#i don't even know the format

[biomechabird]

Despite everything, it's still you.

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

You ever have those moments where an idea just... won't leave your head?

[rhythmmortis]

mutuals please sit down we are watching bbs

[alienfirst]

"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When this blue starlight dies / And all is through"

This is a long scrolling comic I started in 2019 that won't look good uploaded here as a complete image. I'm sure I could divide it up in a way that Tumblr would like, but I also have worked on this for a long time and would like to post it and yeet myself off to read a good book. So HEY! Follow one of the two links here to see the complete comic (or download the full PNG from the Patreon post)!

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cassildas-song-72323431

Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/post/Cassildas-Song--Critical-Role-comic-B0B2F6Y32

[uncanny-tranny]

A vital part of political knowledge (and knowledge in general) is knowing when to say, "I'm not educated enough to make a statement about this topic."

It's okay if you don't know every little detail of every single issue at hand. But it won't help if you refuse to acknowledge where you lack information, where your blindspots are, and what you just don't understand. It's okay to not have an answer.

[romanitas]

peers out into the abyss, in the year 2024. dusts off spy au tag after nine (??????) years. anyone still here?? hello. i finally bring more of it. here it is on ao3 if tumblr is rude about it.

-

It all comes out rather mechanically and professionally, but Annabeth thinks that might make it all worse.  She knows there are aspects of her life she isn’t allowed to share, and she avoids details like who exactly she works for. It’s almost like she’s giving a summarizing report to a superior, not a boyfriend. But at the look on his face as she unweaves her life, she realizes she should probably stop thinking of Percy Jackson as her boyfriend. She is an infiltrator who steamrolled her way over his life, and he watches her with a deep undercurrent of hurt and hostility.  “I was just supposed to find out more about what was happening with Jason’s dad,” she says, her voice hollow and apologetic. “With the company. I didn’t expect…” Luke and gunshots. Dragging Percy through a dangerous situation when he was only meant to be a window into information. Piper and Jason to be solid, lovely friends. Percy Jackson to arguably be the best relationship she’s ever had. 

“I’m sorry.”

Percy’s quiet. He’d stayed quiet the whole time she spoke, graciously allowed her the uninterrupted time to explain herself, even when she knew she hadn’t deserved it. Annabeth feels like she’s standing on glass, but she’s not about to make the next move. He looks at her, then looks around the room, then back at her. Percy is an unexpectedly thoughtful guy, but this level of silence churns her gut.  She swears she hears the clock ticking. “So, do you like, not even care about penguins?”

She stares at him, befuddled. “What?”  Percy crosses his arms, angrily tapping his fingers against his bicep. “That’s what you talked to me about, when we met. You asked me about penguins.”  The fact that he remembered really shouldn’t surprise her. Her face falls; her reply is haphazard. “Everybody cares about penguins.” “Good, because if you lied about penguins on top of everything else, we might really have a problem.” His tone is bitingly sarcastic, a bullet of its own kind, and she flinches, however deserved.  “I’m sorry,” she mutters, again. “Annabeth, you lied. About everything. About - about - ” He trails off and throws his hands up in the air, before grabbing his water and chugging about half to cool himself down. She doesn’t really know how much it’ll actually cool him down, but it’s his go-to.  “I was going to tell you. That’s why I wanted to meet you - before Luke showed up -” Percy glowers. “Then what? You just - you thought everything would be fine?” She shakes her head. “I didn’t know what! I just knew I had to stop lying!” “Yeah? Took you how many months?” He pauses. “Months. You’ve been pretending to date me for months.” It’s like the reality of that finally, wholly sinks in for him, and his anger flashes with heartbreak heavy enough to punch her own. She can’t even reach out to him. The urge is there, but she restrains it, knowing full well she’s lost the privilege of touching him.  “It was my job, Percy,” she says after a moment, a weak attempt at some sort of defense she knows won’t hold up.  “You’re not even an architect.” He says it like that surprises him most of all, but she supposes she had been rather passionate about it. She knows as much about design as she does intelligence. “No,” she admits, then admits something else not many people do know.  “But I almost was.” He looks at her again, with regret, anger, and even a sort of empathy she doesn’t think she deserves. “I watched you shoot someone.”  Her demeanor betrays her, as she feels her eyes well up. “I had to.” “I know,” he says quietly, frowning. He closes his eyes and turns away from her, pressing his hands against the kitchen counter and leaning against it, like somehow it’s another realization that hammers in the reality of his girlfriend. 

