#i drew two things while listening to the songs. very effective for art

[charmixpower]

I don't know if you've ben asked this before, but what's your favorite winx club sountrack?

It has not been asked before :)

Let me just go listen to all the sound tracks, I'll be back. I know you asked just for my favorite but if I'm gonna listen to them to pick out a favorite, imma rank em too

Season Five: This season's music my beloved. "We're the Winx" is the best opening and I'm right. "Power to change the world", "We are Believix", and are all bangers. "Harmonix" and "Power of Sirenix" are some of the best transformation songs in the series, and they're in the same season. "Like a Ruby" is a actually good, real song, with a fucking riddle attached. The talent it has....unmatched. "Christmas Magic" is such a good song I nearly considered forgiving season 5 for the Christmas episode. I never will but, you understand me. I was listening to the songs on YouTube, and the Winx YouTube account has this cute little thing where Musa is always the paired image, and I got to a spoiler song and it was so good I stopped listening so I wouldn't ruin the experience for myself. It immediately put me in the mood to do Winx art

Secret of the Lost Kingdom: This movie has songs that I'd concider listening to outside the movie if they didn't make me wanna cry. Something something nostalgia childhood, this sound track has my heart in a death grip. I love the other version of Enchantix, I love the songs, I love this movie. There's a bonus song on the first movie album, it's "Stand Up" or something and it FUCKS HARD, I know that isn't relevant to the soundtrack of the movie but I just needed to let you know that the first movie stays winning

4kids: "We are the Winx" is like....so fucking good. What is it with this song title that leads the song to always fuck so supremely. Anyways the other songs are also good and I'm obessed with the direction of these songs. "Mean Girls Rule" came on and I had a moment, I've never wanted to watch the 4kids dub more. Just to see when the fuck they inserted that song. It's good tho

Magical Adventure: it's is fine. I'd rather listen to the good s4 songs over this, but I'll take it over listening to another second of fucking Love and Pet. Mid. "Famous Girls" wiggled it's way into my brain bc it sounds like Stella is singing it

Season Four: It's sound track is mostly good. It's full of well masters songs, the problem is that they had the same amount of content for most of these songs as they did for the songs in s1-3 but with movie song length. I very much regret trying to listen to them entire sound track without skipping anything, Love and Pet nearly pushed me to murder. They're good songs but I feel like they should just bite the bullet and cut the fat. Only "Winx are Back" and "Love and Pet" starting driving me to insanity. It was like elevator music that personally wanted me dead. The other songs are mostly just good but dragged, "Believix" and "Winx Open Up Your Heart" however both fuck supremely and I love them. "Let the Power Shine" is also v good. Also I never noticed that Andy and his band had like songs...I didn't pay attention anytime anyone was singing tbh, I was busy trying to beat my head though a wall

The Mystery of the Abyss: "Magic All Around" and "We All Are Winx" suck ass, "Like a Star" is fun and very catchy, and "Feeling Fine" has a surprising amount of heart to it and it sucked me in eventually but I don't like the opening of the song much at all. Very fucking hit or miss over here

Season Six: I left the playlist on and my curiosity got the better of me. The inferior version of the Sirenix song fuckin sucked, but you knew that. On one hand, like the best friend platonic love song, on the other hand, who in the studio personally hated the singer??? Why do they constantly lather her voice in this annoying electronic sounds. It was either intentional, or they majorly fucked up on the auto tune. Either way I hate it. Also dont like the amount of high pitched electric songs here, ow, stop that. I didn't Listen to s7 because genuinely, if I have to listen to one more song about how they're the Winx and throwing a party because these seasons don't have a plot, imma go crazy

Season Three: The sound track is better than the earlier seasons because someone in the studio finally figured out what the concept of mastering audio was. This gives the the songs more emotional weight to me, because I'm not being distracted by the poor audio quality lol. Og Enchantix is my favorite transformation song, so there's also that

Season Two: It's sound track is pretty similar in quality to the s1 sound track, ie it's pretty jank and the songs are not the best, but I like it more. Do I like it more just because I like s2 more and I have more positive connotations to the music? Yes. S2 I love youuuu

Season One: This sound track feels like it's the bands second album with some pretty bad sound mixing. It really doesn't bother me because I still intentionally listen to my favorite band's earliest albums. It feels very dated due to the poor quality, but it's fun enough. Nothing I would intentionally listen too outside of the show, but it matches the awkward stumbling vibe of the first season

[thejilyship]

Taking the Lead

For @jilychallenge August 2021 Theme: Summer Prompt: "I saw you staring and so decided to try to put on my suncream ~sensually~ but omg the lid just popped off and the whole bottle came out stOP grinning oMG" @thejilyship v @sirenicc I did not think I was going to get this done! Also it's fem!jily. No one should be surprised at this point.

WC: 3.5k AO3

A leadership camp was the absolute last place that Jamie wanted to spend any part of her summer. She and Sirius had made plans to go white water rafting, concert hoping, castle hiking, dive bar hunting and he’d even promised to attend a total of four sperate ballets with her. She did not have time to spend a week in the middle of the Scottish hills singing camp songs with a bunch of people that she didn’t know.

She didn’t need a leadership camp. She was, as almost every single one of her teachers and professors had said, a natural born leader. Some of her teachers had said this with admiration coloring their tone, and others had said it in a ‘your daughter really needs to stop getting the entire class to break into song in the middle of third period’ kind of way, but either way, they had all been in agreement.

She took the bus to camp so she would be less inclined to run off in the middle of it, and she went to the main building to sign in, which she was informed would be hence forth called ‘command center.’ She refrained from rolling her eyes.

She accepted her key and went off to find her dorm with her yellow duffle bag resting on her hip. Since they were all adults, they weren’t making them sleep in groups of twenty or so, and were instead grouped into fours. Jamie’s cabin was number five, which was her lucky number, and so far the only good omen she had gotten from this place.

She knocked before she pushed the cabin door open. Two of her three bunkmates were already there, setting up their beds. A redhead with striking green eyes and a petite brunette with springy hair and a gorgeous smattering of freckles. Jamie smiled at the two of them and they smiled back.

“Hey! My name is Lily,” The redhead held out her hand, bold and assertive. Jamie didn’t think she was in much need of a leadership camp either. “This here is my best friend, Mary.”

“Lily and Mary, it’s nice to meet you both. I’m Jamie.” She pulled her duffle off her shoulder and claimed the open bottom bunk. “Are you best mates in the camp sense, or have you met before today?”

Mary laughed, “Best friends since we were eleven. I dragged Lily along to this camp because I’m incapable of leaving home without her.”

“And it sounded like fun!” Lily added, looking back at her curly haired friend. “Did you know that this camp has a ropes course?” She asked, turning back to Jamie.

“A rope course? And that sounds like fun to you?”

“Of course, it does!”

“Wait until we’re actually on the ropes course,” Mary chuckled, “Lily is afraid of heights.” She tilted her head toward Jamie and raised her brows.

“I’m not afraid of heights,” Lily argued. “I simply… do not… like them.”

“Right.” Mary laughed.

Rooming with best friends might not be the best case scenario, as they already had someone to pair off with for all the group activities they were bound to do over the next week. They had a fourth roommate yet, so Jamie would reserve her pessimistic judgment until then. In the meantime, Lily and Mary seemed like nice people who she could eat meals with if nothing else.

“There’s also a lake,” Lily apparently still found the need to explain why she thought this camp would be fun. “And the weather is supposed to be brilliant this week. Sunny and warm!”

“I’m here for the seminars and workshops, not for the lake.” Mary said.

“You can be here for both.” Lily shrugged. “And, as much as I love you, I’m here for the arts and crafts, camp food and fun activities.”

“Arts and crafts is an activity. And this is a camp for adults, do you really think-“

Lily cut Mary off with a scoff. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. “If you think I didn’t check before I agreed to come, then you have another thing coming, MacDonald.” She turned her phone out so it was facing Mary, and Jamie a bit. Jamie was able to see colorful pictures of string bracelets, painted pottery, and she couldn’t tell what else.

“Well then,” Mary shook her head. “I hope you get to live out your summer camp dreams.”

“Thank you.” Lily nodded, looking rather smug. It was a look that worked for Lily. Her cheeks took on a dusting of pink, her green eyes grew brighter, and she sat up taller. Jamie turned to her duffle to avoid being caught ogling.

There was a knock on the door and the three girls turned in unison.

“Hello, I’m Emma Vanity. I guess I’m your fourth.” She gave a sharp wave and then looked at the three taken beds before her eyes fell onto the unclaimed top bunk above Jamie.

“I’m Mary and this is Lily,” Mary pointed at Lily, who offered a bright smile.

“And I’m Jamie Potter.”

“Potter?” Emma’s brow shot up. “As in Potions by Potter? Are your parents Fleamont and Euphemia Potter?”

“It’s a fairly common last name,” Jamie shrugged. She wouldn’t have added her last name if she had thought someone would recognize it.

“Right,” Emma laughed and dropped her bag to the ground. “Well, either way, I’m sure that you are a greatperson to share a bunk with.” She knew who Jamie was, that was clear.

“Mary’s mother was a circus performer if that interests anyone.” Lily had pulled out a bag of jelly candies and tore one in half with her front teeth. Jamie smiled at her appreciatively.

“Does she still perform?”

“No, she retired when I started school.” Mary said. “But she does teach trapeze classes down at the local leisure center.”

“They’re great fun.” Lily nodded. “Should we go and find ourselves some lunch?”

“I hope you know that they aren’t going to serve bad camp food.” Mary pushed herself off Lily’s bed. “Are you two coming with us?”

Emma looked at Jamie, and since Jamie had no desire to be alone with Emma just then, she smiled at Lily and nodded. “Sure. I’m always ready to eat.”

“I’ll come too,” Emma nodded. “I’ve already memorized the layout of the camp, so you can all follow me.” And then she was walking back toward the door.

Lily, who had just proven herself to be very familiar with the camp, was looking at Emma’s retreating figure with raised brows, but she didn’t say anything and just hopped off her bed.

“Off we go then,” Mary bit her bottom lip and followed Lily. Jamie closed the door behind them.

The sun was out, and it was warm, which Jamie hadn’t fully appreciated before Lily had told her that they could expect this weather to last all week. And she hadn’t known there was a lake. That hadn’t been on her list of fun summer activities she wanted to do with Sirius, but she hadn’t been a beach in a while, and while she was sure the beach on this random camp lake wasn’t brilliant, it would be nice.

Especially if Lily was also there to talk it up.

oOo

Jamie gravitated toward Lily over the next couple of days. At first she thought it was because the other girl’s positive attitude was contagious, and while it was, that wasn’t the sole reason.

Jamie had developed a little bit of a crush.

Except not really, because Jamie had never once developed a ‘little’ crush in her life. It took exactly one day for her to realize that she was already deciding how the two of them would find time for each other after they left camp. Two days in and she had decided that their first pet would be a short haired cat named Mr. Tums, preferable all black.

Three days in and she was almost certain that she was in love.

Not in love in love, she understood that was ridiculous.

No, on day three, she was simply falling in love.

It would be a few more days until she was actually in love.

Lily had her shoulder length hair in twin braids today. Whisps of baby hairs framing her face and she kept reaching up to brush them away from her eyes, which only drew more attention to her eyes and her hair and all the other parts of her face that Jamie couldn’t stop staring at.

And at the moment, she was wearing a bloody bikini as she sat on the towel next to Jamie’s on the small beach the camp had to offer. A bikini.

Jamie was doing everything she could to ignore the bikini, but it was there, and showing off every soft curve and gentle swoop of Lily Evans’ body. Jamie was in a t-shirt and boardshorts, because she couldn’t possibly exist in the space next to Lily Evans wearing anything less than this and keep the ability to speak.

Not that her ability to speak was getting her far. Lily was doing most of the talking.

“What do you think?” Lily reached out and nudged Jamie on the shoulder, her bubblegum pink nails scraping lightly on the sleeve of Jamie’s t-shirt.

