#how utterly delightful

[cirilee]

[valtsv]

the silt verses season 1: they banned rhetorical gods? damn something REALLY fucked up must have been going on there for them to do that in the universe where you can be buried alive in concrete as a sacrifice to the roadworks gods to make the commute faster

the silt verses season 3 episode 2:

[thepunkmuppet]

bro okay I’ve never looked into any petekey shit bc idk anything about fall out boy and shipping real people is weird. but DUDE I just watched this video on a whim while doing work and um??? what the fuck???? gay emos in the 2000’s real no clickbait with pining poetic blog posts to boot ummm am I going insane how is this real?????

[ravencromwell]

The poem evokes human greatness and human vulnerability. People are “godlike” in their courage and skill, but even the greatest mortals fall and clutch the dust between their bloody fingers. The beautiful word minunthadios , “short-lived,” is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us. We die too soon, and there is no adequate recompense for the terrible, inevitable loss of life. Yet through poetry, the words, actions, and feelings of some long-ago brief lives may be remembered even three thousand years later.

--Emily Wilson's introduction to the Iliad

[nugulover69]

Delivering an impassioned speech of hope and unity in The Quarry™

[icryyoumercy]

bought a purple cauliflower for monster

10/10 would recommend, excellent ratio of effort to delight

[genderqueerpond]

look i know she's the rani but I STILL THINK MRS FLOOD IS IRIS WILDTHYME

[morningstargirl666]

FIC REC FRIDAY #4

ad aeternam. by darkness_shows_the_stars / @stars-and-darkness

His eyes are intent on her. They always are, but never so strong, never so scorching, as when he’s needling for information she’d rather not give.

“I want you to come and …” She sighs. This is more difficult than she had expected it to be, and that’s saying something. She’d expected it to be like pulling teeth, but the feeling is more akin to ripping off an arm. “I want you to come and pretendtodateme.”

There. Done. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

No, not at all.

Klaus’s face smooths over, washed of all emotion. “Would you mind repeating that?”

Guys. Listen. I don't go searching for fake dating AUs. Mostly because I'm not a fan of human AUs. When I'm reading klaroline fanfiction, I'm here for the fantasy element, the age old hybrid falling in love with the blonde baby vampire. Therefore, fake dating AUs just don't really blip up on my radar. But. Guys. Guys. THIS FIC ALRIGHT. THIS FIC HAS OVERHAULED MY ENTIRE BELIEF SYSTEM???? LIKE? IT'S POST-CANON DIVERGENCE???????? YET A FAKE DATING AU????????????? DO YOU SEE THE QUESTION MARKS HERE IT DIDN'T EVEN OCCUR TO ME THIS COULD BE A THING AND YET IT IS AND IT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CREATION TO EVER EXIST?

Anyways. Yeah, go read it.

OR I AM DISOWNING ALL OF YOU

[corviiids]

I have found out that all your marvellous works are by the same person!!! Telltale, the funny twitter thread, the uquiz... I thought these were all by separate people

You make all the best death note thingies and I am delighted to find out that you are in fact one person

HEY IT'S YOU!!! AUTHOR OF MY FAVOURITE EVER COMMENT!!! im so happy to see you. thank you so so much for your kind words this made me grin so big

[fictionadventurer]

The curse of reading indie books strikes again, because I desperately need to discuss the Emma M. Lion series with you, but no one will know what I'm talking about.

[howdidthisevenhappenanyway]

gladheonsleeps foxquin week master post

just a recap for this week’s efforts, because I’ve never achieved something like this before and I’m still bewildered and very pleased

day 1 SOULMATES Marked for Trouble:

day 2 UNDERCOVER Making it Count

day 3 wing fic but it’s not posted yet sorry :3

day 4 CULTURAL SHARING Isirir be Ijaat

day 5 I.F.H.I.T.D. I’d Love to Keep my Promises, Darling

day 6 MIGRAINE/CHRONIC PAIN ‘Aint no place like a home with you in it

day 7 000 GENERAL QUINLAN Gar Runi be Morut'yc bat Ner Kama

if you read, kudosed or commented on my work this week I want to thank you so much! it was really nice having so many interactions and sharing in our enthusiasm about quinlan and commander fox! rair pair enthusiasts are the best :3c

