#forward-thinking-paradigm

[genderqueerpond]

also I Do think we're getting season whatever-this-is backwards

[venussaidso]

Controversial: “Rahu is bad”.

Blackhole = Capitalism.

I notice how majority of people associate negativity with Rahu when it's actually Ketu that is behind reductions, as I recently touched on but through fictional characters. Yes, both can be bad, when they're not balanced, as they are very difficult planets to deal with (being shadowy & illusory).

For example, regarding Ketu's reducing nature in real life, the guy who created CHATGPT has their Sun & ASC in Ashwini. And Oppenheimer had his Sun in Ashwini, too. And Donald Trump, who is leading to the chaos and perhaps destructive shift of the USA, has his Ascendant in Magha. Ketu is the force which initiates the destruction of old paradigms, destruction of societies, of people etc. Ketu is the planet of destruction, and it has no sense. It is of ignorance and darkness, and unfortunately, its power can be used for bad (not always, it's not always negative, I know).

Oppenheimer's and Sam Altman's creations lead to reduction. Also Mula apparently has associations with mass suicide/genocide.

Ketu = destruction, entropy, till nothingness.

Rahu = creation, order, philanthropy, often long-term goals on Maya.

This is why Rahu is so important, it builds on top of the void after Ketu's destruction. The art, the paradigms and laws of societies, the long-term biotechnologies that we enjoy and are privileged to even enjoy, are all thanks to Rahu. They balance each other for a reason.

Possible Swati Moon natives, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

Rahu is not negativity. In reality, Rahuvians are your rebellious dreamers who want to restructure society fit for everyone. Always based on advocating for better societies. But for that to happen, Ketu must destroy what is present. Can't have renewal without destruction.

Hobie Brown is voiced by Shatabhisha Sun native Daniel Kaluuya. He is the embodiment of Aquarius and Rahu combined.

There's a reason why Aquarius, which is said to be co-ruled by Rahu as well, is the zodiac of humanitarianism and forward-thinking ideas to push boundaries. Ketuvians often feel the same way as Rahuvians do but instead of being as constructive in matters of Maya, they are usually detached and apathetic — that's why they'd rather get lost into 12th house activities. While Rahuvians are actively more in touch with matters of Maya. They understand the need for change, but Rahu needs Ketu to build the new.

Rahuvians are the actual builders whose creations will remain long-term, benefitting society and its people. This is why Shatabhisha is the manifestation of Rahu at its highest octave — and this nakshatra, which is associated with prolonged healing and medicine, having its rashi ruled by Saturn, signifies long-term goals for a better, new world. But it is often that Rahuvians are dissatisfied with the current one, exactly why they'd also be attracted to the idea of Ketu's necessary destruction... (this may explain why rahuvians are attracted to ketu-related activities and ketu individuals in general).

[artbyblastweave]

A tool I find generally pretty useful for thinking about and classifying superhero systems is the Wild Talents Axes of Design, a worldbuilding tool from an RPG that I have not and most likely will not ever play. The system categorizes and ranks superhero settings on four axes:

The Red Axis measures Historical Inertia, how much the existence of superhumans causes the timeline to diverge from our own. A high-red setting represents the standard implausibly-recognizable like-reality-unless-noted world-outside-your-window model. A low-red setting is a total alternate history.

The Gold Axis measures Superhuman Inertia (talent inertia in their internal jargon, but we've all got our own names for these assholes.) This one measures how closely superhumans hew to classic paradigms of heroism and villainy, as opposed to branching out into other societal roles or life outcomes. A high-gold setting is the prototypical endless monthly game of cops and robbers; A low-gold setting would be something like Wild Cards or Top 10, where career superheroes are a rounding error (or even a downright oddity) compared to people with powers.

The Blue Axis measures what they term The Lovely and the Pointless- essentially how much weirdness exists outside the superheroes themselves, or, more practically, how unified the setting's cosmology and power sources are. High-Blue settings are the bizarre and irreconcilable genre kitchen sinks full of aliens, gods, magicians, one million ways to get superpowers and three different kinds of time travel. Low Blue settings would be The Boys, Worm, or Wild Cards- any setting where there's a discrete reason that superhumans happened and nothing supernatural going on outside of that point of origin.

The Black Axis measures Moral Clarity, which is about what it sounds like. High Black Settings are the cartoonishly-clear-cut battles of good and evil, low black settings are omnidirectional amoral clusterfucks where the participants have superpowers.

(The joke, of course, being that if you crank all four colors up all the way, you end up with a full CMYK print, and a reproduction of the aesthetic of classic golden and silver age superhero faire.)

Obviously this isn't a perfect system- it suffers from the perennial, probably inevitable issue that the four of these don't granulate equally well but they feel the need to articulate five nodes for each of them, just to keep it neat- and consequentially it sometimes feels a little like they're struggling to justify why some of the arrangements that they're describing are meaningfully distinct from the nearest tick up or down the axis. I'm also not entirely sure how it integrates this fifth axis I think is pretty important- the question of the degree to which the public is aware of superhumans at all.

But it does provide some interesting and useful language for quick-and-dirty compare and contrast work. Watchmen is Low Blue, Low Black, Mid-Red High-Gold. Invincible is High-Blue Mid-Black High Red Mid-Gold. Worm is Low-Blue-Mid-Black-Low-Red-Mid-Gold. I don't even stand by these ratings necessarily, I just think it would be super neat going forward if I were able to throw out a phrase like "High-Blue interpretation of Superman" and successfully convey that it means we're finally gonna get to see Superman fight a wizard in live action, for example. I think there's slept-upon terminology available to us here

[mariacallous]

A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016 that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of a profound threat exploit at the heart of our democracies. But what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is Broligarchy, a concept I coined last summer when I warned that what we were seeing was the proposed merger of Silicon Valley with state power. That has now happened. Writing about this from the UK, it’s clear we have a choice: we help lead the fight back against it. Or it comes for us next. Please share this with family and friends if you feel it’s of value. Thank you, as ever, Carole

Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America, in real time, is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn’t need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation’s most sensitive data and potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did. If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit - whose personnel include a 19-year-old called “Big Balls” - is now raiding and scorching the federal government, department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like. It didn’t take armed men, just Musk’s taskforce of boy-men who may be dweebs and nerds but all the better to plunder the country’s digital resources. This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’ most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.

In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. That’s a good place to start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn’t the great hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and weaponization of 87 million people’s personal data. But this now is the Great Hack. This week is when the operating system of the US was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the protection of the President.

If you think I’ve completely lost it, please be advised that I’m far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper doesn’t mean this isn’t not happening. It is.

In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren’t eating or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what’s happening. There is fact after fact after fact about Musk’s illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story - the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you put the headline about the illegal coup d’etat next to a spring season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it’s business as normal when it’s anything but.

This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She’s a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University and she said this even before some of this week’s most extreme events had taken place. (A transcript of the rest of her words here.)

“It’s very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it's only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive purge immediately. So that's unusual. I don't have another reference point for a private individual coming in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his businesses and locking out and federal employees. It is a coup. I'm a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we're in a real emergency situation for our democracy.”

A day later, this was Tim Snyder, Yale, a Yale professor and another great historian of authoritarianism, here: “Of course it’s a coup.”

History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who’ve lived in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying it. What I’ve learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley’s system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That’s the model here.

Everything that I’ve ever warned about is happening now. This is it. It’s just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.

It’s not that what’s happening is simply unlawful. This is what David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”

And he’s right. The system can’t and isn’t. Legal challenges are being made and even upheld but there’s no guarantee or even sign that Musk is going to honour them. That’s one of the most chilling points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.

Last week, I included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert about the latest developments in AI. This week I’ve asked Mark to do the honours.

He’s a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer, he’s been participating in ‘War Game’ exercises with Defense Department officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn’t see this. It’s even worse than they feared.

“Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies, firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of government. It all at the hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations. The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have been quick to enjoin actions. “So yes, we've experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government. It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the rule of law hold?”

Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That’s the government body with the slogan ‘We are the nation’s first line of defense’. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful ‘buyout’ - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former employees - spies - have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports that new appointees are being presented with “loyalty tests”.

Musk’s troops - because that’s what they are, mercenaries - are acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways. Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended note below) is that they’ve known since the summer that there would be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a living.

And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens’ data, their personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When data is out there, it’s out there. That genie can never be put back into the bottle.

Itt’s what it’s possible to do with that data, that the real nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly personalised targeting can do. It’s a digital coup. An information coup. And we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.

It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power - because data is power - of a kind the world has never seen before.

Facebook’s actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark Zuckerberg spoke was “Move fast and break things”. That phrase has passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with it.

And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more grotesque than the last. And Musk’s career is an exemplar of that, a career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of privacy, stock market manipulation. And lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing Musk for failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.

Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply gotten away with it. I know I’m repeating this, but it’s central to understanding both the mindset and what’s happening on the ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line on a balance sheet. The “cost of doing business”.

On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, who’s been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his Substack to act now and call their representatives.

“Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d’etat. Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he’s doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress. Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call Congress now.”

It’s a coup

I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece on the New York Times website first thing in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab”. It quoted Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University, “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.” It was displayed prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering noise.

There’s another word for an “Executive Power Grab”, it’s a coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed, distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is “business as usual.”

Over on the Guardian’s UK website on Wednesday, there was not a single mention on the front page of what was happening. Trump’s Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of American news. We just weren’t seeing what’s happening in the seat of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading partner, the UK government didn’t even apparently notice.

The downstream potential international consequences of what is happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy and national security quite clear. What he hasn’t yet had is the backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I’m wrong but it seems pretty obvious that’s what Musk’s Starmer-aimed tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK aren’t headed for the mother of all trade wars.

And that’s before we even consider the national security ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The Five Eyes - the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - is already likely breached. Trump is going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that’s going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely dangling the US’s membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia watches, waits and knows that we’ve done almost nothing to prepare. Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet implemented. Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we’re on but there’s no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.

It’s a coup

We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator seizes power is that he (it’s always a he) takes control of the radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn’t that Elon Musk buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in his digital takeover.

It’s both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an information drone with a deadly payload. It’s a weapon that’s already been turned on journalists and news organisations this week. There’s much more to come.

On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later, twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.

This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the opening of the Stasi archive. It’s not. It’s rocketfuel for a witchhunt. It’s hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state. It’s going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that’s been in Musk’s sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed overnight.

It’s a coup

By now you may feel scared and helpless. It’s how I felt this week. I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn’t happening? Really? That’s the plan?

This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It’s a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.

My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about Cambridge Analytica’s illegal hack of data from Facebook while the company’s VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires. That is a reality now.

The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless. So I’m telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on itself too. The event that I’ve spent the last eight years warning about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated. I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where I’ve done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate to a global audience.