The quirk in Lily’s brow let Jamie know that she had missed something. Keeping her clothes on may have left her with the ability to speak, but Lily wearing that bikini had hindered her ability to listen. She’d been so focused on not staring at Lily that she hadn’t remembered to pay attention to what she was saying.

“What do I think about what again?” Jamie asked, not bothering to pretend that she had heard Lily. The knowing smile on Lily’s face should have made Jamie a bit self-conscious, but she liked how smug Lily looked knowing the effect she had on Jamie. She also wanted Lily to know that she liked her, especially since Lily had not acted as though knowing made her even the slightest bit uncomfortable.

“I was asking for your opinion one what we should do this evening. I want to watch the sunset over the lake, but I don’t think I can stay down here until then. I’ll fry. So should we go to the craft cabin and make some more bracelets,” She held up her rope bracelet covered wrist and shook it, “Or should we have an early dinner?”

“Don’t we have a class to go to before dinner?” Jamie asked, looking out at the water after briefly glancing in Lily’s direction.

“I didn’t sign up for anything. Did you?”

“Probably not.” Jamie shrugged. “Mary isn’t upset with you for ditching her?”

Lily snorted. “I’m hardly ditching her. Besides, she knew I wasn’t going to be signing up for anything that wasn’t required. I came for the crafts and the beach. And to share a bunk with her.” She was smiling at Jamie, she could feel it aimed at the side of her head.

“Alright, well then, I think we should stay down here for a while longer and then go and get some dinner. I didn’t really enjoy the bracelet making.”

“You’re just upset that I’m better at it than you.”

“No.” Jamie shook her head. “I can honestly say that I’m not upset because you’re better than me. I’m upset because I can not figure out how to do it at all. All five attempts turned into a tangled knot of colorful string and heartbreak.”

“You picked out great colors,” Lily had her lips pressed together when Jamie mustered up the fortitude needed to face her. She used all the strength she had to keep her gaze on Lily’s face and then let out a huff and laid back on her towel.

“Thanks a million.”

“Of course.” She reached out and patted the back of Jamie’s hand, her bubblegum pink nails drawing Jamie’s eye. “If we’re going to stay for a while more, I should put on more sunscreen.”

Jamie reached for the bag on her right and handed it to Lily and then shut her eyes. She couldn’t watch Lily put on sunscreen. She knew that she wouldn’t handle that well. Especially not when Lily seemed to be in a mind to tease the shit out of Jamie. Which Jamie knew she deserved after the entirely unsubtle way she had told Lily and Mary about her ex-girlfriend. She had blushed immediately after saying it and then muttered about needing a restroom.

Lily hadn’t brought up any exes at all, but she had followed Jamie on Instagram the first night, and it didn’t take a whole lot of work to figure out that Lily also represented a letter or two from the alphabet.

Jamie bit down on the tip of her tongue and wondered how long she would need to keep her eyes closed before it would be safe to open them.

She heard the cap of the sunscreen pop open and started counting, figuring three minutes to be ample time. She took the time to take a few deep breaths, have a few imaginary conversations with Sirius where he called her a dumbass, whacked her over the head and told her to make her move, and then tried to clear her head of any and all nonsense.

“Where do you head back to after this week?” Lily asked, and Jamie almost opened her eyes.

“Winchester. My brother and I are staying with our parents for the summer, and we have a lot of plans. This camp actually threw a bit of a wrench in our plans, but da wanted me to come here.”

“He didn’t want your brother to come?”

Jamie snorted. “Can you imagine? I mean, da did ask him if he wanted to, but Sirius is very… anti-group activities.”

“What plans were ruined?” Jamie turned her head and opened her eyes, figuring the sun screening was done with now.

It was not.

Lily was rubbing it into her shoulders, her hands moving slowly and her nails contrasting sharply with the pale tone of her skin.

Jamie’s mouth went dry and she tried to swallow.

Lily’s brow went up and Jamie cleared her throat. “Ballet.”

“What?”

“The ballet. I got Sirius to agree to go to a few different shows with me, which he never does, and I’m missing one of them to be here.”

The tip of Lily’s pink tongue peeked out from between her lips and Jamie bit down on her own tongue. What was it about this girl that had Jamie acting like a randy, seventeen-year-old, boy?

“The ballet? I didn’t picture you-“

“I’m actually a ballerina.”

Lily blinked her big green eyes and brought her shoulder up to her chin.

“I mean, I saw the pictures of you with your dance bag, but I guess I just…” Jamie hadn’t posted any recent pics of her in anything dance related, and so she smirked at the knowledge that Lily had been snooping.

“You didn’t picture me as a ballerina? What kind of dancer did you think I was?”

“Honestly? I thought you were a theater dancer.”

Jamie chuckled. “I mean, I have dabbled in the theater.”

“Dabbled? I think it’s you use of words like ‘dabbled’ that made me think theater actually.”

“Dabbled is a normal word.”

“Sure, and it made me think ‘theater kid.’” Lily turned back to the bottle of sunscreen and picked it up, squeezing some onto her hand before she angled one of her legs and started rubbing her hands together. The point of her toe, the angle of her head, it was all deliberate. Jamie knew that it was all deliberate, but she didn’t care. She watched on bated breath as Lily started working the sunscreen into her leg. She started at her upper thigh and worked her way down to the ankle, slowly, making sure to cover every inch of skin.

“How long have you been a ballerina?”

Jamie had to unclench her jaw to answer. “Since I was about five.”

“And when did you dabble in the theater?” Lily’s voice was even and normal, like she wasn’t currently putting on a show for Jamie. She should have kept her eyes shut. She should close her eyes right now, but she knew that she wasn’t going to.

“Um… I think the first musical I was in, I was eight? Mum was helping out with…” She trailed off as Lily angled her other leg and started on that thigh. “Mum was helping with costumes. It was just a small local production.”

“Of what?”

“Fiddler on the Roof.” Jamie hoped that she was answering Lily’s questions, but she really wasn’t paying attention to what either of them were saying. For the first time since she’d seen Lily in this stupid bikini, she was allowing herself to look at her. She was drinking it in.

Jamie was pretty sure that Lily said something else, and half of her brain heard it, though it took a while to get it all pieced together. “I’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof. Mary was a theater kid, so I’ve actually seen a lot of musicals.”

“Good.” Jamie nodded, even though she knew that wasn’t really a top notch response.

Lily picked up the bottle of sunscreen and popped the cap open again, and Jamie could feel the pop in the back of her teeth. She watched Lily tighten her hand around the bottle, squeezing more onto her open palm.

“I might need your help with my back-“

About two seconds before Jamie would have had a heart attack and passed away right there on the small camp beach in the middle of nowhere, the top of the bottle came off and, with Lily still squeezing the bottle, the sunscreen went everywhere. It splattered all over Lily’s lap, chest and towel. It got on Jamie too, a large glob landing on the lens of her glasses.

They both froze for a minute before Jamie looked up at Lily from her one clear lens. Lily’s cheeks were bright red and she was looking at the still dripping bottle as though it had purposefully ruined her plans to send Jamie to an early grave.

The building tension crumbled like a saltine cracker.

“That’s what you get,” Jamie said, reaching over and wiping a large glob off of Lily’s nose. Then she started laughing as Lily turned to look at her. Her cheeks stayed red, but she cracked a grin. “That was totally deserved!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lily shook her head and dropped the offending bottle. She started smearing and wiping at all the excess sunscreen, wiping her hands on her towel to get it off. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

Jamie started laughing harder. “You’re a liar.”

Lily bit down on her bottom lip, still shaking her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You most certainly do know what I mean, and now you’ve made a mess of yourself.”

“The cap broke! I don’t know why you’re telling me I deserve it.”

Jamie reached over and swiped at another glob at Lily’s shoulder. “Sure, Evans.” She whipped her hand so it landed somewhere in the grass and then got another glob from Lily’s hair. “So that’s just how you normally put on sunscreen?”

“Of course it is.”

“I can’t wait to see how your normally put on your pajamas tonight.”

Lily’s face went a shade or two darker and Jamie laughed again.

“You know what, if I was putting it on… a certain sort of way, it was only because you were looking at me-“

“I hadn’t been looking at you!” Jamie took her glasses off and carefully went about cleaning them. “I had very deliberately not been looking at you. You waited until I was looking at you.”

Lily was quiet until Jamie looked over at her, having to squint in order to see the look on her face. She put her glasses back on to confirm that she was looking smug. She was. “Okay, but then you couldn’t take your eyes off me.”

“Have you ever heard the phrase, in for a penny, in for a pound?”

Lily narrowed her brow in confusion. “I have.”

“I’ve only ever had fancied three people in my life, including yourself,” Lily sat up straighter and Jamie felt her cheeks heat but shook her head. Lily had already known that Jamie fancied her. “Yes, go and head a preen over it.”

“I am flattered,” Lily, still covered in globs of sunscreen, waved her hair back over her shoulder with one of her hands. Then she looked at Jamie expectantly.

Jamie sucked in a sharp breath through her nose and released it all at once. “Where do you live, Evans? And how far is it from Winchester?”

“And why do you ask?”

“Because I’ve a feeling that we’ll have some unfinished business come Friday.”

And then Lily laughed, and Jamie felt it all the way to the tips of her toes.

[luvlyrv]

The Fleeting Image of You | Wendy x Fem!Reader

Genre: angst and fluff

Summary: Your world was falling apart at the seams, until a mysterious girl fell into your life. Then, you began to fall for her.

Word Count: 3.5k

A/N: First time I’ve written something with the intention of making you cry. Please tell me if you cried, or if it at least made you sad. That’d be pretty epic. Is it mean of me to say that?

Also, I apologize for taking so long to upload something... I’ve been flooded with work lately and school is just getting way more stressful now :/ I have some stuff lined up for ‘Naughty’ and ‘Our Songs’ btw! Just have to finish.

Date: 2/2/21

You sigh as you sit down in your favorite corner of the library. You set your stuff down, making it known that you'd taken the seat, and stood back up to begin scouring for something new to read.

Spending your time in the quiet and tranquil local library had become a new favorite past-time of yours. It was strange, you thought, how lonely you felt recently. You couldn't help but find yourself disconnected from the majority of the world, a cloud of sadness following you everywhere. No matter how much you tried it felt like you couldn't bother to reach out. Yet, when it came to the library the loneliness exhibited here was not something awful, but rather something chased after. Something you can find comfort in.

You stop in front of a shelf as you reach out for a book with a maroon cover. It seemed to be on the older side. You gently grazed the spine of the book, enjoying the rougher texture it had. You pull it out of the shelf, only to be surprised that it had no writing on either side of the book. Perhaps the title and author would be written in the first page.

You open up the book to look inside. Instead of any text, the first page was a beautiful ink illustration. It seemed to be a design of a mirror. You trace the image and upon closer inspection, it didn't look printed on. It was as if someone drew it in the pages by their self. Maybe someone left their sketchbook here? Or perhaps this was just a strange, unlabeled picture book?

Intrigued by the illustration, you go back to your seat to sit down and flip through the other pages. After the mirror, there was an image of a girl, and after that an image of another girl. You smile a bit, finding the images cute. Especially the one of the second girl, who seemed to share the same hair length and style as you. While in the middle of admiring the art in front of you, you felt a presence. You turn your head up, only for the sight to make your breath hitch as a beautiful woman stood beside you. The stranger was also seemingly enchanted by the book in your hands.

"H-hi" You say softly, mesmerized by how soft her brown hair looked as it cascaded around her face. Her eyes that were scanning the book moved to look into yours. You felt your mouth dry up.

"Hey, I was just wondering if it was okay for me to sit at this table next to you?" The voice that left her mouth was laced with a friendly confidence. You quickly looked around the rest of the library, noticing the overwhelming amount of empty tables. You decide to not question it though, because why would you deny the company of someone like her?

"Sure." You nod as you answer, she flashes you a smile and sits across from you. She tugs at the bookbag she has around her body to open it, pulling out a thick book. You look back at your own book, but you can't seem to focus anymore. You flip the page to try and look busy, but you don't really pay attention to what's on the paper anymore. Your eyes glance back and forth from your book to the woman, who's now peacefully reading.

It takes time for the courage inside of you to build up, and you're afraid of disturbing her, but you felt like you had to say something.

