#difficulty processing

[asavt]

More warmp ups/ideas for that one AU that is still in the google docs.

[bannock-freak]

so honest question, those AI bros who do the 'prompt to image' thing - do they get the meditative 'throwing my whole mind into it' mindful zen out of it? the feeling of challenge and growth and even getting your feelings out of you along with the images in your head?

cus i feel like that just wouldnt do it for me ykno? throwing some words into a generator wouldnt be enough for me, but with how possessive some of them seem to be of 'their' 'work' ...

[miss-americanbi]

can yall imagine what it would be like to be just a normal guy trying to get your paperwork done and cleared on the enterprise so you can go back to your tiny cube of a room to decompose but the captain and first officer are too busy making eyes and odd hypothetical queries at each other to sign off on your shit? i’d throw myself out the airlock.

[cloudinal]

Happy Pride !!

Hoodless version below cut

[st-hedge]

MGSV sketch dump. The brainrot is thriving

[howlsofbloodhounds]

Not really sure how to word it but just had the thought so I’ll just say that canonically, killer expressing his emotions or appearing to have any at all seems to be something considered very out of character for him by the other characters around him.

Swap fully believes Killer is “emotionless,” because he heard so from Ink or Dream—one of them—but the difference is that Swap thinks he can make Killer “feel” again and thinks that’ll help or save Killer in anyway.

Not seeming to realize that Killer, even in Stage 2, already does have emotions; he just doesn’t express them often, they’re extremely rarely ever shown outwardly or felt intensely, he’s rarely ever motivated to do anything just because of an emotion besides maybe boredom, curiosity, and fascination (such as him liking Color sm that he’s able to even identify that he does, in fact, like Color, and yet that is not enough to trust Color or the emotions Color inspires from him—potentially feeling so bored he decides to explore this feeling of “like” for Color out of curiosity) and he cannot identify or understand what emotions he’s feeling unless they’re intense enough to be noticeable and it’s happened to him before (liking toriel.)

[ryllen]

i thought / m a n / these girls are quite heartless 🤣 when i accepted the quest at /clearly/ inconvenient time to swim & dive

[dullahandyke]

'eimear you keep making the same exact post' well once again i must reiterate he is the illusions guy

[ID: a picture of Ienzo from Kingdom Hearts, saying, "Hi guys I'm soooo well-adjusted and nice now! Don't worry about the whole 'growing up in an emotional suppression cult for all my most formative years' thing, or the 'used to be renowned for being mean and manipulative' thing. I'm friendly and normal nowwwwww, trust." A large red arrow points to him and loudly says, "The fucking illusions guy."]

[writingweasel]

Look at him go!

[queer-omens-in-the-archives]

Didn't get around to drawing last night because board game night lasted longer than expected; caught up today, so you may look upon the blorbos now.

[chocolate-eye-candy]

A transition in my life has occurred and is still going

[venusiinfurss]

hate when someone brings up generative ai at the function and i have to bite my tongue and hide what a crazy bitch i really am

[shortnotsweet]

QUIET ON THE OLD FRONTIER (excerpt from THE THRILLING AND NOT AT ALL REPETITIVE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MAN AND KID DANGER: “A CHRONOLOGY OF ENTIRELY TRUE AND HEROIC EVENTS COINCIDING WITH THE END OF HISTORY”) [1] [2] [3] [4]

Well, you know how it goes down in Hollywood: the sun never sinks on the West Coast, and no one can ever die for real.

[ Henry’s expression is frozen, part acceptance, part trepidation. A stallion stands in the forefront of the second panel, backlit by the stretch of desert and a yellow sun. The horse’s front leg is dotted with red; below, Ray is mid-grin with his arms outstretched, hands cut out of frame. The horse, mid-motion, flees toward the horizon. It won’t make it. ]

“I just can’t quit you,” is the kind of thing he would say, big hands outstretched to clasp the back of his neck or to fit over Henry’s windpipe like a noose. It’d be a bit, with a Southern drawl and eyes not quite meeting his, but there would be just enough substance that Henry could pause and think, Well. Maybe you should.

Somewhere underneath that ego is a person capable of letting go, of cutting their losses. Henry’s seen the Old Westerns in their grainy film and open desert, and knows the kind of look good men get in their eye when their horse buckles. It’s the same guarded expression he wore when Drex came barreling back in, looking like Henry might in a few years time—angry, bitter, and stuck in the same place after all those years. Drex came back on his own, but still holding the old reins. Maybe that’s a difference between Ray and the good man; when Henry breaks his leg, he gets benched and pulled from the field. He’ll be back out again the moment his femur mends because he won’t see the break for the escape it could be. A fracture is never just a fracture, and a boy is never just a boy.