But then, it’s all connected. We are living through an information crisis. It’s what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try to continue to do.

And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing this work very almost floored me. But it didn’t. And I’ve learned essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this December.

The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our human rights.

This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and I’ve thought about these words a lot. You have to fight even if you won’t necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.

If you value any of this and want me to be able to continue, I’d be really grateful if you signed up, free, or even better, paid subscription. And I’d also urge you to sign up also for the Citizen Dispatch, that’s the newsletter from the non-profit I founded that campaigns around these issues. There is much more it can and needs to do.

[minkiverse]

PARK SEONGHWA FIC RECS

You can find other Ateez fic recs HERE!

HWA TIME!! A man who is so earth shatteringly gorgeous of course gets written incredibly by atiny 😩 like this man is just art!! As always, I hope you enjoy and support these authors!!

Dividers by @iluvpooks

DISCLAIMER none of these works are mine and majority are MATURE 18+, please read all warnings before reading!!!

Key:

✨ - My Favs

🔥 - Smut (MINORS DNI)

⛈️ - Angst

💗 - Fluff

🍑 - Humor

SERIES

New Horizons - @fivestar-outlaw 🔥⛈️💗 Idol AU

this is just the cutest series!! like meeting him through animal crossing is the most adorable meet cute i want to cry 😭😭 we all deserve a lil bit of delusion as a treat asfgdssfgdf

The Way to His Heart - @edenesth ⛈️💗Joseon Period ✧ Arranged Marriage AU

im a big BIG fan of historical au's and i just loved reading hwa falling for the mc and then doing everything he can to destroy the people that hurt her 😩😩 that kind of devotion is just soooooooo attractive😍😍 it kinda reminds me of the anime My Happy Marriage (which i did not finish OTL) but if you enjoyed that i think you will love this~~

Wallflower pt. 2 pt. 3 pt. 4 - @tenelkadjowrites 🔥⛈️💗 Office AU

seonghwa is mc's nerdy coworker but boy can he fuck 😩😩😩 the smut in this is 🤌🤌 but honestly this fic is so much more than that and how the mc changes and grows as a person because of hwa's influence is so enjoyable to read i just love them 🥹🥹

Sans - @songmingisthighs ⛈️💗🍑 SMAU ✧ Childhood Friends AU

this author really knows how to break my heart 😭😭😭 definitely be aware of trigger warnings for some chapters!!! but this fic was also so wholesome?? like i just love the mc and how they grow from the events of the story 🥹🥹 SPECIAL SHOUTOUT TO SAN AND WOO!!!!

ONE SHOTS/DRABBLES/ETC

sycophant - @ncteez ✨🔥 Business AU

there will always be boss x employee fics BUT this take on it 🤌🤌🤌 hwa is just so attractively straight forward and him teaching the mc on how to dom him is truly just so fucking hot i could scream 😩😩

Untitled - @thetypingpup 🔥 Hybrid AU

The Thing About Pretty Boys - @wonusite ✨🔥 Friends to Lovers AU

never say seonghwa can't fuck.... or maybe do bcs this man goes fucking feral 😵‍💫😵‍💫 i had like a full body physical reaction to how hwa is written in this fic 😩😩 like this is so filthy in the hottest way possible

Dune - @hongism 🔥 Outlaw AU ✧ Biker AU

Untitled - @orgverse 🔥 Sci-fi AU

Warning Signs EP. 1: The Showman - @mphountitled 🔥Rebellion AU

Everyday at the Bus Stop - @tenelkadjowrites 🔥💗

persistent desire - @bro-atz 🔥 College AU

Untitled - @k-hotchoisan 🔥

Red Dress - @wooyoungiewritings ✨🔥⛈️💗 Enemies to Lovers AU

i love a holiday/winter themed fic ok sue me 🫵🫵 its just COZY and this hwa drives me up the wall 😩😩 he's such a charming lil shit and the banter is soooooo good 🫠🫠 i looooooooove this couple!!!!!!!

Scattered bunny!seonghwa thoughts - @thetypingpup 🔥 Hybrid AU

Morning sex with Seonghwa - @k-hotchoisan 🔥

Untitled - @sxcret-garden 🔥

realistic sex with seonghwa - @byuntrash101 🔥

VIP Access - @hwashotcheeto 🔥 Idol AU

multiple??? - @lomlhwa 🔥 Hybrid AU

I Can See You - @daemour 🔥⛈️💗 Single Father!Hwa

Untitled - @thetypingpup 🔥 Hybrid AU

heavy and sticky - @k-hotchoisan 🔥

Untitled - @cheollipop 🔥

Untitled - @thetypingpup 🔥

belong to me - @ateezscupid 🔥⛈️ Idol AU

Untiled - @thetypingpup 🔥 Dragon!Teez ✧ Sugar Mommy AU

Untitled - @bombuni 💗

Honest (But Happy) Accident - @ad0rechuu 💗College AU

amazing grace - @yoongiseesawmp3 🔥⛈️💗 Church Boy!Hwa

Untitled - @thetypingpup 🔥 Bad Boy!Hwa

paradigm - @yoongiseesawmp3 ✨🔥 Bartender AU

switch!hwa nuff said 🤤🤤🤤 no but how this author does banter is just so good like idk even know how explain it because it feels so natural and charming and the smut is so fucking good like im in love with hwa and the mc ?????

The Heart's Filthy Lesson - @tenelkadjowrites 🔥⛈️ Toxic BFF!Hwa

Untitled - @hee0soo 🔥

Damnation of a Saint - @byuntrash101 🔥 7 Deadly Sins AU

the lamb and the wolf - @seonghwaddict 🔥💗 Hades!Hwa

Make Me Water - @bangtanintotheroom 🔥 Friends to Lovers AU

Untitled - @thetypingpup 🔥 Cyberpunk AU

mirror mirror on the wall, who's the filthiest of them all - @almightyddeonghwa 🔥 Idol AU

boyfriend texts - @beenbaanbuun 🍑

[thana-topsy]

O’ Father, Unmaker, O’ Sithis, Dread Lord!

The following journal was found next to the body of Tyrdren Suranni, former Dark Brotherhood assassin.

--

As one reaches the end of their life, it is only natural to look back on the branching paths of possibilities past and become reflective of one’s choices. I feel privileged, as both a Dunmer and a career assassin, to have lived as long as I have. In my two hundred and eighty-odd years of life on Nirn, I have spent well over half of them in devotion to our Dread Father, the Lord of Chaos and Change, Sithis.

I began my worship in the same way as many who come to Sithis do: through entering communion with the Night Mother. I consider my joining of the Dark Brotherhood to be my true birth, and, like my first birth, it was not without a great deal of pain and suffering and loss of blood. But I do not wish for this to dissolve into a memoir, for I would much rather use my final hours in praise of the Unmaker.   

I have read innumerable texts on both the founding of our Family and its failed predecessor, the Morag Tong, and I have yet to find my own feelings about our Dread Lord put into words. There is an appropriate amount of fear and awe to be expected when speaking of Sithis. His is a name I have never taken in vain. Yet this fear has always felt counterintuitive to me. Even as a young assassin I did not fear my own death, in the same way that I did not feel remorse for taking a life. There is no guarantee that any of us shall see the next sunrise. If not by my blade, then by another.

I have faithfully followed the Five Tenets for the entirety of my service and devotion, and I have witnessed only on one occasion the appearance of the phantasmal apparition known as The Wrath of Sithis. It is a moment I shall never forget. To see a man’s flesh ripped to ribbons by a spectre he could not touch… I was forever changed, but not for the reasons you might think. When I beheld the Wrath of Sithis, I was struck with clarity that upended the entire paradigm of my life: 

The Sithis we fear as mortals is not the truth of Sithis. 

That pitiful wraith who disposed of my colleague was not sent by our Dread Lord as punishment for breaking the Five Tenets. No. That spectre was something of mortal creation.

One might be led to believe that this would cause me to have a crisis of faith, perhaps even leave the Dark Brotherhood altogether. This was not the case. In fact, I felt great joy at this realization. The Tenets were rules to be followed by a strictly mortal organization, which were entirely reasonable and easily accomplished. However, I was still unsettled by my own family’s view that sending a soul to the Void was somehow punishment. 

I ask you, what is life? What is death? Are we not stuck in an unending prison of consciousness? Of suffering and loss? Are we not trapped in a dream from which we can never awaken? 

Now I ask you this: what is the Void if not the promise of release from the unending cycle of mortal suffering? 

This was my revelation. Sithis, Dread Father, Unmaker, Bringer of Ends. He is the opposite of Life—the antithesis of mortal suffering. To send a soul to the Void is to enact the greatest kindness one could offer: eternal rest, peace. 

Unmaking. 

It is for this reason that I know the hour of my death, for I am the one to order it. I have performed the Black Sacrament with myself as the target. It is only a matter of time before one of my siblings appears to release me from the suffering of a world to which my spirit shall never return. I shall dissolve into the nothingness of That Which Is Not. 

I leave this final journal with a record of my assassinations, as well as an account of the techniques I have perfected over the many years, in hopes that others might follow my path and walk into the Void unafraid. Let us all step forward into our own Unmaking, hand-in-hand.

O’ Father, Unmaker, O’ Sithis, Dread Lord! Accept me as your child and render me into naught! 

From nothing we were created, and into nothingness shall we return.   

[goblinontour]

Twilight

to climb back up from my oblivion

warnings: 1st person pov, talks of pregnancy, miscarriage, feelings, and sex. 

word count: 7k

It is the last day of winter.  

The sun should have shown itself by now, should have crept back into the creases of the earth and returned his freckles stolen by the cold, made us blush under its rays. But the sky remains bolted shut and there’s nothing on his face other than the purple that now seems embedded under his eyes. Shadows where warmth used to be. I bet mine looks just the same — though I still refuse to look in the mirror. I don’t need the confirmation. I know what I’d see: a face that doesn’t belong to me anymore, a stranger carved from sleepless nights and something nameless.  

For two months now, I’ve been paralysed with fear. I think I am living a nightmare, a dystopia. A world where things are just a little off-kilter, where reason slides just out of reach. I read, I listen, I try to understand the impossible. I try to untangle the logic of things that seemed reasonable before, but which oneself can no longer reach with feasible arguments. It’s like running my hands along a wall looking for a door that isn’t there. And all around me, people keep pretending. Pretending to be going about their lives, pretending all is business as usual, pretending they don’t hear the static growing louder.  

I keep looking out to winter trees, bare and brittle, skeletal in their stillness. And he…he is seeking achievements one after the other, as though that will fill the space. As though stacking accomplishments brick by brick will build something strong enough to hold him up. But I see what he’s doing. He’s turning off the soul — too much transparency bothers, you see. Too much honesty, too much feeling, and it would all come apart. So he moves forward, while I remain here, watching the trees, feeling the wind hollow me out.  