[magnifiico]

in other news !! 👀👀👀👀 will smith poses at my mobile banner! T~T

check out this beautiful graphic the amazing @beckowskysgraphicscommissions made for me for no other reason than just out of the kindness of her heart ;^; she is so talented and such a sweetheart; you all ought to check her out if you're interested in commissioning anything! =w=/

[pleaseshootthejester]

I don't eat all day and then my partner takes me out for dinner and we eat fish and chips and they're greasy and now it's 3am and I've not slept and my tummy hurty and I have lots of regret

[moe-broey]

LOOK

at my

EVIL FUCKING NUTCRACKER KITTY‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

[valeriehalla]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[foldingfittedsheets]

Mattresses, unbeknownst to many, are a lot like cars. Every year new ones roll out, they’re always tweaking and innovating and you’ll never find the same one you loved decades ago when buying a new one.

Where I sold mattresses had a three month return or exchange program for this reason. New beds take a while to break in, and they’re a big expense. Your body is used to the old one. So we made sure people were loving it. If a bed got returned we’d take it back, sanitize and clean it, then sell it again on clearance.

To sell these we always had to disclose what clearance meant to customers, and they had to sign that they knew what they were getting. (FYI, not every company is as… forthright about the used bed situation)

In clearance we had beds that were floor models, we had returns, and more rarely we had old models whose line had been discontinued. These clearance beds were always final sale, so a bed could only be sold twice.

Now, the manager at the store I was working at had realized a vital fact. Clearance beds in the warehouse didn’t sell, especially old models that salespeople weren’t familiar with. And even more especially in odd sizes, like twin extra longs. So he set up a split king on the showroom floor to exhibit clearance beds, pulling all those forgotten twin extra longs out onto the showroom.

Almost all of these were brand new discontinued models. Beds I’d never learned in training were exhumed to be displayed. The manufacturers had moved on to new lines and they’d been left behind. Why would he take such in interest in selling old stock, you might wonder? Because we made double commission on the sales margin of clearance beds, and if we’d had a bed long enough they dropped the cost in the system so it was a fucking cash cow to sell these. Even with huge discounts the commissions were wonderful so it was a win win.

When I got started I was jazzed about this program, I was so on board to sell weird old brand new beds and make a ton of money. I had a wonderful older couple come in, looking for a split king adjustable set. This was a white whale sale.

The current clearance models on the floor were a latex mattress that was brand new despite being of an age to start first grade, and a tempurpedic floor model. The couple laid down and it was like magic. They each loved the bed they’d laid down on. They wanted to buy the whole shebang.

I. Was. Thrilled. I told them about the clearance program and what that meant, and they weren’t bothered in the least. I wrote up the sale then dashed into the back, fizzing with excitement to tell my manager what I’d done.

“You sold the death bed?!” He asked in delight.

I pulled up short, my smile freezing in place. “What…?”

“Didn’t you check the notes?”

I hesitated for a long beat then slowly shook my head. You see, dear reader, all beds had a personal history. Every clearance bed had logs written up by the person who took the return, as well as warehouse crew after sanitizing. It helped us know what to expect when selling them. “Wasn’t it just a floor model? You said it was a floor model…”

He slowly shook his head. I checked the notes.

It turned out, it had been sold as a floor model. The first time. But the company had made an exception and taken it back as a return two months later. Why? Because it’s owner had passed away.

I stared at the computer in horror and my manager shrugged. “They signed the clearance form. Technically it was a floor model.”

“We know for a fact that a man died in that bed!”

“What they don’t know can’t haunt them,” he said philosophically.

The man came back a week later for more sheets, utterly delighted to tell me how well they were sleeping. I clamped my teeth down around the secret of the deathbed, choosing to let them love their new bed without the stigma. Only one person would be haunted by that deathbed, and it was me.