#for about a couple of hours tops

[queenerdloser]

every once in a while im like. hm. maybe i SHOULD actually attempt to Style My Hair instead of my usual tried and true method (brush it and hope for the best, rawdogging through life without a single hair product in there except the dry shampoo that allows me to hide my greasiness from the world). so im like okay i'll attempt a Hair Product and see how it goes. and much like every other single time ive tried it my hair immediately loathes the product and looks 10000x worse so in the end i just give up and go back to my messy bedhead ways. this is why i cant be trusted with long hair, i would be letting that shit figure itself out every single day of my life.

[buglaur]

floating heads but this time with shoulders

[bitternace]

WHY ARE YOU SO EVIL!!! /POS. ATTACKING YOU.

Xemnas and Xigbar for 37 if that number hasn't been done? If it has, how about 74?

no puedo pedirle lo eterno a un simple mortal // ay, todo lo que he hecho por ti.

[ID: a mostly black and white drawing with a purple overlay of xigbar and xemnas shown from the hip up on the left side of the image. the background is black and has some diagonal lines with a bit of transparency on the right side. the shadows are harsh, with only a bit of light falling on their faces.

they stand before each other turned to the audience. xigbar, holds the handle and the middle of No Name before him, head tilted down as he looks to the audience. xemnas stands a full head taller behind xigbar, his left hand held some distance below the bladed tip of No Name, his left eye is covered by his fringe.

xemnas visible eye is painted ochre with a white pupil, while xigbar's eye is white and gold. The eyes on no name's handle and the gazing eye on the blade are a vibrant cyan. the caption reads the spanish lyrics "i can't ask a simple mortal for a forever" and "oh, everything i've done for you." /End ID.]

close-up under keep reading.

[betterthanbatman1]

Umm I love them???

[nighty-night-nh]

Should've expected something to go wrong today, it is the ides of March, but I did not expect to spend 8 hours in a power cut. Thanks for that one Ceasar.

In other news, I read the entirety of Alex Rider - Skelton Key today! Great 3rd entry but also wtf do you mean their putting this 14 year old through the Unimaginable Horrors for 11 more books??? He's already had to deal with a nuke in this one??? Hello??? Alan Blunt I'm going to strangle you???

[okom]

this was the video i saw of frank picking up rays solo!! ray looks over at him so proudly when frank fills in for him, but frank didn’t see ray trying to get his attention because his eyes were closed just vibing😩

link 1 (to vid where op describes what happened otherwise i would’ve never listened closer)

link 2 (short vid of frank playing with his eyes closed)

link 3 (full stage angle)

[purpleponder]

Please excuse me if the background is too simple, I just simply refuse to draw a proper background :p

[books-and-dragons]

waterstones special edition of the chalice and the gods i love you

[compacflt]

I have an anecdote about when I worked for a company and a co-worker left to work in a different state on military aircraft. He had to get a TS clearance and because we had worked for several years together he asked if I would be okay with being interviewed for his clearance. I said sure and an interviewer w the gov, arranged to come to my place of work and conduct the interview there. I was asked questions about him like how well did I know him, and whatever answer I gave led to more specific questions like if I answered a question about knowing his wife, they would ask if I thought his marriage sounded secure etc.

This memory of that experience was on my mind while I read your story and I wondered who Iceman would choose for his TS clearance interviews (and who the gov would choose for him) and what would they say? I feel like their "secret" would be uncovered in even a low level clearance (years later I had to submit names for a low level Public Trust clearance for my job) It was so embarrassing because I did not have many friends I was comfortable submitting for that as I kept my work and home life very separate.

Anyway, that is my "cool story, bro"

Thank you for such a great and well researched story!

this is indeed a cool story bro and touches on what is literally my story’s fatal flaw, which is: Yeah, a shitload of people would’ve known about it. I am going to hijack your question to talk about that, so my apologies, though i will get around to your question by the end. This is gonna be a really long post. I have a lot to say and a lot of ground to cover.

So I wanna start out by talking about the structure of this story and its core conflict, because while I’d like to say this story is rooted in an accurate depiction of the US military, obviously that’s not true; it’s rooted in the dynamic of the story that i wanted to tell, which is the story of a guy coming to realize the truth behind a Big Lie—him passing as straight. And that’s a pretty universal story, but it’s made more specific by the fact that a) the guy canonically wants to be the best in an institution that enforces the Big Lie and b) the guy canonically is so successful because he follows the rules/orders of that institution. So, for character growth, to put it simply, the guy (Ice) has to come to the conclusion that the Big Lie is a lie by himself. He can’t be told/ordered that the Big Lie is a lie, otherwise he hasn’t grown out of “just following orders.” (I’ll get to the Big Lie in a second. I made charts and story structure graphs below.)