"So… " You begin speaking. The stranger's head perks up as she gives you her attention. "What's your name?"

"Oh I'm sorry!" She laughs a little bit, the noise is akin to a sweet melodic bell. "I never introduced myself. You can call me Seungwan, and you?" You notice that Seungwan slips a bookmark into her book and gently closes her book. It seems like she's giving you her full attention, a feeling you haven't felt in a while. You smile before you talk.

"I'm Y/N, nice to meet you. What brings you here today?" You start playing with your hands underneath the table as the nerves begin to truly settle in.

And that's how it all started.

*

*

For the past couple of weeks your mood had been brightening significantly. Before, it was hard to get out of bed for the day to attend your classes. It was hard to even pick up your phone and reply to the very few messages you got. Most of them being from Yeri, the only person you'd consider a real-friend who occasionally checked in on you. Yet lately you found yourself hopping out of bed, excited with the prospect of wrapping up your day quickly to head to the library as soon as possible.

You now officially considered the library to be your second home. Instead of working at your desk you could work in the quiet library, surrounded by the smell of books and coffee and most importantly, Seungwan. As the two of you grew more familiar with each other Seungwan seemed to have a paradoxical effect on you.

The way her eyes stared into yours, all her little mannerisms, they would make you struggle to continue speaking coherently. At the same time though, her sitting across from you, quietly humming, made you feel at peace.

You wouldn't mind spending everyday like this, an evening filled with library-talk with Seungwan. It wouldn't hurt to switch it up a little though. So, when Seungwan finally came over to your little nook in the library, you excitedly jumped from your seat.

"Seungwan! How about we go do something fun?" You haven't even put your things down, expecting her to say yes. Instead she decided to tease you a bit first.

"Oh, is this not fun enough for you?" She plasters on an exaggeratedly hurt face and you punch her arm softly.

"You know I don't mean it like that. How about we go somewhere else for once?" You lean closer to her and tug on the sleeve of her cardigan to beg, and she quickly sighs in defeat.

"Let's go to a karaoke place then." She casually suggests. Meanwhile you start to panic, because god what if you embarrassed yourself in front of her?

"Well, uhm! I'm not too sure about that, how about we-"

"You're the one who's begging me to go out, so I'm picking where!" There's a playful tone in her voice as she immediately turns away from you, heading outside the library. You quickly follow her and decide not to worry too much about your singing skills.

When you arrive to the karaoke place and are ushered into your own room with Seungwan, you start to get nervous. She doesn't fail to notice the way your wiped your hands on your thighs as she hands you a microphone.

"Are you nervous?" She asks as she grabs a microphone for herself. She steps over towards you and sits down on the plush couch next to you.

"No. Maybe. Just a little." There's a pause before you admit your true feelings. "Yes, a lot." The both of you laugh at your comment before Seungwan gives you a friendly nudge.

"I won't judge! I promise you, just don't worry about it and we'll have fun tonight." She stands up and selects the first song for the evening.

If you didn't say that what you heard was angelic, you would be the world's biggest liar. You couldn't help but feel like the luckiest person in the world. It was as if an angel held a private concert just for you. Or perhaps, if sirens were real, this would be what they sounded like. Regardless of what you can compare it to, it was a special sound you wanted to treasure forever.

"I'm not sure how I could top that." You laugh after she finishes. She shakes her head before talking to you.

"Who said anything about being on top? Just have fun!" Then she drags you to go over and choose a song to sing.

You're nervous, you really are, but you decide to trust in Seungwan's words and give an honest performance. You pushed away your worries as you tried to enjoy yourself. By the end of the night, her promise came true. The many duets and solos you guys shared strained your throat, but it was a pain that was worth it.

Before the time in your room ran out Seungwan decided on singing one last song. You gave her some cheers as the song started playing, giving her some not needed (but hopefully appreciated) encouragement. After several seconds she finally started singing. Once again you found yourself feeling like you were on cloud nine solely from her voice.

It took a while for you to snap out in the trance-like state you entered, but once you did you truly appreciated the lyrics that your friend was singing.

"Do you think of me when you open your eyes in the morning? So you think of me when you see something nice? Do you laugh alone out of the blue like I do?"

It's a slow song, a soft song, a song filled with love and affection. It felt like her voice was built for something like this. As you listen to the lyrics heat begins to spread on your face. It felt like recently you've been asking the same questions to yourself about a certain person.

"Tell me is this the first time? Have you fallen for me as much as I have fallen for you?"

Maybe it was the intense desire in your heart that was playing tricks on your eyes, but it seemed like Seungwan's eyes kept looking between you and the screen more than usual. That there was a flicker of something within her welcoming brown eyes. Your heart is pounding too fast now. It threatened to beat out of your chest as your heartbeat filled your ears, becoming louder than the music itself.

"I want to know everything, if my heart has grown deeper than yours like a fool."

Certainly those lingering glances meant nothing. You ignore your feelings as you try to calm yourself down. When the song ended your time at the karaoke room was over. You complimented Seungwan before thanking her for her time. After promising each other to go out for karaoke another time, the two of you went your separate ways home satisfied with the fun night out.

When you got home, you pulled out a familiar maroon book before laying on your bed. You never properly checked it out. Mostly because it didn't even seem like a library book, judging by the fact that it had no stamps nor barcodes. You assumed that not many people were picking it up anyways, and so once you had your time with the book you'd carefully place it back where you found it.

It was odd that you wanted to keep the book so much, but that was due to how strangely comforting it was. Every once in a while you would pull it out again, only to admire it and its wordless contents. Besides the first few pages, every illustration had two girls together. Maybe those two girls were just friends, but in your mind you liked to imagine them as lovers. Your favorite illustration of it all was one towards the end. On the final pages there were illustrations of a night sky speckled with stars, the girls looking out to the sea.

You sigh before putting the book down and turning off the light. Closing your eyes you wonder, is that something you'd like to experience?

*

*

It's been a couple months now. You've spent a considerable amount of time hanging out with Seungwan, as well as a considerable amount of time gushing about her to Yeri. You never explicitly said you liked her, but you certainly didn't hold back on telling your friend every trait you admired about Seungwan.

These days, you and Seungwan would meet up in the library and sometimes stay there for a calm and quiet experience. Other times the two of you would be more inclined to have fun walking around downtown, going to karaoke, or enjoying the bustling energy of a café while drinking coffee.

Today was one of the days where Seungwan suggested to head over to get some coffee. Of course you agreed, as you decided long ago that anywhere Seungwan went you'd want to go too. Not surprised by your easy yes the two of you head out to your typical coffee place.

While in the middle of sipping on coffee Seungwan turns to the side. She rustles through her handbag to pull out two bracelets. She held onto the one with your name on it, while slightly bringing forward the one bearing her name. You stop drinking your beverage as you took a closer look at the bracelet resting in her hand.

It was a simple bracelet made with a dark string running through some beads. You appreciated the cute minimalism of it all. The beads were blue, and after spelling out her name there was a final bead that had a heart on it. You slowly reach out for the bracelet and wear it, admiring the way it felt and looked on your wrist.

You look at Seungwan's wrist as she also adorns the accessory. After your name was also a bead with a heart, and you can't help but to ask why she suddenly gave you such a gift anyways.

"Well… " She begins to look away, perhaps a bit nervously? When looking back at you she quickly looks back down. Unable to hold eye contact she explains herself anyways. "I thought it'd be a nice way to signify our connection. To keep us tied to each other." There's a moment of silence after she says this. You can't possibly control your heart, your mind, your feelings. Could this mean what you wanted it to mean?

"What kind of connection?"

"Whatever kind you want." The words come out a whisper as Seungwan finally looks back at you. Was this an opening? Did she mean what you thought she meant? You let your hand cautiously approach hers. She doesn't back away and let's you take it.

"Can I kiss you?" Your face is fire-hot as you ask, but now more than ever you wanted to. She leans in, and there was the first kiss you shared.

It was short, but it didn't need to be long. When your lips made contact it gave you a feeling of being weightless, yet at the same time it was enough to ground you into reality. This was it. It was really happening.

*

*

It had only been a few short weeks since you and Seungwan started dating. The two of you never said so aloud, but you both knew. She knew by the way you didn't shy to touch and be close with her more than before. You knew by the way she smiled and looked into your eyes. Sometimes when you like someone enough, you don't have to say it to understand.

Today when meeting up at the library Wendy took you out to eat at a nice restaurant. After enjoying dinner together she said she had something important to show you, curiously you followed her as the two of you eventually arrived at the boardwalk.

Since eating dinner took a while, it was now night. The bright white stars speckled the dark blue sky, while the inky black sea reflected the moon and the streetlights. Seungwan takes your hand, casually walking down the boardwalk with you while taking in the sights. You hum while enjoying the feeling of her hand in yours.

"Is this the important thing you wanted to show me?" You ask.

"I just wanted you to appreciate how beautiful the world can be sometimes, how beautiful living is." She says and looks at you. She gives you a smile. The kind of smile that told you that a person was content with life.

At one point Seungwan stops and leans over the railing, staring out to the sea. You lean over the railing right beside her. You spend some time admiring the sea, but you would rather turn and look at Seungwan. As you look at her she's still facing forward. Then she asks you a question you weren't expecting.

"Do I make you happy?" You would like to believe it's a rhetorical question, but she says it with a straight face.

"Of course you do, silly." You reply, scooting closer to her body to warm your own up. She smiles a bit at your answer before looking at you. There's a pause before she continues questioning you.

"Does anything else?"

"I don't know. Anything can be good as long as it's with you." You answer honestly, but Seungwan seems displeased. With a slight frown on her face and a glint of worry in her eyes she begins to hug you.

"I hope one day, Y/N, you realize you aren't alone." She says as she strokes your hair, tightening the embrace between the two of you.

"I won't be as long as I have you." You whisper into the crook of her neck. A moment of silence passes before she sighs and whispers.

"I wish you didn't rely on me so much."

"Why?"

She breaks the embrace and you begin to miss the warmth until she takes your face with her two hands. She looks at you with a longing you never saw before. Her eyes were watery as she gently confessed.

"Because I don't know how much longer we have together." You almost ask her to explain what she meant before she softly placed a kiss on your lips.

You wake up in a cold sweat, breathing heavily as you look around your room. Just a moment ago you were by the sea with Seungwan, and now you were back in your room. You flopped in your bed in frustration that you dreamed up a scenario with her. You calmed down though, knowing that you could visit her again later today.

After attending your classes for the day you excitedly made your way to the library. You walked towards the little corner of the library that you and Seungwan always shared, surprised to see that nobody was there. You sat down at the table anyways, opening up your bag and trying to immerse yourself in a book. Your foot tapped and tapped, the words your eyes saw across the page meaning nothing to you. It had only been 10 minutes, but it felt like forever.

Annoyed at her absence, you walked around searching for her, thinking maybe she was hiding and playing a trick on you. You whispered her name as you peeked your head around corners, going up and down in the aisles between selves. Fed up with searching, you went to a familiar librarian and asked if she'd seen Seungwan yet.

"I'm sorry Y/N, but who's Seungwan?" She said with a confused look on her face. You gave her a confused face back, shocked that a woman who had recommended books for the both of you to read, a woman who had watched your blossoming relationship with Seungwan progress, act like she didn't exist. You scoff and laugh it off.

"Sorry for asking." You say in a slightly sarcastic manner and go to pick up your bag. You reckon that Seungwan made her play along with her joke. You'd have to scold her for messing with you so bad later today.

You're bored and you don't know how to spend your time with Seungwan. As you walk down the familiar path, looking out to the sea, you grab your phone and decide to call Yeri.

"Yerim!" You call out as soon as you hear her answer the phone.

"Yeah, what's up Y/N?" She asks you.

"I'm bored and have some time to kill since Seungwan isn't here today. Do you wanna grab something to eat?" There's a silence on her end for a while.

"Sure, where do you wanna meet up?" She asks, but before you can answer she gives you another question. "Also, who's Seungwan? Is this a new friend you made? You should introduce me to them!" Your mouth feels dry all of a sudden and you don't know what to say. You stammer out a response for Yeri.