A horse with a bum leg gets taken into the field. It can’t return because it never leaves. Oh, well. It was a good beast, a good ride while it lasted.

PANEL NOTES:

The first chapter of the fic “bite your tongue” by ao3 user irregularsatanist (slavishtrust) motivated this significantly, although this is not explicitly lifted. I am obsessed with their mind! Every time I read and reread, my fingers get the itch to storyboard. Much to say, and more to come, surely. (I’m actually being so, so, so serious, the levity of their work is what incepted me into this hyperfixation and every version of the characters I have in my head is inadvertently colored by the blueprint of trauma, codependency, and exploitation in the aftermath of young adulthood that their continuity of portrayal has lain out. I’m not kidding I’m being so real about this rn)

Something about the Wild West motif is just really, really compelling to me: empty space, inherent isolation, man in nature, evocative of incoming change sweeping into the country and devastating those that lived before and in the now and yet still feeling stagnant in the hugeness of the land, and the kind of vulnerability that the wilderness digs out of you. There is no difference between the civilized and the uncivilized here. I don’t think I’m super subtle about it.

There is an anonymous mark on Henry’s neck in the top panel. It could be blood, a bruise, dirt or dust, inflicted or coincidental, etc.

Three instances of hands, or hands in omission: Ray’s hand gripping Henry, the implication of his hands extended outward/upward, and the hand holding the gun in the bottom right panel. In the former and latter, they are highlighted with yellow lines.

Henry does not reach back for Ray, but he doesn’t retreat, either.

Henry and Ray’s respective paneling colors differ.

The horse represents freedom & captivity, cyclical tenancies, dehumanization, and escape into the natural.

Here, Henry may even identify with the gun itself. Ray’s hand over his face + neck mirrors the grip over the firearm, and the line where flesh meets object (or, in this case, Henry) is highlighted by the same line work.

The horse envisioned is a wild one that was groomed into captivity and subsequently domesticated. In most ‘horse’ narratives, the struggle culminates in the question of freedom—or return to nature—as opposed to the human need to keep. By allowing a creature of nature, which was not born into civilization but rather introduced into it, to return to its motherland is a humanist act and therefore a rejection of corporate or urban conformity. The horse exists as an objectified commodity, one to be used or paraded. To relinquish the horse demonstrates more than love, arguably something more important: respect. To respect nature is to relinquish the grip of expansion.

I feel like this is the moment when Henry returns and they both reunite with one another after a period of time. Ray’s expression, while still ambiguous, is much easier to parse than Henry’s. Henry, of course, considers himself the defective horse, and weighs the three possible routes: escape (back) into the wild, to be taken into a field and shot (real Old Yeller style), or to be ridden again. Each carries their own merit and implication of autonomy.

The reality of each unfolding is still dependent on Ray: if he lets him go, if he decides Henry must be discarded, if he utilizes him still—or, if he is defective at all.

Ray’s problem isn’t that he’ll be tempted to shoot the horse, but instead that he wouldn’t. The good man takes the creature out of its misery if he can’t heal, house, and release it. This guy would rather have a bloody horse in his house until the end of time than admit he shouldn’t have had it in the first place. From Ray’s perspective, the reunion is best characterized as the return of the prodigal son. To Henry, this is more of an ego death in slow motion.

Ego Death: “The disappearance of an individual’s sense of self, or the removal of one’s perception of oneself as an entity separate from one’s social or physical environment.” (Britannica)

Prodigal Son: “…a man or boy who has left his family in order to do something that the family disapprove of and has now returned home feeling sorry for what he has done.” (Cambridge Dictionary)

The chapter title, “QUIET ON THE OLD FRONTIER” is a reference to All Quiet on the Western Front, the English title of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel about the traumatic aftermath of World War I. The term, “all quiet on the Western Front” is a colloquialism referring to a lack of progress, or stagnation. “Front” is interchanged with “frontier”, Americanizing the phrase to refer to the Old West and settlement. California, on the Western Coast of the U.S., is assumed to be in close proximity with the location of the narrative.

Of course, “I just can’t quit you” is the iconic dialogue between cowboys Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain (2005), the epitome of the modern Western movie (based on a novel of the same name). Here, the context is not exactly the same, but still (uncomfortably) adjacent. Sometimes, quitting is good. It can help you grow up big and strong.

[abrubag]

Butchlander - She's Not Afraid

youtube

[thebrutaliste]

Adrien Brody as László Tóth The Brutalist (2024, dir. Brady Corbet)

[irisbleufic]

Further to what I just reblogged: is anyone else having an extremely hard time figuring out what’s happening in many scenes of The Magnus Protocol? I never had this issue with The Magnus Archives. The sound editing seems to be less clean/less precise in TMAGP than in TMA.