There’s a lot of negative emotion I am feeling. 

But that word — negative — doesn’t quite capture it. It’s not just sadness or simple dread. It’s something continually sprawling and seeping into everything. I keep wondering how this collective psychosis is possible? How the world can split in two, between those who see it and those who refuse to? And him. How can he believe that ignorance is the one thing that embodies the solution to all worries, problems, anxieties, and fears that your absence caused? He wants to un-know what has already carved itself into the marrow of things. He wants to believe he can choose not to feel it. And maybe he can. Maybe he’s learned something I haven’t. 

I feel like a cat looking at a calendar, staring at the little squares marked with days and not understanding the meaning of them. Time is streaming, spilling, slipping, and I don’t know how to be or what to do in the remaining time I have to urge for myself. To claw something back before it’s too late.  

I wish I could say it directly.  

But ultimately, I believe that in these circumstances, it is the only choice — to keep it buried, to play along. So that we can continue in the paradigm of the perfect reality and not in the nightmare of despair we’ve been given. Because to accept it, to speak it out loud, would be to let it consume us whole.  

I didn’t realise until now that souls could have a patina.  

Perhaps it’s that thing where you get wiser with age and experience, and so maybe your soul develops a patina over time. A thin film of time and sorrow, a dulling of the once-bright edges. It’s kind of a beautiful idea, in theory, to think of the soul as having a patina. It sounds very poetic. But I just wish it would have come to me in a different way, a more pleasant way. Not like this. Not when I had to come to terms with the fact that I’m dealing with sleepless nights not over someone else’s crying, which should have been yours, but my own.   

There’s a kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.  

You have no way to know, but it’s the kind that settles in your bones when your days are filled with things that don’t move you, but they settle, deep and slow, like water sinking into wood until it ultimately starts to rot. It’s the kind that lingers in the hollow of your throat and makes you choke on nothing. It’s not the tiredness that comes from doing too much, but from doing too little of what makes you feel alive. And the worst part is that I don’t even know what that is anymore. I try to go through the motions like before. Ticking off everything on my to-do list, fulfilling obligations, pretending the structure is enough. But something essential is missing. And maybe it’s not that I need more rest, but that I need more of myself in my own life — more of the things that once made time disappear, made my heart race in my chest so hard I thought it might burst out, those that remind me why any of this matters in the first place. But I can’t find the thread to pull myself back. I said a time “before”, before you that was, but now I realise there’s no before, for there’s no after. 

There is only this.  

It is not a metaphor I’m trying to make out of this ache. It is not something that can be translated into prettier language, not something that can be softened. It is simply what it is. It hurts in a way I’ve never known before. No animal could be as cruel as a man. No man could be as cruel as God. No God should have ever taken you away from me.  

It’s as though the world wants to calcify me.  

To make me hard, to make me unfeeling, to coat me in layers until nothing raw is left. But I don’t want to be unfeeling. I don’t want to be numb. I just don’t know how else to survive…

What have I done?

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold. 

When it is summer in the light and winter in the shade, and you don’t know which season you belong to, caught between the thaw and the lingering frost. The first days of spring in the non-astronomical season, in that strange liminal space where the earth is undecided, as if hesitating to commit fully to warmth.  

It felt childish, but early in the morning, I asked Alex for a willow tree in our garden, which I know is too small for one — the roots would surely outgrow the space, the branches would brush against the house, probably the neighbours’ too. Much too wild, too untamed for something so contained as the space we live in. But I wanted it anyway. I wanted something that would sway with the wind, that would bend but not break. Something that I could watch bloom despite it all…He said he would do it when he wasn’t so afraid of letting something he planted grow again.  

It broke my heart, the little of it that was left still holding itself together.  

We cried together in bed for a while after that, though I think we had stopped crying for you. It was starting to feel like we were crying only for ourselves, for the versions of us that had existed before this grief you hollowed out of us. For who we had been before loss turned us into something else. And maybe that was the most unbearable part of it all — not just losing you, but losing ourselves in the process.  

Since then, I only cry alone in my own selfishness. I do not let him see it. I keep my grief contained with my fists tightly held, which I refuse to unclench. 

But I know he cries too. I hear it sometimes, even through the shut door of the bathroom, even through the thick silence we pretend is nothing. The muffled gasps, the sharp intakes of breath. The way he presses a towel to his mouth to keep it all inside. As if sound alone is what makes it real. It seems acknowledging you would break him entirely.  

I feel sick looking at him.  

Not because I do not love him, but because I do, I love him. I love him so much that it is unbearable to witness his suffering and be powerless against it. Because I know what it feels like to sit with grief alone, to let it consume you piece by piece in the dark, and I can’t stand the thought of him feeling that same emptiness.  

I just want to touch all his loneliness and suck it out of his body, just for one night, at least. I want to hold it inside me, let it settle in my lungs, let him breathe freely for a little while. I want to fill myself with all of his sorrow, let it flood through me, and then press my mouth to his and give it all back. Let him drink it from me and know who he is by seeing it reflected in my eyes.  

I love him.  

And I think I love him enough to try and hold both of us together through the pain.  

I’ve never loved anyone like this, and I never thought there would be anything that could eclipse it. We weren’t ready to love someone more than we loved each other. But we did. We loved you more. That love, when it is that enormous, does not simply disappear. It does not simply dissolve into nothingness like you seemingly did. It lingers with nowhere to go. He made me love myself once. And maybe all of it together — the way he loved me, the way I loved him — caused this much love for you to spark in such a short time. We only just got to know you.

I don’t love myself anymore.  

To be loved is to be known, I know that. But I also know now that love is not always gentle. Love, even in its purest form, can wound. 

At night, I often dream of such a time where I got to love you, where I held you properly and you knew me in return. And then I wake, disgusted by the immensity of my own yearning, by the vast, hollow ache that stretches inside me. It makes me sick, this hunger. So I deny it. I tell myself I do not want it. Because to want would mean to recognise the impossibility of it.  

I think I’m afraid that if I admit I wanted you, I will have to admit that I won’t, and can never, have you.  

And I know — God, I know — that this hunger of mine is not love in its purest form. Not like the love you have shown me. This is something else. It’s possessive, I know. A need to take and take, to grasp at what is left until I am sure my fingertips have memorised every remaining trace of you. Until I have devoured what still lingered and made it part of me, hoarded it like a secret I refuse to let time erode. An act that, in the end, would mean forsaking your existence. 

To keep you only as something I consume, something I ache for, something that I refuse to let go of…

Would that mean I never really let you be real at all?

It was summer when we planned you.  

The whole city was empty, as if it had been invented just for us. The kind of stillness that only happens when the heat chases everyone indoors, leaving behind only the sound of bugs and the distant hum of traffic and us brave ones. Our footsteps echoed on the warm asphalt, his hand trembled slightly when I touched him — it was subtle, but I knew him too well — I felt it in the way his fingers tightened around mine for a second before loosening again.  

The sun was slowly going down, stretching out the day in that lazy, golden way it does in the thick of summer. It put on a real show that afternoon, casting him in gold all over. It made everything feel like it was plucked out of an old film where the colors are richer, the emotions sharper. I could feel Alex’s warmth from a mile’s distance, though the sweat prickling on the inside of his palm and onto mine gave him away regardless. He always ran warm, but that evening, it felt different. Like he was burning from the inside out.  

I stopped near an old swing I always saw in the path we walked but never dared to touch before. One of those rusted ones that creaked under the weight of me and of time. I laughed and let my dress slide a little, not for him, not for anyone, but because it felt good to let the air hit my skin, to pretend the world didn’t matter. As if time could stand still. And maybe it did, but only for a moment. It was just me and him, us, and that included you — the thought of you, the unspoken idea of you that had been forming between us long before we had the courage to say it out loud.  

When you finally came around, the time to tell your still out-of-the-loop soon-to-be daddy also did. I wasn’t the most inspired, but you were too much to keep hidden any longer. 

I told him on a drive back home — I don’t even remember where from. Maybe we had just been aimlessly driving, filling the silence with half-finished conversations and songs hummed under our breaths.  

He threw his half-smoked cigarette out the window and didn’t say a word until he saw us safely parked in the mostly vacant parking lot of a nearby restaurant, the closest spot where he could pull over.  

“Did I hear you right?”

I nodded, staring at the dashboard, my heart hammering so loudly I swore he could hear it.  

He exhaled sharply, dragged a hand through his hair, then turned to look at me like he was memorising my face in real-time.  

“Say it again.” he murmured, like he needed to be sure he hadn’t imagined it.  

So I did. And the second time, it felt more real.  

His face changed. I wish I had a better way to describe it, but that’s the only way I know how to say it — it changed. His whole body, too. Something inside him had just shifted, reorganised itself to make space for something bigger than either of us. It was like his organs rearranged themselves to make room for you spiritually, whereas I was deemed the one to take care of the physicality. 

His hands, always so steady, shook as they reached for me. He held my face so delicately it made me feel like I was the sole thing worthy of such a touch. He looked at me like had just given him the entire universe.  

“Are you scared?” I asked.  

“Terrified.” he admitted, his lips twitching like he wasn’t sure if he should laugh or cry. And then he did laugh, it just broke him open at the edges and spilled over with something too big to contain. “But God, I’ve never wanted anything more.”

You made him the happiest I’ve ever seen him.  

Nowadays, when I drive to nowhere, or when I smoke by the window alone on silent evenings, I still see you, and I still see him, smiling as he was, like a movie running endlessly. A loop of something untouchable, something I’ve since lost. 

Sometimes, when the radio plays a song we used to hum absentmindedly in the kitchen, I catch myself looking at the passenger seat, half-expecting to find him there, fingers tapping against his knee, lost in thought, or nervously checking on you in the backseat. I can almost see it, the way he would have glanced back every few seconds, pretending he wasn’t checking as often as he was, pretending he wasn’t entirely consumed by the sight of you. I can even hear him…Alright back there, love? That soft, careful voice of his he would have reserved just for you. 

The phantom weight of your presence is so vivid in my imagination that, for a second, I forget the truth. I’m alone. He’s never here. Just the ghost of him, of you, of a life that almost was. And then the song ends, and the silence that follows is deafening.

It’s summer again now.  

And I miss you…but I miss him too.  

I feel him in the warm light that covers the city, in the empty streets where there’s no one left, in the sunsets that always look like I might see you again if I hold onto that hope. I miss when the world was brighter, when mine and Alex’s affairs were less convoluted, when love was something simple and reckless and ours.  