"Uh, just meet me at the boardwalk. I'll be waiting here." Before Yeri can say anything else you end the call. You bite your tongue in frustration. Did Seungwan make Yeri play in on this too? Despite all the reasoning you tried to do, a deep, unsettling feeling took over your entire body.

When Yeri arrived, you smiled and went about your day with her. Throughout the day Yeri noticed that something was off about you. You kept zoning out and were unable to really hold a conversation. As frustrated as she was with your lack of engagement, she figured you were working through things and didn't question you about it. Later that night she dropped you off at your place and you thanked her. You went back to your room, allowing yourself to putt all your weight on your bed as you stared at the ceiling.

The tears you had been holding all day finally broke through. The hot and salty tears streamed down your face uncontrollably. Had this all just been a cruel joke from your mind? Was it just a dream that lasted too long? Maybe, just maybe, the voice screaming in the back of your head was right the entire time. Seungwan was just too good to be true.

You decide to pull out a book from your nightstand, the book that you found within the bookshelves the day you met her. Thankfully the book was there. Perhaps your memory didn't fail you entirely. When you opened it to the first page though, you were shocked to see nothing. Frantically, you scanned through all the other pages only to see them in the same state. You wanted to question it, but considering what happened earlier today you just couldn't.

All you could do now was cry. Nothing made sense to you. What happened to the person you just kissed mere hours ago? The person who made living bearable again?

Afraid of getting the book wet, you quickly close it and put it away. You raise your hand up to your face as you sniffle. Wiping away the waterfall coming from your eyes, you feel the soft scratches of a string and bead. You pull away to see the bracelet you so distinctly remember putting on snuggly fitting on your wrist. Nothing made sense and you could only come to one conclusion.

She was gone, but not gone from your memory.

[cloudmyweather]

A Small Guide to Munimún’s Discography: Part one, the high school years

First of all, hi. I’m Muni, also known as moonlordress. I used to have a blog here, but then I migrated to Twitter after adult content was outlawed. I did however miss the efficiency of this website in hosting multimedia content... so after a couple of years, here we are again. The old blog still exists, I think, but I forgot the password and don’t feel like retrieving it.

So... fresh start. If you’ve never heard of me (first of all, how did you find me?), you might be delighted at all the new content I’m willing to post here, along with new stuff, of course. I want to treat this place as a sort of ongoing zine, which is what Tumblr was meant to be for anyway. I mainly involve myself with the arts of drawing, painting and music composing. On very rare occasions I also write.

I’d like to first take my time to disclose about my musical output (most of it available for free at this cool link). At 23 years old, I’m still too young to really make any sort of masterpiece, as I am mostly self-taught and don’t really play any instruments. If you’re put off by the fake digital sounds, I don’t blame you - but I feel I’ve gotten better at taking advantage of the aesthetic.

I’ve made music on FL Studio for almost 10 years now. My first experiments were mostly misguided attempts at creating rock music without any real instruments or band members - I am a tad embarrassed by the results, after all who wants to listen to music by a 14-year-old, but I feel like I’ve struck gold a couple times... I’ve always wondered if I could remake some of this music with my current sensibilities.

Anyway, the name of my project at the time was World Destroyance, also the name of my first album before I just decided to use my real name (also a bad decision). I hate all the music on that album and don’t currently know if there’s any way to listen to it. That was done in 2012, I’m pretty sure. Also in 2012 I made two more albums, slightly more interesting than the first - Magic (an album about My Little Pony characters, although instrumental), and [untitled] (a kind of self-portrait). I refer to these three as “the 2012 albums” and I don’t advise anyone to seek them out, but I’m sure they’re out there in a Mediafire link or something. I don’t remember deleting those.

WORLD DESTROYANCE – mid-2012 MAGIC – August 2012 [untitled] – December 2012

In late 2012/2013 I started getting very bitter and angry about real things, instead of the things children get angry about. I had been falling in love for some time, and hating every minute of it. I was rapidly losing all self-confidence and my self-esteem to this day has not recovered. So naturally my musical ideas were getting more abrasive. I learned about distortion effects but not how to use them. And most importantly, I discovered the Residents. The result was Friendly. I don’t particularly like it either, but I think this is where my stuff got deliberately weird instead of unwittingly.

FRIENDLY - July 2013

Highlights: “The Screaming Worm”, “Life after Death”, “Susan’s Story”

After a couple smaller projects (coupled with my questioning of the idea that anyone should even bother to hear what I make), I finished Tolerance Songs in 2014. I was still in love, but this was the first album I actually considered to be “good.” Still many embarrassing moments. I also started using vocals here and there. I never really liked my voice though.

TOLERANCE SONGS – July 2014

Highlights: 

“Hey There”, “Song for Samantha”, “Gingerbread Lovesong”, “Bloodclot”

After a while I decided that five albums and a couple Leftovers was enough material for a “best of” compilation. Just so people wouldn’t have to sit through such immature music to get to the interesting stuff. So I put together Harsh Reality in 2015, drew up a digital booklet as a gift for downloaders, and from then on decided to focus on simply making a lot of music and eventually collecting it when enough material surfaced.

also: LEFTOVERS – September 2014 Collecting unused stuff from the year spent making Tolerance Songs. The Tolerance Songs sessions... how professional that sounds... and neat!

HARSH REALITY – October 2015

Collecting highlights from the first five albums + misc. projects. Around 3 years’ worth of some autistic teenager’s bored meanderings on break from high school.

also: CANCEROUS DEVOTION – November 2014 Soundtrack for a school project. Secretly a love album.

YOU ARE MY SWEETEST DREAM – July 2015 Mini-album meditating on “Sweet Dreams are Made of This” for some reason. I just wanted to be a Resident.

All of this with virtually no audience in sight. Talk about wasting time (and words).

Continued on part two.

[la5t-res0rt]

Wanted to ask about beetlelyds, sorry, I thought it was technically cannon? Like in the old comics after the show ended she grew up and married him. Sorry I’m an old school fan and have no idea why this whole thing is such a big deal. Wasn’t the actor like 20 too? I’m sorry if I sound very dumb. I’m not used to this new tumblr.

youre fine you are one hundred percent allowed to especially when you do it civilly as you have done here

first of all the biggest issue faced in the whole what is and is not canon debate is the fact that there are three (four if you count the limited comics run) publicized iterations of my media

i will go over each very briefly just kidding this is going to a long answer so i will spare the dashboard with a readmore

there is the movie which im sure you dont need me to explain the plot since youre an old school fan but basically the climax is that yes beetlejuice does go for the marriage angle in exchange for stopping the exorcism of adam and barbara and his motive for this is so that he can cause as much chaos as he wants on the mortal coil but his plan is thwarted when barbara rides a sandworm into the house which promptly eats beetlejuice sending him to bureaucratic death limbo

the end of the movie features the deetz and the maitlands happily living together with lydia havign a new appreciation for her situation and beetlejuice gets his head made real small which is very funny haha 

so no in the movie they are not canon editors note the actress who played lydia winona ryder was a teenager while filming the movie she turned 17 the year it released 

the next is the cartoon which i will admit has the most grounds for being considered canon but in the end the show is about a middle schooler and her best friend who is a ghost which in itself is a pretty iffy gray area sort of thing but for a childrens cartoon to work a friendship is better than the obvious enemy status they held in the movie

anyway in the cartoon they are potrayed to be very close friends with lydia being the person beetlejuice cares about the most and honestly if you were to watch it with no prior knowledge of the media and if you ignored their massive and obvious age difference than yeah you probably would read it as a romantic relationship 

however lydia is a middle schooler and that is simply immoral

there have been writers for the cartoon who have been credited to say that a relationship is what they were trying to invoke but for obvious reasons they couldnt exactly move forward with that angle with them establishing that lydia is a child in middle school and a fully grown adult man dating a child who is in middle school is immoral and also illegal in the united states and in canada 

this isnt a good argument for whether or not something is canon and i will tell you why with one simple name and that is luke weber

if you dont know who luke weber is he was a storyboard artist on the cartoon steven universe he is known for making a lot of self ship artwork of him and the character pearl

he worked on the show isnt his material canon no of course it isnt it wasnt put in the actual publication and also if memory serves he was eventually asked to leave the project after he drew art of the shows creator giving him permission to date pearl and calling them her otp and a lot of fans hated this because the most generally accepted interpretation of pearls character is that she is sapphic so a lot of people took issue however that again is just a widely perceived headcanon it is never stated what her actual sexuality is no one in that show is because it isnt a show about that its about wait im getting off topic sorry

what im saying is what can truly be considered canon is what you see on the screen and with the cartoon they are definitely the most friendly with each other and that is why so many people in the beetlebabe shipping community take so much stock in the cartoon because it is the easiest to read the relationship between the mas romantic although that is not what the show actually provides in black and white terms

interpretation does not equal canon and in this case no matter what anyone says the fact remains that in the cartoon itself they are friends good friends yes but friends all the same

it is definitely not a show about a grown man grooming an adult and if it were you definitely shouldn’t be stanning it the extreme because grooming a minor is wrong and it is apparently a problem in the fandom

anyway if the cartoon and the movie are both products of their time and there was more leniency on content bear in mind this was the same era as notorious animation powerhouse and known predator john k who was a showrunner on ren and stimpy and he maintained a relationship with a teenager which was an open secret that nobody really took issue with because in that time being a woman in the animation industry was tricky business and your career could be ended easily if you rejected advances luckily time has moved forward and the animation industry although still full of problems of a similar nature at least people are getting called out and punished for it

you can look more into that yourself its really upsetting though

as for comics i havent been able to find good scans of them and im not willing to purchase them but in my search i never found anything about the two of them ever being married in the cartoon again because she is a child i did find a cover where he appears to be getting married and hes asking lydia to get him out of it but im not sure where the comic actually goes all i know is she is standing off to the side shrugging and looking like she doesnt really care

anyway that brings us to the musical which is set in the modern day 

in the original libretto lydia is described as thirteen but since they got an actress who was older in the updated librettos she is listed as 15 and the story is pretty similar to the movie the young girl befriends ghosts and they try to scare her family out etc etc

the major difference between the film and the musical are that lydia and beetlejuice are more like friends like in the cartoon 

she summons him to help scare after the maitlands attempt doesnt really work so he shows up and they have fun terrorizing people together however she drops him for the opportunity to perhaps get her mom back but when no one will help she goes back to beetlejuice who tricks her into almost exorcising barbara

she agrees to marry him in order to stop the exorcism and he only wants to get married so he can be alive again and cause problems on the mortal coil like in the movie in the musical he states several times its a green card thing whihc obviously doesnt make it okay but still

anyway lydia tricks him and runs off into the underworld before the wedding can happen blah blah blah she goes back blah blah and she agrees to go through with the wedding to save her friends and family with a plan to make him go away for good

theres a very tongue and cheek song called creepy old guy which points out how wrong the whole thing is but everyone is going along with it in a very comedic matter and it includes the line 

i cant believe some cultures think this kind of things alright

basically saying yeah this is very very wrong anyway they do get married and beeltjeuice is alive for like 6 seconds before lydia stabs him to death with bad art and he dies thus nullifying the marriage because death do you part etc

so in the musical no at the end of the show they are not canon because he is dead their marriage is nullified and they go their separate ways

anyway sorry about that i just need to make it very clear that these three properties are all very distinct from each other and basically all three are indeed canon since they are publicized material and arguing the validity of which one is pointless editors note all actresses who played with the exception of dana steingold were minors for the majority of their runs as lydia with sophia ann caruso the originator of the role turning 18 during the run and dana being in her late twenties presley ryan however was a minor the whole time and still is one

tldr no they aren’t canon but to the credit of some people in this fandom their interpretation isnt too far of a stretch thanks to the era and some of the writers wishing to imply a relationship between an adult and a child

i also need to address how this is all a big deal and i suggest you take a peak through my discourse tag and check out @leedia‘s blog to see some of the more harmful things done by beetlebabe shippers

the beetlejuice fandom is home to many minors after the musical came out since musical fandom is vast and the ages of its members varies and normalizing pedophilia is harmful to them not to mention the people who have been effected by sexual harassment at the hands of adults

both sides have victims of csa but one side continues to perpetuate the cycle by showing time and time again that this behavior is normal and easily romanticized in the name of coping and literally anyone who has ever been to a good and credible therapist could tell you that posting cp even if it is simulated cp isnt a really good way to cope and you can get mad at me for saying that its totally fine but and im going to remove my character veil here for just a second as a csa survivor myself i think its harmful to not only myself but many others ok the veil is back down

tldr again there is a lot of bullying and harassment going on with both sides having their own issues but there is one side whos issues run a bit deeper in my humble opinion 

thank you for your question it allowed me to talk a lot you are welcome to discuss further with me in dms if you wish i honestly recommend giving the musical a listen because it is very fun and despite what some people say its very clever and if you get a chance to see a boot of it its visually stunning

one last note that i couldnt really fit in here but a large portion of the beetlebabes shipping community ignore the musical because it openly condemns the idea of beeltejuice and lydia having a relationship and a lot of the antis take issue with much of the writing and characterizations of the cartoon just a note that i think is important since were talking about canon