Annabeth uses the brief respite to furiously wipe at her eyes. She doesn’t know how to salvage this. She wants to, badly. She’s simultaneously done one of the best and worst jobs she’s ever been assigned. Discovering Luke changed the game. Falling in love with Percy altered her life entirely. 

It takes a few minutes, but Percy finally turns back around to look at her. He watches her like she’s a stranger despite the knowing flicker to his eyes. He knows a lot about her, the side of her that isn’t a spy, the side of her she sometimes wishes could be present more often. But she is a spy too, and part of the job description includes sabotage. She’s always been very good at that. She’s just never sabotaged herself before. 

“I told you I loved you,” he says, and that hurts most of all, because it sounds like he doesn’t believe it. Like he can’t believe he’d gone and fallen for her, that he played right into her hands. 

Her expression shatters. “I know,” she says, the words catching. She has to tell him now, because she doesn’t know if she’ll get another chance. It’s a ruinous confession but there’s no escaping it. “And I - I fell in love with you too, Percy. I wanted to tell you so badly.”

He looks gobsmacked. “How? When it was all just - just bullshit to you?”

Annabeth shakes her head. “No. It wasn’t. It might have started that way, but -”

“How am I supposed to believe that, Annabeth? How can I possibly know anything you say to me is going to be the truth at this point? I just watched you - watched you take on some guy, shoot him in the leg, and work with a whole team of super spies, and now you’re here trying to tell me you love me?” He almost sounds desperate to believe it himself. Like he doesn’t want to not love her. He runs a hand through his hair, and Annabeth doesn’t know what to say to any of that. “Fuck. Jason and Piper, they trusted you too.” 

“I -”

His face darkens. “I introduced you to my mom.” He whirls on her, eyes hard. “Is my mother safe?” 

Annabeth nods immediately, and the look he gives her might be the worst one yet. “I had a team check on her apartment. And someone’s watching outside, just to be sure.” 

Relief washes over him, but anger still bubbles under the surface. Maybe she never should have gone to meet Sally. Maybe this wouldn’t be happening now, because somehow it feels like Sally Jackson is one of the pieces that made everything feel more real. But that’s wishful thinking, because there was no future with Percy Jackson in the cards under the circumstances in which she first came into his life to begin with. She foolishly allowed herself to feel like maybe there could be - like the laughing and the cuddling and the smiling and the happiness that swarmed inside her could be genuine, if she let go of so many other pieces. If she stopped being a liar. 

Luke always did bring out the worst in her, but she doesn’t even know if she can wholly blame him. Percy’s reaction to the truth was doomed to exist, no matter how she admitted herself to him. Perhaps they were doomed from the start too. She knows that. She just wishes she didn’t know that. 

“It explains some things,” Percy says slowly, like he doesn’t want to say it at all. “I guess I tried to ignore them. I really wanted this to work. I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

“You’re one of the best people I’ve ever met. I don’t want to lie to you anymore, Percy.” 

His face is crestfallen. “And I feel like I don’t even know who you are, Annabeth.”

He looks at her for a very, very long time. Annabeth doesn’t keep track. She’s run out of things to say, run out of excuses, run out of apologies, and Percy looks burnt out on his anger. He’s cradling it, afraid to let go, but tired of holding it. 

He deflates. “I can’t…” 

Annabeth swallows. Waiting. It feels like something of an end. 

“Get out. Just go, please.”

She does.