I see the sudden speeding up of cars below, the slowing down of people as the world gives way to heightened sensations, to feeling everything I have not been letting inside. And then, inevitably, the process of becoming desensitised to it all over again. I miss him, but I do not need any part of him in sharing this sacred moment. I do not deserve to, not when I am with you.  

Even sitting with just who I have become feels unbearable. 

So, I smoke, and I numb myself to my surroundings, looking for a recluse from being myself. The person I am sickens me. I flick the ash onto the windowsill, watch the embers fade, and tell myself I’ll quit tomorrow. But I won’t. Because there are too many things I should have quit by now. This longing, this version of myself that I don’t even recognise anymore…

This grief is part of it too, isn’t it?

It is Friday, late at night in autumn.  

Outside it is raining as if someone is trying to wash the city of its sins. It beats down on our windows so harshly that I can’t drown it out no matter how hard I try. The sound is relentless. The wind howls between the buildings, rattling street signs and bending trees, and for a brief second, I think the whole world is grieving with me. The lamplight outside flickers against the puddles, casting reflections that shimmer and distort — nothing stays still, nothing holds its shape. I stare at them for too long, hoping that they will.  

It wasn’t too late in the pregnancy when it happened. We barely got to enjoy you before you got taken away from us. That, I’ll never forgive myself for. I keep thinking if I had done something differently — if I had been more careful, if I had paid more attention, if I had just…known — maybe things wouldn’t have turned out like this. Maybe you would still be here, a weight in my arms instead of a distant feeling.  

He didn’t take it well, and that made me take it worse than if he did, I think. He shut down, locked himself away in the quiet, unreachable space inside him, and I was left outside, pounding on his door. There was no nursery to go and mourn in. We hadn’t even got around to that yet. There was no crib waiting for a future occupant, no tiny clothes tucked into drawers, no soft lullabies humming through the walls. There was not a body to go and cry over except each other’s…nothing left but him and I and the memory of you, and you were both slipping from me.  

I am left with empty hands — that’s the story of my life. The feeling of absence clings to me. I feel envious of everyone around me. I feel envious of the ones who got to have a headstone, a place to go, a physical marker that proves their loss was real. I wish you would have at least given me that. You gave me nothing, and yet, somehow, you took everything.  

I think about love and not-love. About how love is supposed to hold, to comfort, to shelter. Alex won’t look at me anymore. I lost my dignity so miserably, and I don’t know how he can pretend that we are always ‘fine’. When everything else isn’t, I just want him to be kind to me again — Please be kind to me. Nobody is to blame, least of all me — I wish he would understand that.  

He’s sitting in a corner now, among stacks of books and cigarette smoke, a bottle of whiskey on the floor beside him. The room smells of old paper and burnt tobacco, of rain-soaked fabric and something faintly metallic — that’s probably from the storm. The lamp beside him flickers, the glow catching in the glass of the framed photo we never took down. I don’t look at it. I can’t.  

I’ve been staring at the ceiling for a while, going through nearly everything I’ve ever said to him in hopes of finding where I wronged him so badly. I replay every conversation, every glance, every touch that might have led us here. Maybe if I can pinpoint the exact moment it all started slipping, I can drag us back to the surface.  

“Want some?”

His voice cuts through the silence. He offers his hand to me, holding the cigarette in such a manner that it almost urges me to put my lips on it. I would do it only to feel his fingertips on my bottom lip. His fingers are stained with nicotine, his nails uneven. He’s been biting them again. His eyes fixate on me, ever so slightly curved at the corners, telling me that this offer is all but a test, and that he doesn’t actually want me to take it. His face betrays his intent — he wants no part in me ruining myself.  

For that, I am grateful.  

“Everything okay?” I ask from my spot, refusing to play along.  

“Yeah, why?”

I look at him, and he understands the anger I’m feeling. I don’t know if he’s being thick on purpose to get a rise out of me or if he truly is so out of touch with reality — more than I ever thought he was.  

“Everything’s fine. You don’t have to worry about me.”  

He says it like a fact. It’s his script he’s rehearsed so well he almost believes it. The hand holding the cigarette now hangs by his side rather than near his mouth. It’s still burning, consuming its own life with each passing moment. The ash at the tip grows longer, dangerously close to falling onto the carpet. A part of me wants it to catch on fire and burn everything down, starting with me and him, just so we don’t have to figure out the solution to this game we’re forced to take part in, given no instructions and no way to cheat our way through it.  

“Okay.”

I don’t think I can hold my breath anymore. I’d have to do it until everything around me fell apart, which the majority already has, but I can’t let this happen. I won’t become immune to his sweet sound of ignorance.  

“I’m standing around like an idiot waiting for you.”

I almost yell it at him, but I think it ends up coming out softer than I would have liked. He doesn’t flinch.  

“Waiting for what?”

“Waiting for you.”

“Waiting for…what? What do you want me to do?”

“I’m waiting for you to get rid of me, Al-” I shake my head before he can interrupt. “No, no, don’t you look at me like that. I don’t want your pity. God knows what I’ll do, so please, do not…do not look at me like that.”  

I hold my head high, face up, storing tears in the back of my eyes.  

He looks at me with his own eyes that once made me believe I would matter. The ones that used to look at me like I was the only thing in the world worth seeing. They’ve dulled. Still beautiful — still him — but something has shifted beneath the surface and I am terrified it is irretrievable.  

The rain keeps falling. The cigarette smolders in his hand. The physical distance between us that has become too long for comfort is now shorter, but I am still waiting for him, far from an answer.  

We kiss, the taste of whiskey and fatigue lingering between us, while his cold hands ghost over my warm skin. I’ve been setting myself on fire for this heat in his absence, hoping the flames will keep me warm, hoping fire will heal my soul. When we break apart, the flame has burnt out.  

“If you want to light your cigarette, use the fire in my heart.” I tell him.  

He smiles, and it makes me proud. It makes me feel like I still have something left to give. But there’s a thought at the back of my mind — a quiet, creeping fear I can’t shake…

What if it burns out before he gets here, deep inside me?  

It’s November 2nd. 

You don’t have to know this, but today he made me feel alive.  

The room was cold. An inescapable kind of cold that settles in these buildings that are too old to hold warmth properly. The radiator rattled in protest, working though barely giving off any heat. I pulled the blanket tighter around me, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the kind of cold wool could fight off, or that could be solved by adding another layer. This kind came from the inside out. 

I held a stuffed animal to my chest. It wasn’t meant for you, it was my own — mine only. Small and soft, something to press into the empty spaces where nothing else fit. It was old, one ear slightly torn, stuffing uneven from years of being clutched too tightly. I had it when I was a child, had it through every heartbreak, every sleepless night, and now it was here with me, in a bed that had never felt bigger.  

At some point, I let it slip from my grasp. Let my fingers move lower, sliding beneath the waistband of my pyjama pants. I could pretend I felt ashamed, that I felt dirty doing it. But I didn’t.  

The focus was not to evoke layers of hidden emotion. It wasn’t about longing or sadness or grief. It wasn’t about loss, either. It wasn’t even about wanting him. I’m not going to act like it was anything other than what it was — movement and sensation. A way to fill the time and carve out a moment where I wasn’t haunted by everything I had lost. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to feel. I just wanted to slip away for a little while, to exist in a space that was mine and mine alone, away from the eternal tragedy that we play in without ever understanding it and away from those nocturnal and demented thoughts that torment me. 

I wished to taste the sweet glory of release again. 

What you think is more important than what is real. It might not be the healthiest thought, or the fairest, but in moments like this, it brings me peace.  

“People always think we look for love at our lowest to distract us. I am convinced we do it because we want someone to look us in the eye, to look our ugly in the eye and still choose us.”

That was what I wanted.  

Not to forget. Not to cover up the truths we lived in. I didn’t want to ignore that I was still here, still surviving, even without you. I wanted him to see me as I was — this mess, this wreckage, this person who didn’t know how to hold onto anything anymore. I wanted him to see himself. I wanted him to see me and still believe I was something worth loving.  

I wanted him to tell me that he loved me, even after how I had failed you both.  

I didn’t stop touching myself when I noticed him standing in the doorway. I didn’t pull away or adjust my clothing or pretend like I wasn’t doing exactly what I was doing. I didn’t even flinch. 

He was watching, not in judgment or disgust. 

And so I continued as he stepped closer. So close now that there was no more debating what was happening, that I was fingering myself and crying. I didn’t even stop when he was near enough that I could feel his breath, see the way his hands flexed at his sides, like he wanted to reach out but wasn’t sure if he should. Not when he knelt beside the bed, either, when he kissed my thigh, lifting the blanket slowly with just the lightest touch of his fingers. I had my knees up in the air, bent at the caps, arching my back a bit as Alex climbed next to me. 

The mattress shifted under his weight taking its occupancy as he moved up the bed. He kissed me on the lips, softly, his taste warm and familiar. He covered my mouth with his palm, quieting my sighs, and replaced my fingers with his own between my thighs. I hadn’t felt his touch in so long, I had almost forgotten what it was like. He spread me apart, and though I was still empty — he kept his fingers only on the outskirts of me — I came close to feeling whole again.  

He unbuttoned his jeans, hastily, fumbling. Then he stopped. Rolled over onto his back beside me, one arm draped across his face as if shielding himself from something too bright and painful in the darkness. I turned toward him, reaching down before he could take himself out in his own eagerness, guiding his hand away so that I could be the one to touch him instead, to play with him just as he played with my softest parts. I put my hand down his jeans and talked to him in the way only I could. 

There was a streetlamp just outside the window, its light cutting through the slats of the blinds, casting striped shadows across his form. His eyes were darker in this lighting, his lashes flickering as he watched me, his mouth parting slightly every time I moved my hand. I could hear the distant hum of the occasional car speeding down the street, tires splashing through puddles. 

The world outside was still moving. Indifferent and unchanged.  

But inside this room, time had slowed.  

He took his rightful place above me, pushing me so hard in the process that I nearly rolled off the bed. He was there to catch me.  

He almost said something to me. He looked straight at me, his lips parted, his breath caught in his throat, and for a moment, I thought he might speak. His top lip quivered. He changed his mind and started undressing me. Whatever words he had, he swallowed them down, chose instead to press his mouth to my shoulder, my neck, my jaw. Maybe he knew that words wouldn’t rewrite the past, wouldn’t undo what had already been done and they would change nothing when he had his body there, speaking to me so tenderly. 

The stress that kept us awake all day and all night was dissipating. Maybe it helped to know that we’re all, both of us, we’re all feeling it. That it’s okay to be afraid and we don’t have to be strong.  

We don’t have to serve as role models. 

We didn’t lay down expectations or reshape our mindsets to redefine what was acceptable, didn’t brace for impact in this big approach. We just let it happen, let ourselves fall into each other like we always had.  

