Hehehehehe for the one word thing: theft (or words related to that)
i'm so sorry for this it could be five sentences if you squint real hard. also me when writing absolutely anything at all: how do i make this about angel crowley
the dollmaker
the teeth went first, which you lined up with extreme care onto curved wires caressing a plain, wooden pole. they say teeth are what make a face, and i guess that must be true—you would know. i hadn't known yet what you were going to do, so i just watched with my bare, gaping mouth as you chipped my teeth into asymmetrical shapes, carving them into a beast's.
the tongue was next, the larynx too—just as well. i wasn't much keen on speaking anymore, anyway, what with all the blood in my gums. i wasn't keen on smelling anymore, either, the tang of iron and wood flecks that surrounded you like a visible aura. the silence must have been music to your ears, now that i couldn't scream through the pain, could hardly even take a breath.
there were the lips, the nose, the cheekbones. you took it all off my face, like a sculptor trying to return their creation to a clean marble slab, and all i could do was watch. and maybe, along the way, i was even resigned. that settling that inevitably came with constancy.
but then the panic surged back up and out of my body along with my eyes, which you scooped out with ease, and i could scream again, only it wasn't coming from me—no, maybe it was me, the other me, if it was me. i didn't know which way was left, couldn't comprehend what my eyes were seeing: it's one thing to see fragments of yourself scattered around like an unfinished painting; it's another to see the remains of where those fragments were stolen from—oh god, it would have been kinder to be less methodical, to have had gnarled and brazenly sliced pieces of flesh and marrow exploded off of my face, rather than the precise and surgical peeling away of skin, all in one piece like wool from a shearer's hand.
and you painted them a lurid, reptilian yellow, slitted pupils like a knife's scar. i saw this, i saw my eyes only through yours, gold reflected off blue, and for a moment there was something so intimate, so complementary in that gaze, you with your deceitfully gentle smile and weightless hair, that i forgot what you were doing to me. just for a moment. but then it came into focus again, that garish, nauseating colour of my eyes, and that moment was gone. the colour of sick, one more step away from the angel i was, if an angel was defined only through construct; if an angel was defined by spirit, by grace, by acts… you're the farthest thing from an angel i could possibly fathom, and yet here you are.
i closed my eyes, then, and one by one you took, and you took, and you took, stealing everything from me, stealing myself from me. when you lifted my brain out of my cleaved skull, the pain finally quietened, if only for the few seconds it took to rewire it, but it was a reprieve, and i was grateful. and i didn't feel it when my limbs were hacked off at their stems, tourniqueted and cauterised. i didn't feel it when you ripped out the nails from my fingers and toes and replaced them with claws.
and so even as you took, and you took, and you took, i didn't struggle, no, and soon i couldn't struggle. but i didn't want it, i didn't, i didn't. but one by one by one, it got easier, with every limb and organ and joint, with every side sweep of my hair; you've changed that, too. because i thought—oh, i thought that with every piece of me you changed and fit into this new mold, i thought you would at least take it all. i thought you would complete me at the end, so that even changed, this new thing may still be me.
but we're at the final stages now. here come my lungs, my intestines, my stomach, fitting into this new me so perfectly it's as if i'd never changed at all. you've taken the stray clumps of my meat and stuffed them back into me, you've fed me back my blood, and it all works, as if i'd never changed at all. there's just my heart now, resting on the stool you'd propped me up on like a doll, nothing left but stray splotches of blood, but you're not taking it, you're not taking it, what are you doing?
i feel each individual stitch now as you sew me up around my joints and from my pelvis to my neck, a long line like snake vertebrae, weaving in and out of my skin. and still my heart remains untouched, outside of my body, discarded like waste. i start to beg now, because i can, and i didn't want this, but now i'm so close to reformation, to being whole, and oh, i feel so empty, you left the hole in my chest there where something is supposed to fit, and now my centre of gravity is off, and i can't be expected to live this way.
please, all i'm asking for is my heart, just this one thing. i know i haven't been good, i know i struggled, i know i screamed, i'm sorry, i'm sorry, i'm sorry. oh, but please, won't you take it?
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I haven’t been here long. What irritating changes have been made?
Credit where it's due, some changes have been good, like polls and stuff! But the big recent changes thus far that I would classify as irritating are:
- The UI change. This one may be less irritating for newcomers because it's basically the same layout as twitter and instagram, but for a lot of folks who've been here a long time, it feels cramped and like a loss of identity for the site. For many, the appeal of tumblr is that it ISN'T an algorithm hell like twitter or insta. Also, there's the annoyance of having to relearn where everything is, because it all got moved around.
- The users being lab rats for various tests the devs wanna pull out of nowhere without consenting to beta testing new site features- like the one that took away user icons on the dash for like half the site. They finally put them back after getting enough feedback that said NO, but users were so used to their feedback being disregarded that they were half expecting the change to be pushed through anyway.
- The Netflix tie-in advertising being pushed even to people who had PAID tumblr for a no-ads experience. Complete with them somehow thinking it would be a good idea to put an unescapable-by-scrolling spooky clown on peoples' dashboards that u had to use ublock to get rid of. While I'm not scared of clowns and often find them quite charming, it sucks that staff didn't take coulrophobia being a common fear into account.
- A wave of fully sfw trans posts being wrongfully marked Mature and staff doing little to nothing about it. Not sure if this is still ongoing, but it destroyed a lot of trust and good will. (LGBT+ users have been having to fight a constant war against censorship ever since the adult content ban on tumblr, so yeah... Nevar 4get the list of banned search words that would bring back no results, like 'girl')
- The site gradually moving away from customization. Tumblr is a BLOGGING site. But it seems to have lost sight of that fact, because most new users don't even know you can fully customize your blogs with css and stuff (an option that is now off by default for new accounts!), because of the in-dash viewer giving you only how blogs look on mobile, which is a lot more uniform. There, it's more like every other site- you get a banner and icon. Oh, but you can change colors and fonts from a drop-down list too, that's cool I guess. Though they recently took away custom color schemes on Message windows, just another little bit of personalization taken away.
- TUMBLR. LIVE. Basically tumblr teamed up with a skeevy dating app partner to allow for livestreams- but not the cool kinda livestreams like on twitch where you can draw or play games, no- to a site full of people who value anonymity, they decided to push phone cam only livestreams. Not only that but by agreeing to the terms, you're giving out tons of personal data including your location to said skeevy dating app partner and all of THEIR third-party ad partners. Needless to say, most people didn't wanna use it, so instead of users it's flooded by p*rn bots (which is ANOTHER issue we've been dealing with for a long time and have been getting an even bigger influx of FROM tumblr live) and scammers. And thus, since tumblr likes to put a carousel of current streams on people's dashes, you often get softcore p*rn thumbnails from the bot streams with no way to avoid it except for toggling off tumblr live entirely.
- Oh wait. That's right. You CAN'T toggle it off. Because you can only snooze it for a while until BAM, you're jumpscared by a carousel of ladies licking your screen again! But hey, at least they made the snooze 30 days instead of the 7 it used to be, right? Yeah, except for the fact that you can't get rid of the tumblr live button itself on the app anymore, and now it's front and center with a NEW notification tag on it, overlapping your dash and cramming useful stuff like the search button out of the way.
NOW- A lot of this stuff CAN be at least mostly fixed on desktop by installing ublock and xkit and tampermonkey + dashboard unfucker... But that's a lot of stuff just to make the site usable, you know?
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