[poetrysmackdown]

some informal thoughts

hello! hope the holiday season has been kind to all of you. and i hope all my jewish followers had a lovely hanukkah! anyways, since i said a few months ago that i’d pick poetry smackdown back up sometime around this time of year, i thought i should make a post. the gist of it is that i’m still quite busy, i have a break that’s about three weeks shorter than I was planning on, and i don’t currently have the mental bandwidth required to read, contemplate, and sort through poem submissions in a way that does justice to them, even if i were to recruit some friends to help out. since running a tournament format requires at least five weeks of continued engagement once it’s underway, and since i’m not at capacity to offer that right now due to the change in my schedule, i’m gonna have to bow out for now. sad bc i was looking forward to it!

my hope is that i’ll have some more time over the summer to hunker down with it, in which case you’ll be hearing from me. it’ll frankly depend on the kind of job i land in for the summer, but i find that my unemployed spirit can typically keep me doing stupid shit regardless of workload...to a point. i don’t want to make any promises because i don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up just to let them down again LOL. i do admit the amount of exposure the first tournament got has made me feel like more of a perfectionist this time around, doubly because i don’t feel that i’m very suited to being a public online presence (even a relatively quite small one)—i’m bad enough at responding to emails for my own real life responsibilities, let alone tumblr asks for the silly responsibilities i invent for myself lol. that’s not to say i no longer want to do it, or i don’t enjoy it, or even that i don’t feel capable of making a really interesting bracket—just that if i am working to put something new together, and if people are taking the time to submit poems they care about, then i don’t want to half-ass it.

my second admission is something like this. I made the original bracket as a celebration of poetry and our relationships to it. yes it was silly and competitive, and the poems were very tumblr, but still, celebration was the intention—I wanted to have conversations about poetry. I stand by the bracket format as a fun and valuable way to foster conversations about poetry, but truthfully, the poems i’m wanting to have conversations about right now—the poems that we should be talking about right now—are ones that i'm not comfortable putting in a bracket. I reblogged The Baffler’s Poems from Palestine collection on here earlier, and Najwan Darwish’s “Who Remembers The Armenians?”, which I still often find repeating through my head when I'm traveling from one place to another, walking home or riding the bus. I came across this beautiful thread recently where people have been translating Dr. Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die” into their own languages (this just makes my translator's heart sing!!!!!!). @havingapoemwithyou has been posting some great poems from and for Palestine as well—check out their tag here.

There's always more to add, and I'll be posting more on here as I come across it, but that's what I feel anyone should be focusing on right now when it comes to poetry. i think poetry can be an escape but it should never be a distraction. does that make sense? i wouldn't be against doing a one-off poll here or there, but it feels weird to be making a tournament for poetry right now, or anytime soon. i feel like what free time i have right now is still best utilized helping my friends with organizing in the real world. and god, a bit off-topic but while I'm talking, fuck poetry foundation—I have so much respect for all the poets keeping up the boycott, because while i think it's a simple decision, it's not always an easy one (Aurielle Lucier discussed that here).

anyways, if you read all of this, thank you for your time!! I could go on and on, but really this was just meant to be a message telling y'all that there won't be another tournament for a while lol. even so i'll be trying to use this small silly platform as best i can until palestine is free because that's the absolute least i can do.

[greencarnation]

Printed some fliers and stickers to put up around town tomorrow. Remember that posting isn't the only way to spread awareness and build public consciousness in your area

[brookheimer]

roman is free in the sense that he is free from waystar, but he is not free in the sense that he has 'escaped the cycle.' roman realized everything is bullshit and left, but that's not what actual meaningful freedom would be for roman. what rome needs is for business and family to finally make a clean separation, for him to be allowed to love his family without molding himself into an image of logan that he isn't. waystar has always been the only way the roys know how to interact with one another, and it still is. in that sense, nothing has changed. roman's declaration about the nothingness of waystar is not actually a change, because he still marries waystar to family, and thus believes family is nothingness as well -- functionally, there's little difference between that and the opposite belief that both waystar and family have meaning and are 'real.' what the roys need is to realize waystar is bullshit and family is real, but roman went from thinking both have meaning (family has meaning thus waystar has meaning) to thinking neither do (waystar is bullshit thus family is bullshit). nothing changes, the cycle keeps on cycling. finally family has been severed from waystar (what he's needed all along -- he's never really cared about the business, only his family, and the business was the only way he could be with his family, so he tried and failed time and time again to mold himself into the businessman his dad wanted him to be), and while this is a good thing, it's coupled with his realization of the hollowness of the family itself. in hindsight, this was inevitable, i think -- if waystar royco was the beating heart of the roy family (which it was), there's no conceivable severing of the two that would allow the family to maintain functionally intact.