I slid across the sheets, curling up into myself, and Alex followed. He took me from behind, his forehead resting against my spine, his hand smoothing over the small of my back and lower onto my bare body, tracing over the dimples his fingers had pressed and carved into my skin so many times before.  

We had sex with one another for the very first time — not as the people we used to be, but as the people we had become in the aftermath of everything, these new versions of ourselves we had yet to discover. 

It was so overwhelming.  

Not just for me, but for him, too.  

I felt the moment it hit him, the exact second everything he had built inside of himself collapsed. He grabbed onto the blanket and pulled it over us like a shield, muffling the sounds that broke free from his throat. He started crying. And when he did, I felt something shatter in my chest. I knew then that he might leave again. That he would get up in the morning, sit on the edge of the bed, run a hand through his hair, and tell me that maybe, in another life, in another city, in another room, things could have been different and we would have had a different fate. 

But we didn’t have another life, we would never have another chance, just this one, and we got it wrong, but that didn’t mean we had to quit trying to make it right. Or, at the very least, make it bearable in its current state.  

He’s the only one who matches my sweetness, who feels emotions so deeply they tear him apart from the inside out. I sank my teeth into his skin, and he listened when I whispered in his ear.  

“Please bite me in return.”

I spoke to him in code, but not only. I wanted him to bruise me. I wanted him to say: Let’s sabotage each other, let’s pretend we don’t know each other, and then let’s kiss.

“I missed your pretty mouth so much.” he told me.  

He moved himself inside of me, and through that shifted the very foundation of who I was. It felt as though our hearts had fucked our brains, untangling every thought, until we were nothing but raw feeling, instinct, and need. There was no logic left between us, no fear, no past or future — only this. The warmth of his breath against my neck, the weight of him pressing into me, the unspoken language of skin on skin, heart to heart.  

It was the most genuine and honest act that had ever taken place between us. The last barricades we’d built to keep ourselves from feeling too much had dissolved in the heat of our bodies. We surrendered — not just to each other but to everything we had been running from. And I think that’s when you know it’s real. When reason drowns in the flood of unfiltered emotion, when desire stops being something you perform and becomes something that simply overtakes you, consumes you, makes you its own.  

We kissed sloppily and fucked lazily, moving slowly. We had all the time in the world. We weren’t just trying to claw our way back to something that had once been whole anymore. His hands, rough and familiar, mapped me out, relearning the territory he’d been forced to forget. Our moans tore through the air, shamelessly, mingling with the occasional quiet sobs we were too far gone to suppress.  

At one point, he pulled back just enough to look at me. His lips were swollen, his eyes dark with something that was more than just lust. “You still feel like home.” he murmured, almost like he didn’t want me to hear it.

I swallowed hard, threading my fingers through his hair, tugging lightly. “Then don’t leave.”

His breath hitched slightly. “I never wanted to.”

He kissed me again, harder this time, to swallow the space between us and make up for every second we had spent apart, every moment wasted on silence and avoidance. 

I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him closer, deeper, until we were no longer just touching but fully entwined. Tears clung to our cheeks, and I wasn’t sure anymore if we were crying from everything else or just from the overwhelming relief of this moment, of still having this, of still knowing each other in this way. He buried his face in the crook of my neck, and I ran my fingers through his hair, nails scratching lightly against his scalp.

“You’re shaking.” I whispered.

He let out a short, breathy laugh against my skin. “So are you.”

I wanted to hold him there, to keep him stuck to me forever in this way, to stop time from moving forward, because for the first time in so long, we weren’t ghosts in our own lives.  

For the first time in so long, we were real.

I didn’t understand him for a while. But now I know that to love in silence does not become reprimanding. The way I feel about him is beyond words and I understand his need for silence. In a manner of speaking, semantics will just never be enough. Not for this. Not for us. Not for the things we have lost. There comes a point when words just won’t do for human beings, for our inherent yearning and need, what only a crescendo can. A pinnacle. A peak. A release so raw that you have to beg the ones above. 

The ones that tell me nothing, the ones that tell me everything…

Oh, why won’t you give me the words?

It’s been a year.  

I didn’t want to be here for another winter. It was too much you and none at all.  

I suggested to Alex that we run off to the countryside. It seemed like a good idea to get out of this place, to slip away before the first snowfall could remind me of what we lost. There were no bags packed, no plans made — we set off with just one extra set of clothes stuffed into the backseat and no set destination in mind, only the silent, mutual agreement that we would let the road decide where we belonged.  

Alex drove, one hand on the wheel, the other resting between us, fingers occasionally grazing my thigh, making sure I was still there and letting me know that he was too. He put on the soundtrack of some Wes Anderson film and let it play, its whimsical, melancholic strings filling the car in place of words we weren’t ready to say. I let myself sink into the passenger seat in the quiet, lulled by the soft hum of Ennio Morricone drifting from the speakers, by the low vibration of the wheels rattling beneath me, carrying us somewhere — anywhere.  

I must have fallen asleep.  

When I wake, the sky outside is thick with gold, clouds gathered around the sun like whites cradling a yolk. Eggy. It strikes me as unusual. It’s an odd thing to see in winter, when the evenings are usually a wash of pale pinks and deep blues, cold and distant. There hasn’t been snow this year either, and I wonder if the world feels as upside down as I do.  

The music is gone, I realise. In place of it I hear Alex humming softly, a sound so familiar and low that it feels like a memory playing on repeat. When I turn to look at him, I notice it instantly — the skin beneath his eyes is raw and there are dried tracks of old tears have settled into his cheeks. He’s cried in his time spent alone behind the wheel. 

He notices me staring and wipes at his face, exhaling like he’s annoyed at himself. “I’m not sad.” he says. He really needs me to believe it.  

I don’t say anything. I just watch him.  

“I cried because…” He pauses, choosing his words carefully, measuring their weight before handing them to me. “Because I have the privilege of watching someone I love very much, even in sleep, and knowing I’ll get to talk to them again.”  

There are a million things I could say, but none of them would be enough, none of them would fit into the space that his words have carved between us. And before I can try, before I can even begin to think of how to hold all of this, the immensity of what he’s just said, his hand is on my cheek, warm and steady. The tactile sensation of it all overtakes me. 

“I was here first.” he declares. 

And you…you are the ubiquitous pest.  

Love can’t be created or destroyed — we’ve established that already. It lingers, even when it’s unwanted, even when it curdles into something unbearable. It stays until it evokes fear and it tears you apart, until you’re left with nothing but the pieces of what it used to be.  

You want me to love you still, but I can’t. I’ll soon catch the rot of you deep inside me that I’ve been too scared to face. Someone has to leave, and I won’t let that be us. I will love you forever, but I can’t. I can’t. I can’t — I won’t — I’m afraid I’ll catch your disease. 

A few months. That’s all it was.  

And yet — sometimes, just sometimes — I wish it would hurt for you too. At least a little. Just enough to make it fair. Just enough so I wouldn’t have to carry all of this alone. But now, it’s all I can do to push you away, to shove you off so I can live knowing that, for once, I saved someone. Even if it couldn’t be you.  

I saved me.  

I saved him.  

I saved us.  

I look out to the sun waving at us as it veils itself behind the clouds, casting long shadows over the quiet stretch of road ahead. I watch it disappear, a slow, deliberate exit, and I think—  

How lucky we are to have known someone that makes saying goodbye so hard.

a/n: Inspired by this request. This is definitely influenced by a lot of what I’ve been reading and seeing recently. I reference ‘God’ and concepts related to that quite a bit, I’ve noticed, it’s something that’s present here as well, and though I’m not at all religious I find it to be an interesting subject when it comes up in fictional situations. I mentioned the other day that I wrote a sentence I really liked, it’s the one at the end of the paragraph about the willow tree. I don’t have much else to add here :)

[prinnay]

Your art is one of the things that I look forward to regularly. I’m saddened that you’re being accused of using AI for your art. You’re so talented, and so inspiring to me. Keep on keeping on.

Hi and thank you! Also my apologies for this late reply! I think that's just the nature of doing detailed-ish digital art for now, until some sort of online paradigm shift happens. I believe some sort of shift will gradually happen, but no idea what. Though not gonna lie sometimes my drawings are a bit off in perspective/lighting, so that might set off a false alarm for someone on the lookout for ai XD

[irinewt]

so fucking happy that i was able to complete both development psychology and theoretical paradigm of psychology notes today, this means i can spend tomorrow studying them both and prepping for the quiz on monday and tuesday :3

besides working on my notes all day i had tutoring which was really fun, i started this online course on coursera for academic writing, because i feel super not confident at my writing skills and id like to improve, especially with academic writing. my tutor assigned me this book to read to get me started on my essay due at uni, im looking forward to reading it!! besides that i had my internship where we discussed case studies and psychological disorders! we got quizzed on them and i think i did pretty well

tomorrow i plan on revising and reading the book my tutor assigned me, along with my internship and maybe ill sneak in a little walk with a little treat for my wellbeing heh

⭑｡𖦹°‧

[punkpandapatrixk]

Full Harvest Moon in Pisces ♦︎ Moon Magick Pick A Card

The Full Harvest Moon, known also as the Singing Moon, was in Pisces on 18 September. It was a partial lunar eclipse and carried a massive Healer Archetype aenergy about it. After all, it was a supermoon in the sign of self-undoing and martyrdom :P It ushered in a deeply reflective time to ponder upon the suffering of Mankind in this all too often unfair world.

