy any record of which was the original, and sold each piece for $250 as Possibly Real Copy of 'Fairies' by Andy Warhol, by MSCHF.

As with many smartass art collectives, MSCHF's projects range from eye-rolling to kinda clever to brilliant, but I think this is their magnum opus. It has exactly the kind of unwieldy literal title I adore. The original work has been arguably destroyed, but in a way that Warhol would applaud. It's the most pointed way to ask art buyers, do you care about the actual artistry of the work or just the bragging rights of owning the original?

---

Artistic domains where reproduction is trivial are often prone to the Superstar Problem: Why would I listen to the world's 50th-best cellist when I can stream all the Yo-Yo Ma I want just as easily? NFTs were pitched as a solution to this, marking the original or master copy of a natively-digital work to let it retain value. But even if the crypto market didn't have its own 2008 every few weeks, I don't want fine-art auction houses to be the future of digital art, especially when there are already plenty of existing ways to mitigate the problem. A fursona, a tabletop-game character, a niche Blorbo, etc. are all bespoke value-adds that enable a much greater range of artists to get commissions. But these require a culture of art fans who don't care about flipping it at Christie's, often overlapping with fannish cultures where plenty of artists operate at all experience levels.

I don't have any tidy conclusions for this, but I just want to say that an earlier version of this process - "paint me a biblical scene, and put me in it to flex my wealth and piety" - culminated in one of the funniest artworks I've ever seen, Francisco de Zurbarán's Christ Crucified (With Donor):

[copperbadge]

Recently I ran across an article about an art center that was doing creative expression classes for people with disabilities. Not that unusual, I've encountered that and trauma-oriented art therapy before, but it was the first time I'd come across the idea since getting diagnosed with ADHD. While the class was aimed more at high-needs disabilities, it occurred to me that I could -- if I wanted -- make non-prose art about being disabled.

Outside of my work in scene design I've never been much of a visual artist because I've never felt I had the combination of "something to say" and "a meaningful way to say it", but I started to question how meaningful and complex I really had to be to just make some statements about having ADHD. I can do it in prose, after all.

So I started thinking about how you would talk, in visual language, about things like time blindness, shame stemming from undiagnosed disability, the shift in behavior that medication can induce. Ways to express my condition to people who don't experience it. I still didn't really know how to build the pieces but whenever I went to an art museum I'd think about how I might do a gallery installation. The centerpiece of my mental gallery was a pair of barcodes, one marked "Neurotypical" and one marked "Neurodivergent".

[ID: An interior view of a small booklet, with pages marked 1 and 2, showing barcodes -- on the left, labeled Neurotypical, and on the right, in slightly weirder configuration, labeled Neurodivergent.]

And then I thought, why not make a zine? Nothing you're thinking of couldn't be put in zine form instead of on a gallery wall.

[ID: The booklet continues to pages 3 and 4; on page 3 is a postage-style label reading AUTISM with up arrows on either side, and on page 4 is a QR code labeled ADHD. The QR code technically should work but it just dumps a block of text I wrote about having ADHD into a browser.]

I grew up with zine culture in the 90s and I always wanted to make one but much like with visual art, I never felt like I had the right kind of thing to say; either I had too much to say or too little, and anyway I wasn't confident that what I wanted to do wouldn't just come off as trite and obvious. But you can make a six-page zine out of a single sheet of paper, so I did: I made Helpful Labels For Strange Brains by idab zines, a division of Extribulum Press. (i--dab is a term for a cuneiform tablet that contains a royal communication.)

[ID: The last two pages feature the same image -- a cereal bowl with a spoon in it, the spoon containing a single Adderall pill. One image, however, is captioned "Wake up. Pour yourself a cup of iced coffee. Fix a bowl of cereal. It's going to be a good day." while the other is covered in a detailed ADHD-style step-by-step process for the same actions, culminating in "It's going to be a day like that."]

I'm pretty pleased with how it came out -- the art all looks intentional and it still has that "taped this together after school" aesthetic I remember fondly from the 90s. And the confines of six pages, each only a few inches square, offers a good structure to keep things clear, simple, and meaningful.

[ID: The cover of the zine, labeled "Helpful Labels For Strange Brains" in a kind of esoteric stampy font.]

Especially nice is that if you wanted to you could just hand out the flat sheet, and let folks fold it into a booklet or not -- there's instructions for folding it on the back of the zine. Additionally I have some sticker backed printer paper so I could print it such that you could literally turn the labels into real labels.

Anyway if you want it, here ya go. You can print it on a single sheet of paper and follow the instructions on the back to fold it. I thought about selling it but I do not have the spoons to do a bunch of printing and folding and shipping.

[sylvies-chen]

AHHHHHHH THE NEW PERCY JACKSON IS HERE here are my thoughts for episode 1:

SPOILERS AHEAD

They’ve already amped up Percy and Sally’s relationship SO MUCH compared to what they did in the movies, this was so good and UGH my heart just breaks for them percy is such a mama’s boy and he’s the only true joy sally’s had in her life for the past 12 years… yeah somebody sedate me…

PERCY SAYING HE THINKS HIS BRAIN IS BROKEN AND HE CAN’T HELP NOT FOCUSING oh my god the dyslexic adhd rep is so real I’m remembering how meaningful it was to have this in the books growing up

grover my baby is killing it I love him <3

percy being mad that his friend has been gaslighting him this whole time ohhhh 😢

SLAYYYYYY PERCY WITH THE MINOTAUR they beat the bad cgi allegations so hard

idk why but sally jackson being an olivia rodrigo stan makes so much sense to me like yeah she’s just a girl trying to get through at the end of the day and probably the best time in her life was when she was in her twenties and in love with a god like nobody captures heartbreak in her twenties like olivia

[fipindustries]

the interestesting thing about the matrix, as presented in the famous 1999 film "the matrix", is that is actually not that bad for one specific reason. the people there are real.

its telling that in the movie neo is not given close friends or family or a partner or any meaningful kind of human conection, it helps to sell the world as distant and fake and inhuman.

but the thing is that any relation you form inside the matrix... is actually a real human conection. like say you are in the matrix and you start dating this really cute, cool person who likes to play boardgames and s a fan of romantic comedies and is studying to become and architect. that is a real human who is somewhere in the rows of human cultivated fields connected to a bunch of tubes floating in goo. but when they are talking to you in the matrix they are actually talking to you. the things they say actually mean something, the love you feel for each other is real.

like, thanks morpheus, your fight for Zion is cool and all but i have a daughter, i have my best friend with whom i went to college. and morpheus might say something about how the college was fake and it never existed but the moments i had with my friend were real!

the real problem with the simulation machine is solipsism. in a premise where you ARE actually the only mind that exists and everything else was a simulation then, well, that is a lot more scary (would it? if all your friends were AIs would that mean they were not real? food for thought), but my point is that is not the premise of that movie.

i would really like a story where someone is woken up from the matrix and they are resolute to find their partner somewhere on the fields of bodies maybe to wake them up too. or maybe the partner convinces them to go back into the matrix, i dont know. there is a lot of place for drama there.

the last matrix movie sort of touches on that but i feel it doesnt really count because it does it with neo and trinity who both got to know each other outside the matrix and also they were both forcibly put back and whatever