[jonismitchell]

hey arden do you have any book suggestions? i don’t have any preference/specific genre i’m looking for but i just need something new to read while in quarantine :)

you’re in luck! i happen to be a massive nerd and i’m going to compile a gigantic list of recs for you. here we go.

the only classics worth reading: i want to preface this by saying i did not pick these books because they are written by women. they are just good and they happen to be by women. this reinforces my theory that only women can write.

emma by jane austen: better than pride and prejudice by a long shot. the characters are funny, the romance is swoon worthy (don’t think too hard about the age gap), it says very smart things about society, and i could write an essay on how it revolutionized fiction.

wuthering heights by emily bronte: my all time favourite book about how awful people are and how the cycle of abuse perpetuates itself. it’s absolutely exceptional in every respect. i won’t go into too much detail because i don’t want to give anything away, but you should definitely read this book.

jane eyre by charlotte bronte: i’m not saying i’m a bronte sister stan, i’m just saying i’m a bronte sister stan who can’t be bothered to take five seconds to copy the accent. anyway, i read this book when i was a wee lass and i stole it from an apartment in nice. the characters are genuinely amazing, and it’s an early feminist book, which i think is fantastic.

the handmaid’s tale by margaret atwood: you don’t get more feminist classic than this. set in a dystopian future where women are only valued for their ability to procreate, atwood examines gender roles and still delivers a brilliant adventure story. if you end up liking this, try the power by naomi alderman, which essentially tells of the opposite society.

the bell jar by sylvia plath: an introspective story about mental illness. it’s the type of writing that i feel hits hard at about any age, and i remember feeling really haunted after finishing the whole thing in a night. definitely high up on my list of amazing novels.

feel good books: sometimes, we need to read something that’s not revolutionary but still radical. don’t worry, i got you. here’s the lasagna of novels.

finding audrey by sophie kinsella: this book is funny, heartwarming, and makes you think. as someone with anxiety, i felt really represented by a lot of audrey’s behaviours. her mom is lowkey nuts, but i feel like that shouldn’t impede your enjoyment of the book.

the shadowhunters series by cassandra clare: LISTEN. objectively cassandra clare is a terrible person. objectively these books are not good. but they are amusing! they are comforting! they are interesting! also, there are a million of them. start with the infernal devices: clockwork angel, clockwork prince, and clockwork princess. set in old old london, this series features the only valid love triangle ever, girls who like to read and kick ass, and boys who are soft and play the violin. next, head to the mortal instruments, which is pretty much drinny fanfiction. don’t think too hard during these and you’ll have a good time. after that, read the short story collections the bane chronicles and tales of shadowhunter academy. if you got really into the lore (like me) these books are funny and a little captivating. finally, get to the highlight of this whole thing, the dark artifices. the one true love of my life, emma carstairs, stars in this brilliant trilogy about forbidden love. yes, it’s super corny, but all these books are super corny. if you can’t get enough of the universe (or accidentally got hooked) try out the collection ghosts of the shadow market. once you finish that, you can read the first books in the new series(es), red scrolls of magic and chain of gold. all of these books are jam packed with magic and vaguely plagarized demons. not brilliant, but a fun ride.

emma mills books: emma mills writes cute happy contemporary romances and i can’t recommend her enough! first & then tells the story of a jane austen obsessed nerd who crushes on a jock. which could actually be about me, and if you trust my judgement, you probably like me enough to read this book secretly written about me. foolish hearts gives theatre kids and boy band stans alike a chance to feel represented in what could be one of the sweetest (and funniest!) romances of all time. famous in a small town gives band kids and people who are clarinet-sized a chance to shine, and includes a country singer who struck me with her similarities to taylor swift. (our song is even referenced in the novel!) by far my favourite would have to be this adventure ends, which is hilarious and heartbreaking and talks about fanfiction without looking down on it. all of these books are definitely feel good and will make you believe in heterosexual romance.

mildly upsetting fantasy: just fantasy trilogies that will hurt you.

the poppy war by r.f. kuang: wonder what harry potter would be like if the magic system was complicated and the murder was high? no, like high on opium? and the plot was based on chinese military history? look no further than the brilliant work of art that is the poppy war. this book is by far the best fantasy out there, i cannot exaggerate that enough. also out is the equally compelling sequel the dragon republic, and the final book in the trilogy is set to hit shelves this year. please please please read this amazing book.

six of crows by leigh bardugo: six dysfunctional criminals try to steal from the most heavily guarded prison in the world. what could go wrong? this novel is intelligent and witty, and will keep you on the edge of your seat as you’re dragged into this scheming and brilliant world. in my opinion, this is the only valid book in the grishaverse. this and its equally well plotted sequel, crooked kingdom.

the gilded wolves by roshani choski: this one is definitely similar to six of crows in its funny and smart main cast. the magic system is super unique and the plot is endlessly enjoyable. it’s also set in old old paris! so france is always fun. there are also tons of mythology references and disaster bisexuals. and apparently the sequel (the silvered serpents) comes out july of this year.

scythe by neal shusterman: the first book on this list by a man, wow! i’m so inclusive. anyway, this genius trilogy is set in a world where humanity has solved almost every single problem, except overpopulation and corruption. an elite order called scythes are tasked with killing and managing the order of death. it’s like the hunger games went took a political science seminar. everything spirals out of control very quickly and the characters are so great. the sequels are called thunderhead and the toll respectively, and the overarching tale is gripping.

the cruel prince by holly black: i’m not kidding when i say this is the only faery book that matters. this book stars a human girl who grows up in the magical world and more violence than is statistically necessary. but it’s good! this is also a trilogy (every book on this list is the first one in a trilogy, i am the worst, i’m sorry) and the sequel the wicked king is quite possibly the best scheme-y magic politics thing i’ve ever read. and the final book, queen of nothing, doesn’t disappoint by a long shot.

contemporaries no one talks about

the boy who steals houses by cg drews: this book has autistic representation! and it’s written by book blogger paperfury, who is even more of a delight on the page than she is on the internet. be warned, this book includes heavy mentions of abuse and graphic violence that are unavoidable. but it will break your heart and stitch it back together again. also, waffles.

some boys by patty blount: this book deals very candidly with the aftermath of rape and public pressure. it is also one of my favourite books of all time for its treatment of ‘bro culture.’ and the heroine, grace, is incredibly strong. i read this book in maybe fourth grade? and it essentially inspired me to start giving a damn about social justice. so yeah, there’s that. (i also haven’t read it since fourth grade, so someone will have to tell me if it holds up).

emergency contact by mary choi: i’m rereading this for the second time right now and it’s still really awesome. it tells the story of an unlikely friendship, big dreams, and does it all through a really interesting narrative voice that manages to effectively capture two very different people. it is yet another romance, but it’s really wonderful and heartwarming. (unlike the other two books in this section).

children’s books that treat kids like people

a series of unfortunate events by lemony snicket: this is quite literally my favourite series of all time. it’s upsetting and kind of wrong once you think about it a lot, but it’s also maybe the best thing ever written. i literally cannot explain how much i love these books. there are thirteen books, so you’re definitely in for a good, long time.  

the mysterious benedict society by trenton lee stewart: three books about propaganda and smart kids and found family. i literally do not know what else you want out of a series. it’s fun and there’s only a little bit of kidnapping, so it’s very family appropriate compared to the other books on this list.

wuh luh wuh

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid: i KNOW no one shuts up about this book but you really should read it. like, there’s nothing that will ever top the narrative. the drama, the glamour, the girls who love girls, you know? all the components of a brilliant novel. it’s also got some truly poetic prose and genuinely beautiful moments. the reason everyone talks about this book is because it’s amazing. send tweet.

girls of paper and fire by natasha ngan:  (massive trigger warning for sexual violence)  haha! another violent fantasy book that’s part of a trilogy! thought you escaped that, didn’t you? this magic system is brilliant and the book is so good. it’s a breath of fresh air into young adult fiction. and did i mention it’s a wlw romance? i read this during a math class and had to go to the bathroom to cry when i finished it, because there was finally a heroine in a fantasy novel who i could see myself in. there’s also a sequel, girls of storm and shadow, that is equally amazing.

it’s not like it’s a secret by misa suigura: wlw girls with soft poetry vibes. complicated family lives. candidly dealing with racism, sexism, and homophobia. this book is really good. simply read this book.

i have even MORE book recs but i decided to cut myself off because this is the longest thing i’ve ever written for tumblr. hope you enjoy!

[drewschermickblindone]

Drew Schermick Reviews:

Louis Gibbor & DJ JahBluez- The Supernatural Progression of the Boom Bap

  I have had the pleasure of being in the studio to witness the magic my two friends St.Louis Gibbor & DJ JahBluez can create.

After watching and listening to them do their thing, I can profess that they are indeed the real deal.  Gibbor is among not only one of Arizona's most passionate and creative MCs but a true force in all of underground West Coast hip-hop.

His lyrical style and song writing is, dare I say, avant garde in his delivery of raw and left field approach to rap.

Jah is one of the most seasoned and invested producers in all of hip-hop; his approach to beat making and song crafting is second to none.

His production keeps evolving and as I take notice of the vast list of artists he has collaborated with. His catalogue is intimidating.

When my friend asked me to have a listen and offer some critique of their new project, I was excited from the start.

So now we have for you:

The Supernatural Progression of the Boom Bap-

  Movement-

           The opening track Movement begins with some ethereal synths.

Gibbor enters the track with some smooth vocals speaking of and on the weight of the world and its effect on him and those closest to him.

The hook is Gibbor repeating "the movement" with a nice reverb/delay with Jah inserting a nice soulful sample that pairs with St. Louis's hook.

Jah's kick and snare plus hihats mingle well with his synth based melody, which complements gibbor and medusa's lyrics and vocals nicely.

Medusa, the undisputed goddess queen of underground hip-hop, is so elegant and her contribution to this track only strengthens its resolve of subject matter and musical vision.

Gibbor ends the track with some abstract poetry about WOMEN, race, melanin, sex, love, and man's conflict with female interactions.

Jah brings in an interesting distorted clapping type sample at the end that wraps up the track with some mesmerizing production.

A truly beautiful track and a perfect way to kick off the record.

 Homesick-

           Jah's whirly strings and heavy snare begin the track, with Gibbor coming to give the DJ his props before talking about going back home to his people back in Cali. Gibbor proceeds to flow faster and demonstrate his lyrical velocity by telling a road trip story which flows into the lovely chorus where he pays homage to Albert Hammond's It Never Rains...

           While Jah brings in a beautiful female vocal sample, Gibbor raises his singing range as Jah brings in some dope biggie scratches.

           818 213 indeed.

  Scorpions' Kiss-          The vinyl crackle at the beginning of this track shifts my attention from Cali to the Middle East. Jah's production here is fine art.

                       The clarinet (woodwinds), flute, and boom bap drums emulate a type of Egyptian Noir drama score where the gods Gibbor, OHM & Myka9 come with so much heat

                       I feel as if I am in the desert on a tour to solve an ancient mystery.  Gibbor and Myka's styles mesh so well and Ohm's verse at first feels out of place and replicable, but on a second listen, I feel as if his contribution balances out their more singsong approach with his AOTAesque hard raps that complement the scene and cinematic style.