‘You’re not yourself when you’re triggered. You become who you think you need to be to survive. If we remain in environments that trigger our fight or flight mode, our identity starts to slip away because our values and personalities are constantly being hijacked by thoughts of fear, panic and survival.’ – some pin on Pinterest

It is unfortunate(?) but it is a significant part of Reality that each and every individual existing within this Matrix is suffering in their own wildly unique ways. Perhaps this is why the Buddha’s whole ass brand revolved around suffering—not to glamourise its concept but to maintain a semblance of awareness of its existence; and how that very thing alone shapes each person’s perception of Reality. Such an awareness...usually, breeds empathy. And that is precisely what this Full Singing Moon in Pisces theme is all about~🥰

‘When I was a novice, I could not understand why, if the world is filled with suffering, the Buddha has such a beautiful smile. Why isn’t he disturbed by all the suffering? Later I discovered that the Buddha has enough understanding, calm, and strength; that is why the suffering does not overwhelm him. He is able to smile to suffering because he knows how to take care of it and to help transform it. We need to be aware of the suffering, but retain our clarity, calmness, and strength so we can help transform the situation. The ocean of tears cannot drown us if karuna (compassion) is there. That is why the Buddha’s smile is possible.’ – Thich Nhat Hanh; excerpt from The Buddha’s Smile

SONG: Fine on the Outside by Priscilla Ahn

MOVIE: When Marnie Was There (2014)

deck-bottom: XVII The Star Rx, Red Historian (John Dee) & Priestess of Protection

[Moon PAC Masterlist] [Patreon] [Paid Readings] [buymeaboba]

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 1 – Deliciously Enjoying Your New-World-Building

e m p a t h y – 3 of Pentacles

There was a time, you built a world up from the ground, with people you thought were your people. Or at least, you thought you wanted to build a world around or with these people. But then you became disillusioned. You realised they were ungrateful, or perhaps, they didn’t quite see the world the way you did. What you thought they wanted similarly as you, in the end turned up to be quite the contrary. Then you realised the Universe had all along planned for y’all to grow differently~

Now you’re done with that old paradigm where you’d been too helpful towards those unworthy of your companionship, or even compassion. Facing forward, you now know that the most important thing is to surround yourself with people of similar ‘values’ and not just ‘goals’ or ‘ambitions’. Spiritual values go far deeper than just shared economy LOL ‘Corporate goals’ or whatever some such 3D-based nonsense. None of that interests you at this point in your spiritual evolution. You want something bigger, more awesome in meaning!

m e r c y – 5 of Cups

You’re still healing or just fresh out of spiritual rehab from this feeling of having lost people and whatnot. But it’s all good because, ‘The peace I have now is worth everything I’ve lost.’ If you’re truly honest with yourself, I’m sure you’re actually glad to have lost these losers. You know deep inside they would’ve never been able to survive what you’ve survived. In many ways, you also know these small minds were never destined for the greatness that you know is just around the corner for you~!

So I think, right now you’re still balancing your thoughts and emotions. There’s another quote that says: ‘Sometimes your heart needs some more time to accept what your mind already knows.’ And that perfectly captures the aenergy you’re currently swimming in. But look around—wow, isn’t it peaceful? The clouds are finally parting and your world is warm again <3

c o m m i s s a r y – 2 of Pentacles

After having gone through the mental struggle you’ve had to deal with, you’re stronger and fiercer in your capacity to deal with bullshit. I see that you’re quicker to deflect someone’s disrespectful behaviour and you’re not tolerating people acting out at the expense of your peace of mind anymore. Back in those days, you compromised so much of your own values to accommodate people’s ‘feelings’ but you’ve realised now that those very people often didn’t think about your feelings or how they’d put you in an awkward situation.

This FM in Pisces, you’re gaining a deeper layer of understanding of the mechanism of the crazies you’ve had to deal with up until fairly recently. I’ve this feeling that you’re dealing with the last remnants of those heartbreaks. You’re not going to ever deal with these thoughts and feelings anymore, so think about them for the last time and bid farewell for good~ From here onwards, you’re peacefully enjoying a new new-world-building without those crickets, so~ HAHAH <3

full moon self-care🔻🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘

Gold Astronomer (John Dee) & Priestess of Patience

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 2 – Done ‘Experimenting’ with Bullshit/Sorrow

e m p a t h y – Page of Wands

Oh, this is the ‘empathetic weirdo’ pile! You must be a Pisces in some way LMAO

This is a very strange aenergy in which you’ve been in this phase of ‘exposing’ yourself to bullshit and suffering in the grander scheme of the Human Experience. You’ve been ‘assuming’ this role of an experimenter or some such, exposing yourself to some degree of toxic experiences for ‘research purposes.’ It was imperative that you had firsthand experiences with various-but-specific kinds of bullshit surrounding this whole Matrix World, all so that you know how to dissolve them once and for all through the act of alchemical transmutation.

You’re a natural transmuter of ‘negative constructs of Reality’, believe it or not. The whole idea of your ‘little experiment’ was for you to have a hands-on experience with certain aspects of suffering within this Matrix, so that you’d be able to ‘vote down’ on qualities that you do not like. In this way, you may resonate with being a Blue-Ray Starseed or a Crystal/Rainbow Child of a Lightworker~

m e r c y – King of Pentacles

Yes, you’re a part of the board members that are able to give your ‘disagreement’ upon negative qualities that are commonplace in this Earth Matrix. The magical thing about your very existence here is that as long as you DISAGREE with something, anything that’s wrong/undesirable about this world, it immediately dissolves. Well, depends on what you’re disagreeing with, but eventually it all dissolves with your dislike and disagreement. You’re just that powerful, you capable but dehydrated bitch~ XD

If you’re ever interested in becoming a public speaker, a content creator, or a whatever else what will allow you to reach, connect and convey your epiphanies to a larger audience, all the more wonderful. You’re meant to be heard and listened to—you’re too wise to live an offline existence in this era of digital connectivity ;P You have a power within you that can potentially encourage and motivate others to co-create a more positive Reality for themselves through their own power of agreeing and disagreeing with bullshit ^o^v

c o m m i s s a r y – 2 of Wands

Anyway, you’re now done experimenting, babe~ I see you. You’ve suffered enough in the name of commiserating with ‘normies’. In some ways, you might’ve also just been breaking generational curses and karma. But that’s all mostly over now! You’ve known enough; you’ve gained enough data/information for building perspectives; you’ve studied enough for an entire lifetime. You’ve exposed yourself to enough of the horrors of the world; now you can clean up and return to your natural state of paradise and peace.

You can still do the magickal work of spiritually transmuting the world’s bullshit from your natural habitat of high-speed manifestation. But now, you’re not a commiserator anymore; not a soldier anymore—you’re a billionaire philanthropist hahahah You see, you have the know-how, the resources and the power to help, but you don’t have to suffer together. Celebrate in this return! You’re YOU again! You’re your true Divine You again!

full moon self-care🔻🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘

Silver Alchemist (Ramon Llull) & Priestess of Inspiration

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

Pile 3 – You Can Now Eat the Cake, Too

e m p a t h y – Ace of Pentacles Rx

More than even Pile 2, you seem to have dealt with an even greater amount of lack throughout your Life. This may be a financial lack for some, but for the most part, this Pile is really talking about a general lack of proverbial SUNSHINE! It almost feels like you’ve never truly been happy or free practically your entire Lyfe! Maybe some of you will resonate with being this way for a long time instead of an entire Life XD Yeah anyway, that was the spiritual lesson, which may have been a carry-on from some previous incarnations~

But now, you’re fucking done. You can have the cake and eat it, too! You know why? Because you’re a goddamn cake factory, that’s why! You’re now able to produce endless amounts of cakes and that’s the secret to your abundance for the remainder of your days. But you’re not greedy either, so the Universe really favours that, too! And sometimes, you always have cakes around because you have other people giving you cakes~ \`★_★`/

m e r c y – 5 of Pentacles Rx

To be quite honest, in a weird way, this aenergy is making me think of royal families LMAO Like these ‘royal’ fuckers ain’t do nothin’ but they keep receivin’. They keep having the best of everything with taxpayers’ munny tsk tsk… I know you ain’t a fucker like ‘em, but this is just the image that comes to mind LMAO It’s a vibe that’s giving ‘Universe’s favourite’ or ‘I get paid for just existing’ and all some such. But unlike evil ‘royals’ on Earth, you’ve achieved this level of abundance because you’ve tapped into your Spiritual Royalty consciousness~ ♥︎

Right now, I’m seeing you take care of your body, mentality, spirituality, sanity, but most of all, body. Yes, body and habits. You’re being asked/guided to re-build your healthy habits, your sane rhythm. You’re returning to old-but-positive habits that might’ve been robbed of you as you were surviving some of Life’s toughest challenges! Some habits or comfort activities you might simply have forgotten, and now you’re reclaiming them ^-^v

c o m m i s s a r y – IV The Emperor Rx

Many of you tuning into this have been deep in the process of dissolving an entire paradigm of lack caused by trauma, done by some ‘authority figures’ in your childhood, or younger years. This mostly has something to do with ‘discipline’? Or some sense of needing to be ‘humble’ and ‘regulated’ while in reality they were instilling a scarcity mindset in you. Very evil. Very manipulative. The whole time, these figures were never as ‘limited’ as they were shaping you to be.

You could’ve also been judged so harshly and unfairly, to a point where you became overly critical of even the smallest things about yourself. In your mind, there was this bullshit panopticon that was always policing your conducts, even your mind! In some sense, you could’ve struggled with having a ‘good girl syndrome’ kind of problem tsk tsk… Yeah, that’s all in the past though. This reading is literally just giving you validation and clarity ^-^v I promise you that your happy days are impenetrable now~♪

full moon self-care🔻🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘

Red Geographer (Marco Polo) & Priestess of Happiness

Access full reading + cards on Patreon🌸

☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・. ☆♪°・.

[Moon PAC Masterlist] [Patreon] [Paid Readings] [buymeaboba]

[theresattrpgforthat]

Mint Plays Games: Rotted Capes (And the Lesson I Keep Learning This Year)

Last month I finally played a long-awaited one-shot of Rotted Capes, and I (once again) learned a lesson that’s been leaking into my brain over the course of the past year.

(tldr: you should play games you think you don't like)

The Context

Over the past 4 years, one of the settings my home group has returned to time and time again is our own personal superhero universe. We call it the Dover City Universe (The DCU for short), and we started building it in Spectaculars, by Scratchpad Publishing. Spectaculars is great for folks who like playing in person, and like building their own comics universe, and it comes with a lot of fantastic aids for new GMs who like a structured adventure that they can customize to fit the themes of their table.

Since then we’ve also run games in MASKS by Magpie Games, Henshin by Cave of Monsters, and i’m sorry did you say street magic, by Caro Ascersion. Each game has been an expansion from the original setting, placing a focus on a different location or time period.

Now, one of the players in my group has a really big love for media that turns a bit darker, including post-apocalyptic media, so when we were talking about possible future games, I suggested Rotted Capes, by Paradigm Concepts. He got very excited, and even offered to help me buy it. It then took me nearly 2 years to get it to the table.

The Rules

Rotted Capes is what I consider a crunchy game, far crunchier than what I’m usually willing to tackle. Character creation involves a point-buy system that makes stats and abilities more expensive the higher you push them, and there are many advantages or powers that require you to build your character in a specific way before you have access to them. The rank of your ability, skill or power determines how many dice (and what kind of dice) you roll for any given action, and the ranks also scale the passive modifiers you add to certain things in a very gradual way.

When it comes to the powers, your characters are b-list super-humans - all the A-listers died, disappeared, or turned undead when Z-Day hit, so you’re all that’s left to defend humanity. Not all of you were heroes either. Combat against regular zombies is meant to be reasonably easy (with the bigger threat being bit) while combat against super-Z’s is meant to be terrifying. Rotted Capes provides you with loose categories of superhero types to guide you towards a character build that is going to be useful/effective in combat, but the superhero abilities themselves are general, allowing you to interpret exactly what it means to “generate energy” for your character, or how you have the ability to “entangle” your foe.

