#i don't know WHY I'm the way I am!! can't figure it out!

[satureja13]

A new episode of The Stables (our spin-off about the Boys' horses) took place! The last one is over a half year ago! And it's been a while since we had all the horses together in one place.

While Ji Ho took a swim in the river, Vlad was trying to stop him: "Be careful!" Tch, if Vlad really 'cared' about him, he wouldn't have ditched him for Kiyoshi! (Yes, you are so brave, Superhorse Yang Mal! Too bad they can't swim for real, but Valerian once ran in the ocean at Sulani the other day.)

When Ji Ho stepped out of the water, he couldn't believe his eyes! Kiyoshi was hitting on Jack and Saiwa and Jeb were kissing? He thought they were supposed to keep their distance to Lothario Kiyoshi! And why did Saiwa not stop Kiyoshi (to protect Jack from him, as promised) and gets so distracted by Jeb, who hurt him so much by cheating on him with Vlad?! Plus - he thought Jeb and Jack had something going on! Jeb even wanted to marry Jack!

"What are you all doing?!" Ji Ho yelled at them. Jack rose in shock: "What am I doing! Was he seducing me? Leave me alone, cheater! And what are you doing, Jeb? And you, making out with your ex, Saiwa. You told me it is over! Both of you! I was so close trusting you, Jeb!" Saiwa: "Oh no, what have I done! I'm so sorry, Jack. I was out of my mind. I failed you."

Jeb: "Saiwa, we need to talk..." Saiwa: "There's nothing more to say, Jeb."

'I don't wanna talk, about things we've gone through Though it's hurting me, now it's history I've played all my cards and that's what you've done too Nothing more to say, no more ace to play

I was in your arms, thinking I belonged there I figured it made sense, building me a fence Building me a home, thinking I'd be strong there But I was a fool, playing by the rules

The gods may throw a dice, their minds as cold as ice And someone way down here, loses someone dear But tell me, does she kiss, like I used to kiss you? Does it feel the same when she calls your name?

The judges will decide, the likes of me abide Spectators of the show, always staying low The game is on again, a lover or a friend A big thing or a small, the winner takes it all

I don't wanna talk, if it makes you feel sad And I understand, you've come to shake my hand I apologize, if it makes you feel bad Seeing me so tense, no self-confidence' ABBA - The Winner takes it All

Jack: "I think we need to talk, Jeb!"

They argued back and forth... (Isn't this amazing how much character and expressions the horses have? They are so well done <3)

Vlad said nothing, he just sighed. Did he held his hopes too high that Kiyoshi would choose him over all his other affairs? He must hurt too... And stupid Ji Ho still feels for Vlad, after all that has happened... He'd even begged Kiyoshi to not steal Vlad from him, in vain. And Ji Ho also knows how irresistable Kiyoshi is.

Jeb to Kiyoshi: "I told you to leave Jack alone and not to play with him!" Kiyoshi: "You're one to talk, you just hurt him more than I ever could."

Saiwa has enough of this charade: "We're leaving! Come on, Jack!" Kiyoshi to Jack: "Jack, come with me. I'll take good care of you." Jack: "What? No!" Jeb is leaving too, he needs time to think.

Even the birds are so done with them! hahaha

The Stables from the beginning -> here

[gayofthefae]

The Mike ily plot should have been told like the painting plot. The painting was a love confession we didn't know the contents of but we knew it was romantic, so it was both a reveal and we were on Will's side in anticipation of Mike's reaction, relieved when he smiled so wide. Mike was presumed by many to also be a love confession in the making we didn't know the reasoning within. It could have been a reveal with us also on Mike's side in anticipation of El's reaction.

But in taking away El's reaction, there's nothing left. It would have even worked if it had just followed through before the pineapple pizza scene. There is no information I'm gaining here. He loves her. We assumed that. She's happy. Okay. If she were able to react and he were nervous then I would still be empathizing on the edge of my seat. But neither are true. His fear that she's going to die completely overshadows any possible nerves over her taking him back that he had expressed it.

It could have been a great moment where he overcomes his insecurities to take the risk and we wait with him with baited breath to see if she'll take him back after all that's happened and rejoice together when she does, exhaling with him.

But instead, he told her he hadn't been able to say it because of anxiety but displayed none in the moment, flowing easily once he started - not to mention a big part of playing nerves is analyzing the person's reactions as you're talking, something you can't do if they have none, so there was no way to be proud of him for overcoming it. Even if we count his initial hesitation, I can't be proud of him for taking a deep breath and overcoming it alone because he didn't do it alone. Will helped him.

So I'm: Not proud of him. Not in anticipation with him. Not relieved with him.