           The takeaway message of this track seems to be about cherishing the moments in time that make up our narrative and legend, overcoming our fears, and enduring.

           This is like an extraordinary film in music/song form, an epic track that deserves much attention and acclaim.

 Darling Carla-

 The strings and synths make one feel as if something is lurking around the corner.

Gibbor comes in stripped down speaking poetically about a woman/wife.

Gibbor seems to get personal and to speak tragically and romantically about a magical love and time lost.  

           I can relate and sympathize with track on a personal level, as I have had similar failed relationships that I can attribute to my brokenness.

           Hurt people hurt people; this cliché explains the last verse of the track where he opens up with a vulnerability rarely seen/scene in hip-hop.

             I am captivated and deeply touched by this one.

  This That-

Jah's sped up cuts that open and come in and out of this track are dope and fun laying the foundation for this banger.

Tomeicko kicks off the first verse with some interesting cadence and delivery. Her content is a bit dry. Some battle /semi-conscious raps work for this more straightforward track.

Volume 10 second verse is what we all would expect, respect, and admire from the West Coast legend. Gibbor's final verse, in my humble opinion, eclipses the first two verses.

I am most enthralled and into the beat and production on this track. Jah creates something fresh yet oddly reminiscent of the 1990s; it works and this song acts as a nice reprieve after the serious and heartbreaking feel of Darling Carla, thus moving the album forward in a cohesive placement.

  Play times over-

Play times is a haunting tune where Gibbor explores some horrorcore and social-political type verses.  

Despite his dark delivery and subject, his vocal stylings are very polished and he is clearly preaching what he truly believes, questioning our exploitations and personal beliefs that shape our society.

He delves into some religious rhetoric and critique which may be triggering for some, or for those with open minds, a lot of content to digest and ask yourself about; your own values and idealizations come into question.

Overall, a very deep, debating, thought provoking, and brave track that is a possible nod to Revelations?

  PSA12-

 Named by JahBluez. Public Service Announcement 12. The 12 has multiple meanings to him but he is primarily speaking on the Technic 1200 turntable.

My roommates The Adepts shine on this dope cut.

Dapper Dan kicks things off rhyming about graff and the failings of society.

Midknight comes straight in after Dap with some more social commentary followed by a nice vocal sample that transitions the track to Gibbor's world, where he continues to touch on the state of the nation with a shout-out out to his higher power; his delivery here is exceptional.

OHM follows, dropping more knowledge followed by a sick turntable demonstration by Blesd1.

Ohm comes back in again giving props to the Shapeshifters and co.

Overall, it’s a decent track that keeps the album flowing, and hearing my close homies get some shine on such an exceptional record brings me a smile.

  Give it your all-

 Gibbor goes all in speaking his truth over a dope beat with a nice conga bleed into the programmed drums complimented by a slick sample give it your all.

This song is inspiring and begs the listener to give 100% to all their endeavors

 The perfect insurgents-

Another track with Dapper Dan & ohm illuminating conspiracies and finding our purpose in the madness.

The production is solid but feels less inspired than the other songs on this album.

OHM comes with more social-political hip-hop. Ohm’s delivery on this verse is ill and noteworthy.

Gibbor’s chorus is for real and epic. Dan spits some misogyny/spiritual bars, almost contracting himself, but reeling himself back with an enlightened style that is cool as ice.

Gibbor's last verse comes also with more worldview commentary but starts to feel redundant after the last two tracks.

I'm trying to find more connection to the title referencing the insurgency and becoming radicalized and forging alliances against the evils of the world, but I think I can hear it subtly in this one.

  The Fraternity-

 Jah lays down some military type production with the drumline type beat and the trumpet sample. Jah's cuts between verses are really dope and adds dimension.

Mista Crane, my friend NOK, Embrae, and Gibbor all hold their weight on this gargantuan track. Nod your head to this banger where these heavyweight MCs illuminate the hypocrisy and failed political system, the negative forces that threaten our vision and drive us as artists and men bringing the fire to this standout track.

Gibbor’s finishes off the track with one of his finest verses on the album touching on spiritual revolution and those who are asleep at the wheel.  This one bangs and commands RESPECT.

  The Ghost-

 We are now at the final closing track titled "The Ghost"

Piano and horns float as Gibbor's poetic stylings have me in a trance.

He delves into the existential, self, and ego. Then, out of nowhere, he comes in with this Myka9esque hook featuring soulful, wild, quick, and exhilarating singing that finishes off the album on a poignant note.

A gorgeous whirlwind of a song and a perfect ending with Jah bringing in the wind. I love it.

 8/10

()()()()4/5 mics

 Drew Schermick 2021

[404fmdhaon]

creative claims — artist

summary: goofing around with his pal siwoo (npc), and this song comes as a collab of some sorts. warnings:  wc: 1236

bc’s never felt like home, not then. not now. nine years strapped inside the riptide of a company that soothes itself as suffocating than the oxygen he craves, it’s times when he’s trapped inside some half-basement apartment with an old friend that suddenly, life no longer bears and burdens but instead relieves itself as an escape.

an escape from home, this becomes a taste of oasis.

the bpm yanked high, on overdrive. he’s set the basis of the upbeat funk that comes from skewed filters and the off-beat set of the snares that become the upbeat emphasis of a beat. no moody colors, it’s bright, nearly orange the way the room’s lit with a disco ball flare and the drunken laughter that fills the void between them.

“this sounds like a track to nintendo, fuck.” gyujeong barely musters out in between the short breaths of his chuckles. siwoo’s already on the keys, an electronic brand touch signature to his style — it all mixes into an off-put disoriented mix of elevator music and groove, tinged with hints of jazz.

“if we add a layer of saxophones, you think anyone would listen to this fuckin mess?” the good vibes are infectious, a bellowing burst of half-drunk laughter that slaps back at him.

“i don’t know, try it.” gyujeong juts his chin forward, hands reaching for a flask that hinges on empty. what he gets out, is the last swift gulp of bitter soju — a flask of soju, hapless in how the divide in their lifestyles match up after all these years. 

the room fills with a hit of saxophones, harmonious in how siwoo manages to blend it together right on beat in line with the rest. a jangled image now comes clear, sharpens itself into something poppy, jazzy. a contradiction that poises itself as manageable — maybe, it’s just the alcohol talking. 

“add a spin to it, a retro drive. you know? one of those things that distorts the beat into a shift for when you have a change into another verse. a build up, before you draw it back to the chorus.” hands pressed behind his head, inspiration dawns when his spine eases into his chair, and when he’s no longer fixated and held against a wall with a knife that bc wields together.

the beat’s enough to get him off his seat, bouncing on the soles of his feet — there’s a bend in his knees as he swipes away a pair of shit sunglasses hung on the wall. it’s the effect of siwoo, not just any company. a musical soulmate enticing the two when they were nothing more than two kids sharing the same cup of ramen inside the corner seven eleven. and now goes, where one of them remains in the same basement apartment while he’s left to sell out inside the luxury of hannam. 

“you look fucking stupid, you know that?” siwoo’s voice is bright despite the pricked edges of his words and dismissive shakes of his head, but the grin perched across his face gives otherwise. “you know — let’s just record this shit? lyrics about artistry, being artist.”

“you add saxophone on one song and you think you’re picasso or some shit?” 

“yeah because we are, we are, we artist baby.”

the phrase has a ring, and the grittiness of gyujeong’s own voice echoes it loud. but they work in sync, like clockwork the way siwoo already manages to hit red to record the spews of drunken slurs. 

a person who is bored and about to die, a man that never is a man. who dares to shave only to make a rash? people who are going to shatter very much, oh yes

it’s rapid fire, a makeshift freestyle that skips past logical ties. instead, he pins it down to ease — the blurbs of words mangled. carefree, weightless. it’s how music should be, he thinks. the feeling of bouncing, a skip in his feet. the shattered disillusions of struggles fled from his shoulders, rounded about in how he carries the world by storm. invincibility comes when he’s one cup too deep in soju, floating to the ripples of slipshod beats hoping to make a subtle move.

and it sees it easy — the art of no longer giving a fuck. no longer tied and beaten, or drowning the woes of misery no longer there. the thoughts no longer clouding his head in a moment of invincibility, there’s a new world he crafts together painting the boundaries. it’s a house of mirrors, no boundaries — eternity that spans the dangerous taste of feeling limitless.

don’t think about it too much, you hold the brush you have the best feeling in front of his house mirror

“life is short, art is long — we are, we artist babey” siwoo’s voice yells past the blaring speakers. the reaction of laughter is instantaneous in how gyu hugs his stomach, crouching over at the melodious ring the notion has. artist, sellout — life is short, art is long. irony makes him laugh and he’s been in the game far too long to dispose this as a trash take of something headed straight towards the bin of beats done and gone. 

by the time he’s back on his two feet, laughter subsided, gyu’s back onto the chair that swallows his body, reeling it back in. the mic out and yanked in front of his face, it’s a silent gesture that spurs his own hand reaching for the headset on the desk. 

he clears his voice, a grumble of his throat loosening for the lyrics siwoo’s managed to type up. incoherent spellings, yet it’s enough to get the gist — the surface level that memory takes over when he hears the clicks of the metronome cue. prep. set him in place for the reel in to seriousness that seizes the formalities of creating something useable. 

“be the pretentious dick i know you are.” instructions call out from the production seat, siwoo’s dictation he knows far too well. “you know? the whole what the fuck mood — i want you to rap it like that.”

a nod of his head, and he goes through the first verse. there’s a lightness, a nonchalance to his diction. the deadly stares of high above you tides humanizing itself into his voice, latching on to each and every syllable of the dynamic tone. no longer a grittiness, instead the chest heavy voice pulls into the lines spoken — a billowing open voice loud enough to seep to the family living a floor above. 

gyujeong continues, lets what comes natural. innate take over — no second guessing, or over analysis in caution of how others perceive. it’s freedom floating letting the facets of his persona uncovered with no expectations as to who’s to witness it. here, there are no victims, only witnesses to the chung gyujeong he’s sealed and kept away. 

but this stays in the confines of siwoo’s place, and gyu would be damned if a solo came across the horizon anytime soon — wishful thinking, and he’s abandoned that shit a long time ago.

instead, this becomes the flashback into his taste of what drew him into the scene. the taste of love when he feels the beat hit a notch into a special place he’s pocketed in his mind — music stripped away as an occupation, and what remains is the highs of music as a hobby. a first love.

“fuck man, i forgot what it feels to make music like this.” an afterthought that escapes without thought, and tonight becomes the first instance where he’s found the novel feeling again. bursts of honesty and creativity, jams upon smashed notes and bashed heads — fuck it if bc doesn’t care, it’s a line he draws for himself. one as a personal saving win.

[nightbloomsresorthotel]

A Controversial, but Fair Essay on Gabbie Hanna’s Poetry That Doesn’t Completely Shit on Her Writing

So I just finished listening to her youtube video where she addresses this topic. When I first saw her poems, I could see what everyone was talking about: her poems are simple, full of puns that seem to masquerade as a function of “depth”, with simple, easy to understand language juxtaposed with themes of growing up and trauma. She says that her influences include Shel Silverstein, Bo Burnham and William Williams, including his famous poem This is Just to Say.

(prepare thyself reader, this is a quick 2k analysis. I’ve included GOOD poetry recs at the end!)

She goes on to say that what drew her to these poems was there charm- Shel Silverstein’s works were meant for children, and they are easy to interpret- and could be read from the perspective of both an adult and child. As a child reading Where the Sidewalk Ends, I enjoyed the illustrations and the rhyming nature of these poems. I’m sure Gabbie Hanna did as well. Hearing her talk about these inspirations and what she wanted to do with her own poems, it’s clear that she was aiming for each piece to harken back to the whimsy and innocence of childhood, while addressing more adult topics.