When you play the game, your character will roll 2d10 for any given action, and try to beat a difficulty number set by the GM. You add extra dice based on your Attributes, Skills, Powers, and equipment, the dice ranging between d4’s and d12’s, depending on the rank of your skills. As you might see in the above chart, once you get high enough, you might even be adding 2 dice for a rank of something once you get it high enough. Beating a 5 is so trivial, it might not even require a roll. Beating a 40 is an astounding feat, and extremely unlikely.

In combat, players roll Xd10 (X=initiative) and look for the lowest result. This result determines their place on a 12-slice clock. Each player has their own personal clock, while the GM uses a GM clock, which they use to track what slice of initiative is currently happening, as well as where all the NPCs are. Every time the GM moves to a new slice of the clock, whoever is on that slice has a chance to do something, and depending on what kind of move they make, moves a number of slices forward on the clock. They will not be able to act again until the GM hits that slice of the clock. If you do something big and complicated, you can do it, but you’ll have to wait more than a few turns before you can do something else.

There’s also a player resource called Plot Dice, which are dice that you can spend or add to rolls to give yourself a chance of success, help out a friend, resist harm, and re-roll failures. Plot Dice is determined by your lowest Attribute, but they can be refreshed by playing to your character’s personality flaws (the zombie apocalypse changed everyone).

The character sheet for Nautica, the big bad of our session.

The Game

To make this only difficult once, I decided to put the entire table into a Google Sheet, so that I only had to worry about how many points I was spending, rather than continually referring back to the table to change things like passive modifiers or dice sizes.

I also took on the bulk of character creation, asking my friends to build half of a character (choosing archetype, highlighting favourite powers, and describing to me their background) and then doing the number crunching on my own, to make sure I knew how their character abilities worked. I did this because I was the only one who had reliable access to the rulebook, and I knew that asking a group of people to study how to play a game just for a single one-shot was not likely to work out.

The players all made very different characters. We had an ex-military martial artist who showed no mercy, a former sidekick who was still learning how to use his fire-powers, and an ex-villain trash man who could talk to rats and mainly fought using sticky bombs and magnets. When we rolled up to game day, we passed around printed versions of the character spreadsheets, the initiative clocks, and a number of polyhedral dice. I set the scene for the culinary school the characters were looting, and ran the group through 2 easy combats and 1 terrifying confrontation with a villain (who was one of my old DCU characters, but in an older, grislier form). After the combat, we spent about half an hour talking about the hideout where our enclave was camping out in, and playing through ending scenes between the heroes and various NPCs.

The Takeaway

I bought Rotted Capes for two reasons, and neither of those reasons were because I was genuinely excited about the game. I suggested it because I knew my friend loved the genre and I knew about it in the first place because I had heard about it because I listened to Fandible’s actual play series and the group sounded like they were having a lot of fun. But zombie media isn’t usually my thing, and crunch makes me hesitate because as a GM, I know the bulk of the work is going to be on me.

However, once the initial hurdle of reading and prepping the game was cleared, we had so much fun. The actual rules for rolling were very easy compared to the amount of math that goes into building your character, and the biggest obstacle for the players was trying to navigate all the cells of our Google Sheets.

The two most exciting pieces of game-play for me were the moments where someone got to roll a whole fistful of dice, and when combat clicked. Moving on the initiative clock was so wonderfully intuitive, and having a visual aid made it so easy to keep track of who was going next, and how long you had until you could do something again. Tying your actions to moves on the clock ensures that no one person is doing a bunch of interesting and complex moves one after another - if you do something really complicated or impressive, you have a kind of cooldown before you can try something again. Meanwhile characters who do something small and simple will be able to act again before you know it, and might get to do something right before a villain gets a chance to respond.

This brings me to the big lesson I’ve been learning this year:

Play Games You Might Not Like.

Three of my most positive experiences over the past year were games that I played for reasons other than because I thought they were really cool. I picked up Last Fleet because I needed another space game to run (that I already owned) for our Galaxy Squad run, and it turned into a big dramatic story that was cathartic, satisfying, and truly jaw-dropping in its narrative twists and turns.

I played A Complicated Profession because my co-GM was really excited about it and wanted to use it to lead out from our Scum & Villainy arc. We ended up having the most hilarious time coming up with various customers (including a goat-man played by Danny Devito and his himbo boyfriend).

I played Rotted Capes because I like my friends, and I really love building a superhero universe with them. I ended up discovering an initiative clock that rocked my world, and had a blast throwing mitt-fulls of dice around with my friends.

There were also games that I was super hyped about to play that ended up not being as much of a fun experience as I was expecting. I think that since I had built up such a big idea in my head of what those games would feel like to play, that when the dice hit the table (or in our case, the Discord chat), the result couldn’t possibly live up to what I’d imagined.

So do it. Pick up the game your friend is asking you to play. Take a chance on that game that sounds like it might fit the genre you’re looking for. Read the rulebook for a system you’ve never tried. Not every game is going to be a hit, but in all of that mess you’re going to find real gems that you carry forward into future projects, and come away with moments beyond what you can dream up.

[lebuc]

this paradigm shifting

* this latest paradigm shifting, a sign of impending strife

or is it simply grifting & dismissing with the honed end of a pointed knife, moving forward

to that which most of us deem untoward:

rewarding those already hoarding the largess the rest of us would otherwise possess, in the best of times;

unnecessitating this crest of rhymes attesting to such, brinking on the verge of being too much in a surge of reflective thinking & hopefully not too much drinking to assuage the pain, draining the will to do naught but sit still - but then, again until we decide strategically to pay the bill, since we drank from freedom's cup near-filled to the tip-top from the bottom up;

for now, there remains but a few sips in our view which could be mistaken for a 'mourning' type dew by its scarcity & the tragedy of its taking

should our purview remain waning & shaking, unstirred - at this occasion of a dream deferred upon waking, by huns at the helm, or should i say curs…

& the dream train once on track, now deterred by those who wish to tack, take back what we preferred to remain a part of the terrain - laid, paved & trod in halting, but not faltering paces

reflecting an evident pride on our faces for making this faux-merited space* a home for many a creed & race, even at a stuttering pace in yet segregated homes comparatively degraded.

if truly meant, what was written in a document of note of which many were & are still smitten, still harboring hope that we'd fulfill its lilting words' heft

with the spirit of those not yet bereft of curds of courage to face the bellowing herds heralding a purge of persons at the flick of foul words; who parse their prounouns, nurse the verb 'to be', & verse the adjective 'inclusively' cursively, not curtly; who deny & dismiss a woeful missal to homogenize, neutralize & ostracize as unoffical

some good folk - in an stunning reversal of DEI, where all 'outside the pale' need not apply - joke/no joke.

already fatigued of the flack upon the redux & the mess the rest of his back-slapping crew promote clearly & hotly, in a spirit quite mottley ( a snickering doge, 'f you get the reference/pun )

…& frankly, that's all i gottly, this here traipse around the sun. * 4/25 - lebuc - this paradigm shifting (...it's reigning men - hold the hallelujahs)

[maras-mischief]

Shifting paradigm.

God, it’s feels so good to be out during the daylight.

“Kate? What are you doing here? It’s…I mean…the moon. It’s day time.”

“I know. The night after the full moon was last night. When it set, I felt like I still had the strength to stay. Keith wasn’t clambering to come back out.”

“So you’re here now.”

“Yup. So what do we do first? Make love for a few hours or go for coffee and get to know each other better?”

“I don’t know. Do you feel Keith?”

“He’s inside, but deep. It’s like he’s sleeping.”

“Do you think we have time for both?”

“Love making and coffee…I think we might be able to. Somehow I get the feeling that Keith is enjoying being me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember when he was first bit and then the change?”

“How can I forget. You were almost feral and the sex was borderline scary.”

“Right. Keith was also fighting me the entire time. It was a fight for dominance.”

“So you’re what, winning?”

“Not really. I think Keith is surrendering. He’s come to enjoy me and us.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know when he’ll be back. Does that upset you?”

“If I’m being honest, no.”

“Really?”

“If I’m being 100% honest, I’ve come to enjoy the time with you more than Keith. I look forward to the full moon every month. I find myself almost melancholy when you’re gone.”

“Keith’s noticed a change. Maybe that’s why he’s taking a break. Maybe he wants us to see where this is going.”

“For right now, I see it going to the bedroom and after hours of passionate love making lunch and some shopping.”

“Shopping?”

“You can’t keep wearing my clothes if you’re going to stay. Plus, I think you’d look fabulous in something a little more fitting.”

“Okay. But for now, get your ass to the bedroom.”

[ericdeggans]

'Sinners' is the argument for why Hollywood needs DEI

(Be warned: This essay discusses plot points from the new movie Sinners)

Sitting in a movie theater on a Sunday, watching the grand spectacle that is Ryan Coogler’s horror movie/tone poem Sinners, I couldn’t stop chuckling.

Not just because the movie has its funny spots, including a great moment where one of Michael B. Jordan’s characters shoots a guy in the behind who is trying to rip him off. And not just because he’s crafted a story about vampires in the Mississippi Delta that feels both vibrantly fresh and achingly familiar.

I was laughing because Coogler, in crafting a successful film that is not just rooted in Black and non-white culture, but is a carefully-crafted, earnestly made love letter to it, he has provided the strongest argument yet against the toxic fiction that more diversity, equity and inclusion in a democracy is somehow bad.

Even as weak-kneed film studios and profit-focused media companies roll back DEI programs and offer mealy mouthed equivocations in the face of Donald Trump’s war on diversity, Coogler has stepped forward with a boldly creative film which simply proves, through its excellence, the value that comes from unleashing the creative spirit fortifying people of color.

Sinners is a movie which wears its themes on its sleeves. The vampire who threatens the rural honky tonk owned by Jordan’s characters in the 1932-era Jim Crow South is white. And he’s drawn to the place by the bold, pulsating creativity of Miles Caton’s Sammy “Preacher Boy” Moore -- a spellbinding blues singer whose talents are connected to a continuum of Black musical creativity which cuts across time and geography. The way Coogler illustrates this, with a magical musical sequence set in the honky tonk which includes a Black funk rock guitarist and African drummers, is one of the film’s most impressive sequences.

“In a lot of ways, Africa explained Mississippi to me,” Coogler told journalist Jelani Cobb for a feature story in The New Yorker, describing the impact of his first trips to Africa. “I realized, ‘All right, African Americans are extremely African.’ We may be more African than we know. With this film it was, like, ‘Oh, we affected this place [Mississippi].’ We brought Africa here.”

Jordan plays twins, named Smoke and Stack, who return to the Delta after years in Chicago, fortified with money earned from up North, hoping to build a life for themselves in their old hometown. But the evil and soul-killing exploitation of the white man’s world, embodied in the mysterious vampire drawn by Preacher Boy’s gifts, comes calling to threaten their dream.