i do think that roman will have relationships with his family after the finale (shiv is definite, con is likely, kendall is also likely because roman is incapable of not being around his family and can't imagine a world in which they don't return to each other somehow), but he's aware for the first time of the nothingness of their bonds, something that everyone has already known except for him -- something, i think, that isn't even entirely fair. they do love each other. there is something there. and now that waystar is no longer part of the equation, maybe there's hope for real relationships beyond transaction, beyond business, beyond logan. but none of them believe that to be possible. roman always used to, but for the first time, i think he's not sure. he's free of waystar, but the roys never managed to functionally healthily uncouple family and business, so being free of waystar also means being free of family -- it has to mean that. he's convincing himself it's all nothing and he doesn't care, and that won't last. but, in my opinion, neither will the distance between the siblings. i think it'll take time, but they'll come back together, albeit in varying degrees (i doubt shiv and ken will ever have quite the same relationship again, for instance). roman is free of waystar but not because he realized it's not necessary for family -- because he 'realized' family is not necessary, that family is nothing too, that everything is nothing. it's an empty sort of happiness, unsustainable and hollow. but i do think there is hope. i think it'll be okay for rome in the long run (family-wise, at least). i just don't think nihilism is a salve capable of healing deep cuts, only a bandage allowing them to stay hidden for a little while longer.

in life and in death, waystar royco and the roy family are eternal partners, inextricable from each other -- and so long as the two remain conceptually married, it'll be hard for roman to find legitimate happiness: if one is dead, then the other must be too. he ends the series the same as he started it, believing fully in logan's conception of family as a business unit (meaning now that both are bullshit), people as economic units (meaning now that both are bullshit), and roman himself as the son who couldn't be the heir and thus was never much of a son at all. logan dominates his worldview just as much as it always has. sure, roman acknowledges that everything is bullshit now, but that's even more logan than his previous viewpoint which was a naive sort of belief in family. now, it's all just bullshit. everything's bullshit. it's logan with nihilism as the dominant frame (rather than capitalism), but regardless of roman's thoughts on the meaning of things, the structure of the world is the same one that logan taught him. he is free from waystar, but he is haunted by its ghost and always will be.

[butchsophiewalten]

Martin Twitter Q&A Answers Part 3

[the-meme-monarch]

allo people are insane how do they not get that some of the things they say are weird and fucking unwarranted

[pianokantzart]

Now all we need is the full version of the conversation between Toad and Mario with the cut "I'm not afraid, I'd do anything for my brother" and "I hope you told your brother how much you love him, because you're probably never going to see him again" lines.

[okayto]

I'm in a reference class right now and I just get so irrationally angry about the requirements.

Like, obviously, the purpose of the class is to make sure all the theoretically-future (or sometimes current) librarians know how to actually look things up AND verify sources AND in a wide variety of subjects and topics. Yes, good, valuable, important.

BUT I hate it so much. I hate questions that sound like they came from an alien whose best human impression comes from old chatbots: "Who is Zora Neale Hurston? What is she known for? Does Sparkle Library have any of her books?" why are you asking the first two questions if you clearly know them enough to ask the third "What's this geologic feature I saw in town? What's its history? Where is it?" can I point you to Google Maps please "What is the meaning of the word fandom?" why am I required to find you four verified resources on a dictionary definition "Can you help me find articles about this topic" yes but our professor hasn't actually given us examples of how they'd 'verify' articles so IDK if this will work even though it's literally exactly how I'd do this in my actual library job where I provide reference services to college students.

[khaotunq]

enneagram series - type 1: akk, the eclipse "Conscientious and ethical, with a strong sense of right and wrong. They are teachers, crusaders, and advocates for change: always striving to improve things, but afraid of making a mistake." [x]

[rhinocio]

POB Bitty would like to offer you some nice eggs in this trying time

(Don’t worry, the hens at base are laying more than enough to share and Uncle Raph is holding 90% of the weight for him, Bitty just wants to feel strong)

(This is just for funsies, no pressure to reply <3)

とてもちいさい弟 (totemo chīsai otōto) - very little little brother

[lovelaceisntdead]

The binding of Mabel has Begun.