I think that Gabbie Hanna missed the mark. She admits that some of the poems in her book were rushed and this makes me question if and where she ever got any peer feedback from her pieces. I also wonder if Gabbie has ever taken any writing classes or poetry workshops, but I am doubtful. The big difference between This is Just to Say and, lets say, her poem Chivalry is clear. Here is This is Just to Say:

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold.

So much has already been said about this poem. But the biggest thing to take away here, is that Williams clearly put thought into syntax, imagery, rhythm and rhyme. You will notice that this piece doesn’t exactly rhyme, but it slant rhymes. Rhyming has become less of a marker for poetry recently, mostly because I think it makes people think of nursery rhymes or songs and traditional, older forms of poetry, and some poets don’t want that connotation. This may surprise some, but poetry is an ever evolving art form; poets are always playing with experimentation in their work. Here, imagery and the five senses make This is Just to Say great. Up until the last stanza, we don’t really get anything that makes us feel a physical sensation until we get to “so sweet/ and so cold”. This is where the impact of the poem lies. This is the climax of this poem. Every word before it is intentionally abstract, while sweet and cold are in comparison, concrete images and sensual images. This is why we can almost taste the plums the author is talking about at the end of the poem.

Let’s look at a poem I picked at random from Gabbie Hanna’s book, CHIVALRY:

I’m not some no-brained bimbo

and i’m not some helpless girl

i am fucking remarkable

and i deserve the world.

i don’t need you to open my door,

but the gesture would be nice.

i don’t need you to buy my meal;

the offer would suffice.

i don’t need to be taken care of,

but it’d be cool to know you care.

i’m a holographic charizard

highly desired and rare.

yo, i even drop pokemon references

‘cause i’m fuckin dope as shit.

i’m good with just me, i don’t need you

not even a tiny bit.

Let me address what I like about this poem first. Gabbie knows what she wants to do- she utilizes rhyming and repetition to make this an easy flowing read. She knows that a lower-case “i” shows that despite what she may be claiming in the poem “i don’t need you/ not even a tiny bit”, the narrator does not think highly of themselves— perhaps the narrator desperately needs the “you” addressed, but is not confidant enough to ask for their friendship/ relationship. The narrator is contradicting themselves, showing a low self-esteem, and maybe crying for help. This juxtaposed with the fun rhyming tone of the piece and the mention of pokémon succesfully gets this point across.

However, this poem seems to focus on utilizing these elements of craft only. Gabbie could enhance the reader experience by adding more concrete imagery: why type of meal? How helpless of a girl? These are instances where Gabbie could help the reader connect to the speaker, and she doesn’t do so. We could also argue that she’s emulating This is Just to Say by only including one concrete and colorful image, but I will address this further down.

Additionally, this narrator could be anyone. I could imagine anybody saying this, of any gender. Perhaps Gabbie did this intentionally- the more vague a narrator is, the more it could apply to anyone— the average teen/adult could connect to this poem. However, this gives the poem a generic quality. Perhaps others would like to connect to this narrator more, and get a better sense of who the narrator is. Also let me address why I keep using “narrator” instead of “Gabbie”. It’s a force of habit for me (that I got from poetry courses in college) to assume that the narrator of the poem and the author of the poem may not always be the same person. I think in this situation, these poems are undoubtedly from Gabbi’s perspective, but to remain neutral just in case, I will continue to use “narrator”. 

Something I’d also like to address is the matter of rhyming in the current poetry world. Many journals have gone so far as to say “we do not accept rhyming poems” in their submission guidelines. Not all, but some. People who just start out writing poetry believe that poems must rhyme to be considered poetry at all, but when you take your first poetry class in high school or college, you quickly realize that this is not the case. Here, Gabbie uses a simple end rhyme scheme to evoke poetry like Silverstein and childhood memories of reading poetry, nursery rhymes, etc. But I think to those who have been reading poetry for a long time, teaching it, or reading submissions for their journal, the mark of a novice poet is that everything rhymes, sometimes at the sake of using a better word in its place that doesn’t rhyme. I think rhyme has its place in poetry, but it can be overused. Since most of Gabbie Hanna’s poems do rhyme, it’s easy to see someone getting “rhyme fatigue” while reading. Another negative effect of rhyming is that the reader will begin to anticipate the rhyme- this can cause the reader to skip lines entirely, and focus solely on the rhyme scheme, rather than focusing on the meaning of the poem. A piece that harkens back to childhood and uses rhyme well, in my opinion, is This Be the Verse by Phillip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.  

   They may not mean to, but they do.  

They fill you with the faults they had

   And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

   By fools in old-style hats and coats,  

Who half the time were soppy-stern

   And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

   It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

   And don’t have any kids yourself.

I think the big difference between this and Gabbie Hanna’s poem is that it starts off strong right away with “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”. The condescending tone is always there right from the start, and the rhyming is more of a surprise than an expectation throughout- the line “it deepens like a coastal shelf” brings new imagery and meaning to the poem by veering off into another subject. This enhances the surprise.

I’d also like to address cliche’s. The cliche’s present in CHIVALRY are “I deserve the world” and “I don’t need you to open my door”. These are easy to understand from a readers point of view, but often, cliche’s offer nothing new and exciting to the reader. They are easy to skip over and ignore. These add to the poems generic atmosphere.

Let’s talk about the pieces title itself: CHIVALRY. When we read this poem with the title in context, we get a strange disconnect. The poem is clearly about a girl who says she doesn’t need chivalrous acts from a  friend or partner, and doesn’t need someone because they are “good with just me”. But the subtext of the piece is less about chivalry and more about self-esteem or a willingness to be loved. The piece has changed meaning two thirds of the way down. I think the title is too obvious and misleading, and gives the reader the wrong idea about what the poem is trying to say. In essence, the piece is named after a facet of the relationship between the narrator and other person, rather than the root of what the poem is trying to convey.

The pokémon references add color to this piece, and it is the only place this piece has any kind of concrete imagery. In the This is Just to Say the sweet and cold plum imagery is the very last line, heightening them. In CHIVALRY, they’re near the middle of the piece. Thus, the longer ending reduces the color  and lasting effect of “holographic charizard”.

Overall, I think Gabbie Hanna could benefit from workshopping her poems and getting peer feedback from other poets, in addition to reading poetry that isn’t thirty plus years old. I don’t know if she already does this, but judging from her poems, I can only assume that she hasn’t. At the very least, she should avoid rushing to get poems out before they are due.

Gabbie Hanna is a novice poet who put her poems out into the world and got a greater amount of backlash than any novice poet usually does in a workshop or classroom setting.  When in the classroom, there is such a thing as Critique Etiquette. Critique for poems are give honestly and gently, never in a harsh or mean way. Fellow poets point out possible interpretations of work, or possible unwanted connotations of sometimes, even a simple word at the end of the line. In addition, poets in the classroom are exposed to modern poets that are creating new and exciting work that is often published in highly esteemed magazines- reading the best of todays poetry. Gabbi Hanna’s work seemingly got published without peer review, and the quality of it was clear to those who read it. That being said, I do think that people who read and love Gabbie Hanna’s work do connect with it— no doubt because these poems are designed to be as generic as possible, so that others may see themselves in the words.This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I believe her work appeals best to newcomers to poetry, people who maybe have only ever read works from Shel Silverstein or Edgar Allen Poe. This can be a blessing and a shame. There are many good poets out there, that aren’t getting published because they don’t have youtube channels or brand collaborations, and they are just plain hard to find. However, Gabbie Hanna has opened the door for many would-be poetry readers, and has sparked a love for the art of poetry in them. Hopefully, this love leads them to become wider read, and to seek out more poetry from a multiple of authors to read.

I decided that I’d also like to include some published poetry from poets that are from a range of different backgrounds. Go forth and read!

POETRY THAT DOESN'T SUCK: Sonya Vatomsky's Salt is for Curing- poems by a non-binary poet that focus on themes of femininity, Russian food, Russian folklore and identity. Review Purchase 

Danez Smith- A black, queer, non-binary and HIV positive writer. A poem I really like of theirs is "Dinosaurs in the Hood" is a great poem that I personally love.

Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. This book contains poems that focus on the Black experience in America. Excerpt from the book here

Khadijah Queen's I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On. This collection features conversational poems that focus on the narrators encounters with famous men in relation to what the narrator was wearing at the time. A piece that centers around the question "Well, what were you wearing?". Read two poems from the book Here. 

Fatimah Ashgar's IF THEY COME FOR US. Poems by a Pakistani-Kashmiri-American. These poems focus on race and identity. One of my favorites takes the form of a bingo card, titled Microagression Bingo (read here and two other poems from the book). As a poc myself, I was nodding along to every line, thinking "Yup. I've been through that too."

Tommy Pico is an indiginous poet, and Junk is a book length poem of couplets that uses modern, fast, text style language. From the Tin House website: "The third book in Tommy Pico’s Teebs trilogy, Junk is a breakup poem in couplets: ice floe and hot lava, a tribute to Janet Jackson and nacho cheese. In the static that follows the loss of a job or an apartment or a boyfriend, what can you grab onto for orientation?" Read an excerpt Here. 

I can assure you that none of these read like Rupi Kaur, Gabbie Hanna, or Atticus. These are serious poets that have spent years honing their form, submitting to journals-- they did the work. And it shows in the quality of their writing.

While I'm not a fan of Atticus and Rupi Kaur and Gabbie Hanna, I can appreciate that they've appealed to people who may have never read a poem before. Now those people have a  newfound love for poetry, and a hunger for more. Hopefully, those people will seek out other poets and expand their knowledge and repertoire of current poets, maybe lesser known poets that do amazing work.

[awkwardtaco056]

so now that i’m no longer in the Hell that was school and after finding the lovely blog @endcringe i’ve decided to talk about my own experiences with cringe culture, bullying, and why it’s Really Bad to not let people enjoy inherently harmless things, especially neurodivergent people (read more because this is gonna get long and triggering at times, TW for mentions of bullying, suicide, child abuse, a brief mention of incest shipping. I won’t be naming any of the peers that I discuss my experiences with, because my point with this post is Not to “cancel” anyone, I just want to speak out on my experiences)

I’m neurodivergent; I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 8 years old. I didn’t know a lot about it, and a family member even painted it as “oh it’s nothing blah blah blah just apply yourself more. Because of this, I had no idea about the concept of hyperfixations until I was in my late teens. Due to that, I would obsess over random things and my family would shame me relentlessly for it. My mother said I had an “addictive personality” and that she feared I’d end up a drug addict or alcoholic because of it.

I look younger than what I am, I’m short, and small. AKA, the perfect candidate for being picked on by people bigger and stronger than me. People made fun of my art when I was around 13, but fortunately that was an instance where spite fueled me to improve drastically. However, just because I happened to take the shitty comments and have it fuel me then does NOT mean bullying people will have that effect all the time. At some point someone put my old South Park fan art on a cringe blog. I was temporarily hurt, and a little angry, but I realized that if someone was making fun of a 15 year old’s art, they probably didn’t have much going for them in life, so I moved on.

Fast forward to high school. Everything was horrible and I’m not exaggerating when I say I barely made it out alive. I was living in an abusive household up until January 2018 and I found comfort in many different interests. I’ve always found great comfort in music and the arts in general. In 2016, I drew a picture of a mermaid. I was inspired by the chocolate opal gemstone, and I thought it’d be fun to draw a gay chubby mermaid with dark skin and a rainbow tail and freckles. Junior year was lousy and I wanted something that sparked Joy. I was immediately told that “scientifically, mermaids wouldn’t look like that. Mind you, my take looked like this:

Obviously I wasn’t going for realism, I just wanted to draw a cute mermaid. However, they continued to tell me that they wouldn’t look like that, going as far as writing so on the back of said drawing. When I got angry at her for taking it too far (as I’d established before that I didn’t like it when people wrote on my art without permission), they got angry back, accusing me of being unable to take criticism. Heated by the accusation, I went as far as asking my art teacher if it was fair for them to say that, and she said no, stating that constructive criticism would be talking about how I could improve my lineart and coloring in the digital version. I took her actual helpful criticism and since then have improved Drastically in digital art. Even with that being said, I found myself hesitant to participate in things such as MerMay because I was leery of hearing that peer berate me for having cartoony mermaids. 