It is a tale as obvious and clearly drawn as the wide vistas Coogler captures with his IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras – a pioneering combination which makes the film such a visual treat. Here’s a video where Coogler explains some of his production choices.

But because the writer/director is such a talented craftsman, we drink in every permutation of the story, even though we mostly know exactly where it is going. And because Coogler has built his brand around elevating Black centered stories which make room for other cultures, moving through Sinners also feels like a family dinner which makes room for everyone, from Native American vampire hunters to Chinese shopkeepers.

So why did Hollywood not see this success coming?

I have a few thoughts:

Hollywood still struggles with stereotypes dressed up like industry facts. Years ago, Hollywood executives would explain their reluctance to fund big movies centered on Black people and culture by saying the movies “didn’t travel,” or didn’t perform well overseas. But plenty of movies have busted that paradigm, from Coogler’s own Black Panther films, to Hidden Figures, Moonlight -- even Will Smith’s 2013 science fiction boondoggle After Earth made three times as much money overseas than in America, earning nearly $250 million worldwide. Too often, I think Black-centered projects have suffered from assumptions that audiences somehow cannot make the leap that Black audiences often do – seeing themselves in stories told about people who don’t look like them.

(Even Ben Stiller noticed Hollywood’s myopia when it came to Sinners.)

Hollywood has a tough time giving Black filmmakers the same respect as great white auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan. I remain mystified by the buzz over Coogler’s deal with Warner Bros. which allows rights for the film to revert to him after 25 years. At a time when there is more content in front of consumers than ever – and debt-laden Warner Bros. Discovery needs a movie hit badly – why wouldn’t the guy who directed the most profitable movie in 2018 cut a deal to participate in the profits of his current film and own his intellectual property after it has been fully exploited by the film studio? Especially since other filmmakers, like Tarantino and George Lucas have managed to craft similar deals? Near as I can tell, Lucas’ ownership of Star Wars didn’t kill movie studios. So why would Coogler’s eventual ownership of Sinners?

Too much of the press which reports on Hollywood proceeds from the perspective of the people who run and own everything. One of the underappreciated consequences of the hollowing out of modern news outlets is that reporting on Hollywood has become much more specialized. So trade publications and hyper-focused news outlets like The Wrap, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and Puck are leading coverage of Hollywood issues. And too many of these outlets, chasing a wealthy and monetizable audience of Hollywood players, create coverage which reflects their assumptions and biases back to them. I remember seeing this many years ago, when Deadline ran an ill-considered piece asking if the push for ethnic diversity in casting TV shows was “About Time or Too Much of Good Thing?”

This is, of course, something we’re struggling with in the wider world now, thanks to the anti-DEI fairytales spun by the Trump administration and propaganda-filled outlets like Fox News Channel. It is tough to convince Hollywood that, by making more inclusive and diverse TV shows and films, you’re actually making them less predictable, more appealing to a wide range of consumers and more likely to involve super talented people who might not be white.

In other words, you make them better.

Fortunately, Coogler has given us Sinners, a film which makes all those arguments and more in an engrossing, entertaining movie that will likely become one of the most profitable projects of the year.

What more proof does Hollywood need that DEI is G-R-E-A-T?

[elhokher]

okay I need to preface this with yes I like having representation and anyone who's been around my blog long enough should know that renarin is my specialest little guy him and him and rlain are very cute and if y'all really need it this is coming from the perspective of a queer man if you turn this into a pissing on the poor type deal I will simply block you but. now that I've had time to stew on it.

the rlainarin arc was a bit boring.

part of this is I think rooted in Brandon trying to be a Good Ally™ doing Good Representation™ and he worked a lot with sensitivity readers to make sure things are handled well but it just felt a bit... tokenizing? like they were in the spiritual realm as a bit of plot convenience but also it kinda felt like an excuse to keep them relevant enough to give them pov chapters. and it's cute! don't get me wrong! but also every other characters get emotional arcs about growing as a person and they got...trying to ask your crush out? it felt very out of place.

now you might be saying hold on! they're not primarily pov characters you can't expect as much nuance emotionally as someone like kaladin. and you're right! but let's look at the other supporting cast members here. jasnah gets the struggle of power and her entire attempt to keep thaylenah which results in a meaningful paradigm shift for her! navani gets to work on her connection with the sibling and uncover the past. we don't even really see much of relationship between renarin and glys much less rlain and tumi. sure they may have been good representation! but they were mediocre arcs. even in the discussions I'm seeing lately of favorite parts, it's not that people have disliked it it's just...nothing to write home about?

it also feels particularly weird to have an arc around "my family will think it's weird" when it's been pretty well established that alethi in general are like. fine with queerness. and sure you can say "well they're nobles" but at this point renarin is in line for 0 titles. dalinar was only going to give king of urithiru to someone who wanted it, jasnah planned on being the last queen of alethkar, there's literally no point? it feels a little love Simon. and yes absolutely in modern western culture people can feel weird about coming out to people who would be accepting and that's fine! but that's also rooted in real world homophobia which alethkar doesn't seem to have.

even when we compare with the other canonically queer stormlight character, it just kinda. . .falls flat. part of this is that shallan wasn't intended to be queer but honestly it feels like it reads well. she doesn't have to turn to camera and say she's different she's bisexual she can just be a person. she can fall in love with adolin she can get flustered around jasnah veil can call women hot and it's like. fine. and it feels more authentic to the setting! a lot of the rlainarin arc in WAT felt like it was meant to be educational. for cishet people. and like that's fine! but it doesn't make for an engaging character arc. I can't even say it really makes for good reading.

and look, I get it, we all like seeing them get flustered and worry about what the other one thinks and we all get to be excited when they confess their feelings and kiss but it just feels so tonally dissonant that like. I can't believe this was intended to fit into the main plot. it feels a bit patronizing - like look we have good healthy representation now! I'm doing so good at this! and genuinely from the bottom of my heart it's thrilling that the largest name in fantasy is willing to do this even more so considering the religious background he's writing from I'm not writing all this to say Brandon is a bad guy or secretly a homophobe I'm just saying. I wish we had more, y'know? something less feel good for the cishets for being good allies something with more of a real plot that engages with the themes of the series and whatnot. I'm looking forward to arc 2 (in like 10-15 years)! I'm looking forward to more rlain and renarin and their dynamic! I just hope it feels less. educational.

anyway a lot of this was directly inspired by verilybitchie's video on good representation it really helped me out my finger on why their arc felt a bit flat so please go check it out she's a great creator.

[th3-0bjectivist]

25’ PAGE UPDATE W/ PAGE MASCOT, SPRINGIN’ CHIP!

Heya folks! Page mascot Springin’ Chip back with a page update! This update is so important that I’m taking a five and one-half second break from obsessively licking out my sister’s infected ear canal. Absolutely NOTHING could possibly stop these deep, constant and passionate canine wet willies… UNTIL NOW. So, pay attention for a moment, because this update will make you mentally and perhaps physically climax and then bask in the post-nut afterglow you need to keep logging on to this pornbot infested platform we know as Tumblr.

If you wanna know how I am these days, I’m just fine, lots of joy over here as always for this pup! I’m still a smartass lil’ shithead whose too smart for his own good. I’m getting into lots of unnecessary conflicts with larger, monster-male dogs lately because I’ve developed a Napoleon complex which makes me insecure, jealous and aggressive. Give me a break folks, I’m a small dog/man! My testicles are literally forfeit these days, you’ve got to assert yourself somehow!!! It’s only a matter of time before a Doberman or Pitbull bites my cocky little jabroni ass, and rightfully so, and maybe then I’ll finally learn my lesson! But today I’m just here to drop a page update and then get right back to licking that sweet, sweet ear pus.

Some of you may be thinking as you’re reading this, “Why is this delusional asshole talking through his spaniel? Why in the name of all that is holy should I care about ear pus!? Please, for the love of God, go away!” Well, dear Tumblr, in the next few weeks we’re going to show you precisely WHY you should stick around, as th3-0bjectivist WILL BE BACK IN JUST LESS THAN A MONTH. This week and next, we’ll be offering a half-month blowout as a preview. Our Four-Item Itinerary for mid-2025 to beg-2026 is as such:

A. DROP ONE METRIC ASSLOAD OF NEW PAINTINGS. This year is all about personal artistic incrementalism and evolution. Original abstract paintings used to be REALLY popular on this page, still are, and we hate to sound like every other artist that has ever existed but we’re moving out of the abstract phase this year. However, to honor the past we’ll be posting abstract backgrounds which will serve as a mere base for at least six or seven fully realized fantasy-themed brush paintings! If you like the animated art on this page, you’re gonna get animated abstracts as well as fully realized moving art all year long! Lucky you! B. POST NOTHING BUT UNPOPULAR, BUT BRILLIANT MUSIC. As we’re getting a late start in 25’, we might as well reboot the musical rotation on this page by posting tracks by some of the most criminally underground musical artists imaginable. We’re only going to be posting music SO UNDERGROUND you can only find it on this blog, or on a few other dark corners of the internet, every two-to-three weeks! C. MAKE THE AUDIENCE LAUGH/PROMOTE THE EVERLOVING SHITE OUT OF OTHER ART BLOGS! Lots of memes and goofy horseshit from other, more comedic Tumblrs as usual moving forward! A time-honored tradition on this blog, to be sure. Also, lots of art is gonna be on display this year by Tumblr artists that have earned exposure and deserve respect for their skill and dedication to their craft. D. ABSOLUTELY NO INSUFFERABLE PARTISAN POLITICS. You know how these days every other person on this platform thinks they’re some kind of economic/political pundit as a result of the election!? We don’t do that here! Our politics are unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but our art is! That’s because art is resistance and immortality, folks! You want an interpretation on modern politics from this page!? Fine, but you’re going to have to painstakingly read between the lines because unlike other ‘art blogs’ I could mention, politics are not overtly expressed on this page to ensure maximal entertainment and satisfaction for EVERYONE who views it, and not just one wing, section or subsection of the modern political paradigm.

After the upcoming half-month preview, which we’re mostly doing just to measure the Tumblr winds and waters, we will then engage in a slow-motion rollout of content into early 26’. There will be absolutely no rushing of anything this year. So, enjoy folks! We love you! We miss posting to this platform, and as such, without further ado, let the half-month preview… begin! Oh, one last thing, folks! Check out our Deviant Art page, its full of crispy artgifs… far higher in quality than we can offer you with Tumblr’s arbitrary 10MB file size limit… and it serves as our full art gallery and online one-stop-shop. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got a pus-filled ear canal to insert my bare tongue into for at least the next quarter-hour or so! It’s a living, folks! Happy 25’!

Stay chipper, Springin’ Chip