In giving us their experiences separately with no communication with each other, we were also severed from empathizing with them because nothing in the situation is actionable. She can't kiss him because he finally said it. He can't smile nervously because she seems receptive. They're just knocking the first domino with nothing available to change it's course. And with nothing available to change a course of events, you're bored. Because nothing surprising will happen and we know that for a fact. Nothing can affect the situation so Mike is just gonna keep talking til he's done and El is gonna react to it internally. What am I watching for? What am I waiting for? What reason do I have to pay attention if no new information is being given to me and none is able to be added. We're just on this ride til it ends. Okay, it's over now. Let's go home.

We don't need to see her reactions. He does. We already can assume how she'll react. We need be reminded that he doesn't know and find out with him as if we didn't. I can't be proud of his bravery because I can't see it. It takes no courage to do something with no consequences. She can die, yes, but she can't reject him, and that's what he was afraid of. The one thing stopping him from telling her is impossible and that's when he tells her. It's not why. But it is why I'm uninvested.

They could have had us on the edges of our seats. We knew Will's feelings. We knew it would all be okay and he and Mike would still be friends in the end. We knew the painting likely had romantic connotations. None of that matters. He put himself out there to be caught and rejected deeply, even if veiled - he was backing off of the risk of consequences but there still *were some*. I'm proud of him because he still did something big and I was watching Mike's reactions like a hawk to figure out what he was thinking about and what action he would take next based on it. El could not react, she could not reject nor approve, she could not act. It's like predicting the murderer in a comedy. You're wasting your time, nothing's gonna happen and you'll be disappointed. The "I love you" speech should have been written like the painting reveal.

It should have. But it wasn't....

[sciderman]

(Idk if someone asked this already) since we’re on the topic of gender

sci what is gender to you and how do you see it in you and how you express it in your art?? (Just a young queer artist who wants some light shined upon them 🥺)

i 'unno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[meownotgood]

THAT'S 60,000 WORDS LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOO!!

[tanicus-caesareth]

guarana drama, damage control

[sherlock-is-ace]

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[sociallyawkwardseal]

Okay, so not fanfic/writing stuff but do you ever think of how close Calla and Kody used to be? How sweet and bright and encouraging she was towards him when they were younger? How friendly and warm she was? How they smiled at each other? It makes me want to eat rocks.

[musical-chick-13]

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[daz4i]

if i may complain for a bit about something that doesn't actually matter and can be easily avoided. god i hate fics that baby-fy chuuya

[eats-the-stars]

love the guy assigned to my case at the “help you get a job” program. i have exactly 2 modes. 1) procrastinating until the absolute last minute. And 2) guess I will complete months worth of work that is also due at the end of the year in exactly 3 days of non-stop effort. You can basically flip a coin as to which approach my brain will decide to take for any given task.

so yeah I have a job now. and my poor case manager dude is like “wait. no. that was so fast. it’s been one week. you did how many interviews? and you picked...this one. the one that is not like anything you have done before and also was not on the “jobs I think would work out for me” list that we made?”

and he was scrambling like “accommodations. training. oh god. um. do i need to talk to your employers?” and getting more anxious when I was like “no i think I have it covered.” like i am sorry bro but i know that my vibes in person are like “quiet forgetful autistic person who can pass for either a high school student or a grandma at any moment” and this does not inspire confidence, but I am actually pretty independent once someone gives me a little push to start a thing.

also...dude you have my job history. winter sports area general worker (concessions, ticket sales, renting ski/snowshoe equipment, managing cross-country trails, monitoring the tube hill, etc.). family restaurant hostess (basically every role in the place except a cook). person selling fireworks out of tent for all of July while also living in a smaller tent behind the shipping crate filled with things that go boom. call center customer service rep handling 4 different clients that range from crafts and home decor to incontinence products and super expensive furniture. freelance dog-sitting with clients ranging from “rich couple who wants me to let their elderly cockapoos out twice a day for $50 bucks a pop in a house with a basement theater” to “i’ll give you $10 a day to exercise and feed the 3 huskies in our small apartment also they can jump higher than you are tall and scream louder than you thought possible.” bro we added a whole “volunteer experience” section to my resume because I wrote grants and worked with an environmental group to restore native bluebirds to the community and volunteered at the community table and the animal shelter and the library. like i have done lots of things that are not really connected at all. someone says “hey do you think you could do this?” and I am suddenly living out of a tent for a month googling “what the fuck is a crossette?” i once ended up in Memphis for 2 months doing volunteer construction work in the aftermath of a hurricane because my cousin didn’t want to go alone and everyone was like “oh we know someone who goes with the flow so hard.”