The only other story about a Big Lie I can think of off the top of my head right now is Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen, which is about a Black woman in Chicago trying to pass as both white and straight. It’s a great book and I’ll try not to spoil it, you should really read it for yourself, but the terminology I’m going to use in this post comes from an analysis of it, so just to bring you up to speed—Clare, the woman trying to pass as white, is recognized by a friend, another Black-but-passing woman, Irene, who is shocked that Clare has abandoned her heritage (the truth of her, that is) and married a hyper-racist white man who doesn’t even know that she’s Black. So the book sets up a dynamic of the Big Lie that I’ve outlined here (hopefully it makes sense):

I built on this dynamic for my fic. Ice is both a “dupe” and a “passing figure,” in that he believes the lie that he is straight and also passes for straight—but it’s also more complicated than that because he’s not actually straight (getting to that). Mav is an “in-group clairvoyant” and can recognize Ice as passing because he is also straight-passing. The Navy are a bunch of “dupes.” But…what is Slider, for instance, or your question’s hypothetical government official who, yes, will 100% find out because people always find out?

In comes my ginormous-and-overly-wordy WWGATTAI Plot and Character Dynamic Summary Graph. You don’t really have to read it all, the only important bits for this discussion are the leftmost column (“plot”) and the green quadrant (“out-group clairvoyants”).

To summarize—people who know the truth can’t actually act on it, because for Ice’s character growth to make sense, he has to come to the truth himself. This forecloses the possibility of any outwardly homophobic action (by which I mean someone like a govt official or one of my lame OCs actually challenging him on his illegal relationship) in the plot, because for 90% of the story Ice is so fragile that he would probably just cave immediately and double down on the internalized homophobia. So, for plot purposes, everyone—including Mav, as it happens—has to sort of tiptoe around Ice’s obvious not-straightness and give him an unreasonable amount of grace so he can figure it out for himself. 

And therein lies the fatal flaw of this story. It is, like, not conceptually viable. Of course people would find out, of course the government would interrogate him about it, of course he’d have to confront the truth much sooner than TWENTY-FIVE years after he first starts messing around with Mav.  Which literally breaks my heart because I didn’t realize it was a fundamentally busted story until long after I had finished writing the base plot & couldn’t fix the overarching problems 😭 The thing is, it had to be this way, because there is at least a thirty-year gap between TG86 and TGM22, and TGM is obviously the emotional climax of the series and my story had to match that. So—fanfic and its canon constraints, everyone. 

But also… I can explain away these logical inconsistencies with story structure & character dynamic graphs to make the story make sense, sure, but it doesn’t change the truth of the matter, which is that… I hadn’t ever really thought about things like security clearances, and therefore wrote around them because I didn’t even know to consider them. And I know there are a bunch of other details in this story that betray my immaturity (anytime I talk about alcohol, for instance—I still am not legal to drink in this stupid country & have only cheap bad experiences to draw on; THE HOUSE—if i could rewrite this story from the beginning they would not have bought a fucking house together, what was I thinking???) and the lack of thought about the real-life logistics and consequences of secrecy is one of them. 

And it’s exactly what I mean when I say “I look at this story and all I see are its flaws,” which is why I wanted to write this post & get it on record. I have just enough life experience to read my own writing and know that it’s fundamentally unconvincing, and not enough life experience to know how to fix it. :(

But, to answer your original question, you’ve got me brainstorming a scene where Ice is asking Slider to be his character witness & Slider’s like “Look bro do you want me to lie to the federal government under oath for you because I will” and Ice has to be like “Legally I cannot ask that of you but”

[therevengeoffrankenstein]

x. average sci-fi milf

[doodlboy]

Ough my hours got cut in half this year

[yandere-daydreams]

do you think that jade leech would work at the dmv?

no, he'd resort to homicide within the first hour. Floyd would thrive, though.

[oh-gh0st]

ok i actually need ot ramble ab that wip

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

the concert experience is just wild man.. like to be able to see people who’s songs mean so much to me. in real life. and to have their words quite literally vibrate in my soul as I scream along with other people who are sorta like me, in a sense. Pictures and videos can’t truly capture the joy and adrenaline that was so very clearly there tonight and that the bands brought in but they help preserve the memory. Thank you Bears in Trees. Thank you Chase Petra.

[hotpinkcyanmillie]

probably not going to watch the new dr strangelove anytime soon here but god “I heard this movie I didn’t watch does something wrong so I’m not gonna watch it and assume it’s propaganda” sure is a fun microcosm of the way people online and especially tumblr talk about media

[kat-n-dog]

ugh ugh

i started out as a trainer at a big-time facility w lots of other young people and it did a lot for me but ultimately the environment was Highly Toxic and too fast-paced for me and i had to leave. and for whatever reason that was enough for the other trainers there to decide that they want nothing to do with me and they have made a point to give the impression that they Don't Like Me even though i have done nothing but be overwhelmed by the expected output of working at that facility (and the weird neurotypical cattiness of the group that i was consistently confused by)

and that sucks on its own but also due to being in the same small community in the same area i am always seeing things they're doing. and due to them being a big hotshot facility that is now owned by a millionaire businessman, they are getting a Lot of really unique and cool education and mentorship opportunities that i do not have access to.

and it just gives me this twisting feeling in my stomach bc despite us all starting out together, and thinking we were friends, i was ousted from the group due to things i can't control. and that led to them making a point to impress upon me that they're better than me. and now they are getting to work with and learn from world names, so that means that very soon, if not now, they will be right.