so you better believe i told you “oh i don’t know, maybe a receptionist position would be nice” and then applied to every local job known to god and then a few extra and took the first one to say “cool can you start next week?” i know i did not give off “I will try anything at least once if you ask me fast and then go ‘great!’ before I can process what i agreed to” vibes while sitting in your office in my colorful leggings, grandma sweaters and animal hats while not making eye contact and talking about how lovely my nephew is and how much I enjoy quiet time alone and gardening and i struggle with a poor memory and navigating social interactions. but i know you proofread my resume my guy. you asked questions about all these things except the construction thing because i actually forgot to mention that actually which is good because then i might have had to mention the cult involvement that i wasn’t aware of until i was stuck on-site but it all worked out so no sweat. still, i am glad that he is concerned by my “out of the blue” spontaneity. it’s kind of his job to help people settle into jobs that they can handle, and I also know that I would realistically need more assistance from him if I wasn’t so good at adapting on the fly due to my bad habit of saying “sure, I can do that” to literally anything. also my new job is honestly pretty tame, so i am not sure what he is freaking out about. i should really not mention some of the other jobs i spontaneously applied for before accepting this one. like..my friend...i could be working in a bridal shop. i could be training to install and repair vending machines or decorating cakes or delivering medical equipment. i applied for a job that was literally “window production.” none of these are actually as wild as that time I spent 2 months with a religious cult doing manual labor and living out of an abandoned, half-destroyed school building because my cousin talked me into it. i had to watch a dramatic reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus on my very first night that brought the whole gymnasium of strangers to wild, howling tears while I was awkwardly clapping my hands as my cousin sobbed incoherently into my shoulder. i once dog-sat a bluetick coonhound for 2 weeks in the dead of winter, and the snow if his yard was so high that he was able to jump the fence and book it down the street. i had to chase him through knee-high snow for over an hour before he stopped to sniff a bemused old lady long enough for me to catch him. i once had a customer at the restaurant rail at me for a good twenty minutes because she was absolutely sure that we did serve pineapple upside down cake and i was just withholding this dessert from her, specifically. the bar for “jobs I would apply for” is so low that I actually thought “well as long as nobody spits in my face, pukes on me consistently, or shanks me in the kidney again I could probably do anything.” although to be fair to my case manager i did not mention those things to him (except the pineapple upside down cake lady because I mention her all the time, i am still pissed off about that situation). also, my sister was actually the one to have a dog wake her up in the middle of the night only to puke directly into her mouth, but I watched it go down, so the psychic trauma of witnessing that still exists.

[laughinglynx]

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[onlythebravest]

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[coldflasher]

you know what’s a scam? at the end of last year i just severely stopped giving a fuck at work and i was literally spending so much time doing fuck all, messing around on my phone for most of the day only to then edit like 30k in the space of 2-3 hours after lunch, and somehow i got away with it and my quality scores were fine. this year i was like okay this is not cool, i’m gonna make a determined effort to do this properly. so now i actually focus and don’t procrastinate, and yet i’m now consistently underperforming and i’m about to be put on performance review for the second quarter in a row which is... not great

i personally think our scoring system is stupid and needs an overhaul because in spot checks, they take off the same number of points for everything. so if i were to completely fail to edit a sentence and left it in a completely unreadable state, i would only lose one point, but then i also lose a point if i misplace a hyphen. so like. last year i somehow managed to fully miss this massive sentence that ended up making no sense whatsoever, and that was fine, apparently, because i didn’t lose points in other areas, but now i’m about to be put on performance review because i missed a few commas and accidentally used a mixture of single and double speech marks in a quote

the worst part is the way they do checks is so annoying because they just pull two random papers from the past 3 months and you can GUARANTEE they will pull a shit one. you can be on top form for ages and then have one bad day and somehow they always manage to pick the one paper you made mistakes on. i’m aware that they do this on purpose to put the fear of god into you because the idea is obviously that every paper should have no mistakes but let’s be real, that’s not realistic. human error is a thing. everyone makes mistakes. and somehow they have a sixth sense for finding the papers you made those mistakes on.

the problem is that last time i went on performance review, they monitored me for a bit and then did an extra spot check and the papers they pulled that time were basically perfect. one literally had no errors and the other had like. two. so i got a near-perfect score. which probably made me look great, like i’d worked really hard to fix the issue, which to be fair, i did. and they were really happy with that. except this quarter they pulled two more and i got the exact same bad score i got last time. so now it looks like i only started putting in effort when i was being monitored and then just immediately stopped trying again as soon as i wasn’t under review which ISN’T EVEN TRUE. i’m genuinely trying, here. but i’m very aware of how bad this looks and now i’m gonna have to do another one of those awful meetings where they bring up the fact that i’m Underperforming (*already shaking and crying at the mere prospect. once again i am about to get a bad grade in having a job*) and they literally have a senior manager who just. sits in the meeting in silence. watching. and nodding. while some other guy points out all the mistakes i’ve made. because that isn’t unnerving at all

i hate employment, i want to go live in a little hobbit hole and never have to receive another performance review again

[ayakashibackstreet]

You are not immune to nosey aunties trying to dictate how you live your life and commenting on your life choices...........

[keeps-ache]

hey guess who got their just got their post taken down for the first time! me :DD

[aromanticannibal]

all my childhood I told people I was atheist bc everytime I said I didn't have a religion they said oh, so ur atheist

but like really I do think theres some higher forces and stuff it's just that christianity and islam and judaism and all that jazz don't really vibe with what I think man