 During high school I grew to love many musicians, a lot of emo/alternative stuff, a couple being Twenty One Pilots and Melanie Martinez. I love how unique TOP’s style is, their open discussion of mental illness, and as someone who had a rough childhood, I connected with every single song on Cry Baby. It was like nothing I’d ever heard. I started listening to mashups featuring all these different artists I love, adoring how they could change the tone and sound so drastically. A peer Bully of mine in junior year condemned these two artists, declaring that they made “Bad Music” simply because it didn’t fit their tastes. They’d throw my drawings on the ground, write over them in pen, steal my headphones so I couldn’t listen to music, push me around, complain that mashups sucked and gave them a headache, and in general shit all over conetnt that was actively preventing me from committing suicide. 

Some family members were no better. Once high school hit, I began listening to Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and My Chemical Romance. Their deep complex lyrics stuck with me. I would write down quotes from my favorite songs and thanks to hyperfixating, I remember each studio album in order My mother resented when I fell in love with the “Emo Trinity” because “the Columbine  shooters were emo and that event traumatized me” Despite that, not only did the Columbine tragedy occur in 1999 and none of the bands got together until the early 2000s, but I have a pretty good feeling those groups aren’t For gun violence. The other side constantly criticized the fact that I love FOB, P!ATD, and MCR because I’m black and “why must you listen to that white people music.”

 I grew fond of Dan and Phil in high school (and I’m still a fan to this day!), I loved Phil’s kindness and positive aura and I deeply connect with Dan’s sense of humor and personality. Their content made me happy during some very dark times in my life. It’s November 2017, I’m over a close peer’s house at the time, and notice PINOF is upon us. I drew the PINOF whiskers on my face, my plan being to quietly watch them in the corner of peer’s bedroom on my phone through headphones, the others were doing their own thing and I knew they didn’t like them, so I thought they’d respect it if I silently indulged in it. Unfortunately, the complete opposite happened. I was immediately shunned and locked out of the bedroom, told that I’d only be let back in if I washed the whiskers off because “absolutely not”. Me, being stubborn, washed them off temporarily but drew them back on in the room. Life during then was especially bad for me, as the abusive household I was in was getting worse. They noticed, of course, and even though all I wanted was to enjoy this small tradition in a time during a deep depression, I was immediately shoved out the room and locked out, only to have said peer’s family members notice. I’m a relatively shy person, so this was honesty a really harrowing experience that had a lasting effect on me. 

I grew to adore Sanders Sides as well, but the moment I found out most of my peers didn’t like Thomas, I was terrified.  I stopped watching Dan and Phil’s content for months and shied away from other fandoms too, only occasionally indulging in times of complete solitude. One time when said peers were due to visit my house for the first time, I saw the Phandom and Fander stuff I’d hung up on my wall in my little sanctuary that was my bedroom (it was the first time in years I’d had my own room), and I was filled with panic and fear. I took them down and hid them away, genuinely terrified of what they’d do to me if they saw. It’s still incites so much anger in me to this day because they turned around and ended up shipping incest, but somehow liking D&P and Sanders Sides was So. Much. Worse.

They were baffled by my actions, despite having humiliated me Twice by going on a private blog of mine separate from everything so that I could fully indulge and laughing at everything on there, once at a peer’s house, once right in school. I don’t think they realized how traumatizing it was to have a large group of people in public laughing at something I was deeply self conscious about for all of my life. I put on a brave face at the time, but ended up crying in the bathroom after first period began. I continued to be treated as lesser until things came to an ugly head August 2018 when I ended up in the hospital because I nearly attempted suicide. Years of child abuse, bullying, and being deemed “cringy” made me feel like I didn’t deserve to be alive, that everyone would be happier if I were gone.

After arguably one of the lowest points in my life, I cut them off and slowly began to embrace the Real Me. I started letting myself enjoy the things again, made true friends and even found love, my first boyfriend ever at 18. I still get choked up retelling it, but when PINOF 10 dropped, after he found out how much I’d been hurt over the incident in 2017, I was greeted with a photo of him with the whiskers on his face. I cried for a while, blown away at such a pure act of kindness. He listens to me ramble about my interests, he compliments my taste in music, he watched K-12 with me. 

This got incredibly long, but my point is this: Cringe Culture hurts people. You might think it’s whatever if the Thing doesn’t apply to your interests, but content you’re denouncing as cringy could be something that’s keeping them alive, that one flicker of light in a void of darkness. When I was contemplating suicide, I listened to The Black Parade, repeating Gee’s words to myself over and over, that nothing in the world was worth hurting yourself over. Some friendly joshing here and there is okay, but actively ripping someone to shreds constantly to the point where they have a mental breakdown in front of you and later on plan their own demise is disgusting. Nobody should abuse anyone for having harmless interests, no one. Unless you’re participating in p*dophilic/inc*st/s*xual assault/inherently abusive ships/content and pretending it’s not bad because “Fiction doesn’t impact reality!”, you have every right to like what you like and be happy. Read homestuck. Play Undertale. Draw up the Wildest OCs you can imagine. And stay away from people who try to rob you of innocent fun, life is too short and in this cruel, unforgiving world, you deserve to be happy, whether you’re a 13 year old who draws cute furries, a 16 year old cosplayer on TikTok, a VSCO girl, a 30 year old who writes/draws self insert art or a 20 year old who adores Invader Zim. 

Cringe Culture is just bullying under a different name, and it can lead to many instances of people, especially fellow neurodivergent folk to feel isolated and ostracized. Attempting to bully someone out of an interest they have isn’t going to fix them; it’s more often than not going to cause more damage. I suffer from diagnosed C-PTSD, anxiety, and depression, and sometimes I still find myself trying to over-justify my interests. To all who are roped up in bad homes and lousy “friends” who berate you for your innocent passions, I’m sorry you’re suffering, things will one day get better even if it doesn’t feel like it, and fuck those people. I’d also like to note that sometimes even if it seems more terrifying, it’s better to have one or two close friends you can truly trust than a whole group that walks all over you. You have every right to call them out for treating you poorly, and if things don’t improve, you also have every right to leave.

You have a right to live your True Self.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Elkhorn

Jesse Sheppard and Drew Gardner joined forces as Elkhorn in 2013, Sheppard on 12-string and Gardner on 6-string. Together they’ve made a string of gorgeous duet albums on Feeding Tube and now Beyond Beyond Is Beyond records, while supporting the growth and scholarship around American Primitive guitar playing in a variety of ways. Sheppard, in particular, has been active in organizing the 1000 Incarnations of the Rose festival and documenting players including Glenn Jones, Nathan Bowles, Chris Forsyth, Ryley Walker and others in video. Their latest album, The Storm Sessions, comes from a snowed-in session in Brooklyn when a cancelled concert turned into a prolonged and graceful meditation on the possibilities of guitars and guitar-like instruments.  In her review, Jennifer Kelly wrote, “… a tribute to filling in the quiet spaces that have arisen unexpectedly out of chaos and disappointment, but which are, themselves, very peaceful and beautiful.” Drew Gardner contributed this list.

I put this list together with the thought of talking about some music that overlaps with elements of The Storm Sessions. There are several shared elements at play in these records: songs using longer durations that unfold in suites, improvisation, the blending of several genres-sounds-traditions, gradual development, the use of calm/blissful moods, and players who tend toward letting the music guide the playing.

Mary Lattimore —The Withdrawing Room, “You’ll Be Fiiinnne”

The Withdrawing Room, harpist Mary Lattimore’s debut album, unfolds beautifully with delay-soaked harp mixed with bubbly psychedelic electronic textures courtesy of Jeff Zeigler. Lattimore knows how to use patience to build a feeling of calm tranquility and often walks her harp figures beside a stream of contrasting ambient sound. She glides though different sound areas without trying to push the songs around, letting the music be. The results are lovely and dreamy.

Maya Youssef —Syrian Dreams, “Queen of the Night”

Maya Youssef is an expert player of the maqan, a traditional Middle Eastern plucked instrument in the zither family. She grew up in Damascus and now lives in England. Defying the tradition that only men could play it, she has innovated the maqan as a solo instrument beyond its conventional use in larger ensembles. The instrumentation on Syrian Dreams is maqan, percussion, cello and oud, the textures of which blend into sets of suites that seem to tell many stories. This is a record of original compositions of Middle Eastern music that seamlessly incorporate the sounds of flamenco and jazz. Somehow Youssef’s group also reads like a freak folk chamber band. She’s unafraid of the healing power of music, and she connects her compositions with both the ancient and the difficult recent history of Syria.

Sunburned Hand of the Man—Headdress, “Shitless”

Gloriously lo-fi collage-ist space jams, cohesive in their disjointedness. Like GBV, the low fidelity makes it more intimate. As with most of their catalogue this is a head-trip and also a lot of fun. This record puts all the myriad things they’re capable of into perfect balance: uniquely fried “Massachusetts dub,” comical Dadaist prank-chants, slow loose funk grooves with all kind of friendly space debris orbiting around. Each song has at least three different genres melting in and out of it, and it all sounds like a party. They don’t order the tunes around, they let what’s happening happen. There’s plenty of improvisation here, but without a big demand for the guitars to need to get anywhere—what a relief. They’re happy being where they are, floating over the rhythm section and soaking in the cascades of color, relaxed and weird-blissful.

NNCK—Qvaris, “The Doon”

NNCK went to great lengths to secure certain freedoms, especially freedom from fame and freedom from commerce. Those freedoms are put to great use here and the result is a floaty ego-differed collective texture and with a groove and a vibe. It feels like all the players are steering the boat. Everyone is thinking about the total sound and the overall flow. Everyone’s in charge and no one is. They improvise and move from zone to zone, sound world to sound world. There are trippy drones, ritual percussion, and calm, bizarre and soothing textures. The songs sound like they’re improvised in a way that allows them to be self-assembling/self-disassembling ensemble music. It sounds like life forms are evolving. The various combinations of different elements create a lot of variety as the landscape scrolls by. Need some dilating texture-walls shifting into a bonus of damp squishiness? You got it. Need some mescaline-fueled post-rock? You got it. Rustically glowing biomechanical insects morphing into autumnal haze? Yup. Malfunctioning alternate-dimension windchimes into Dada kabuki Muppet theater? Cannabinoidosaurus Rex chill out wedding music into Martian organ grinder swing winding up at third-pot-brownie-surf-rock? You get the idea. There’s something for everyone. All the song/soundscapes flow through these ecosystems with a “how did we get here?” effect. The players find different windows in the soundscape. It never feels crowed. Sonically occupying the space they’re in, they let the music become itself rather than trying to control it.

Joshua Abrams Natural Information Society—Mandatory Reality, “Finite”

I first heard this record last year in the Elkhorn tour vehicle while Jesse and I we were driving from the Milwaukee Psych fest to Chicago. It turns out that being stuck in a car for several hours moving at twenty miles an hour in a white-out is the perfect context for experiencing this music. There was something about the slow speed, the need for concentrated attention, and the monochromatically unfolding landscape that really enhanced the experience of the music. Abrams’ use of slow tempos, repetition, long durations, gradually shifting textures and cycles of chords and melodic figures was perfectly mirrored in the snowy drive. He allows the music to repeat and unfold without needing to rush in contrasting sections or motifs. It’s patient and languid and mesmerizing. Done in real time with no overdubs, it blends several sounds beautifully: minimalism, Gnawa music and modern Chicago free jazz. At times it feels like a radically becalmed Braxton Ghost Trance piece transmuted into something like the spacious Tabla Tarang playing of Pandit Kamalesh Maitra or the straight 8ths of Gamelan music with John Luther Adams-style long tones stretched over it. When we arrived in Chicago the snowstorm had abated after the long drive, and as I stepped out of the car into the slush I felt refreshed rather than exhausted.

Pauline Oliveros with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis—Deep Listening, “Lear”

Deep Listening was improvised with no overdubs using just-intonation accordion, trombone, didgeridoo and voice in a cistern in Washington State that once held two million gallons of water. This space featured a natural forty-five-second reverb. As dolphins know, reverb is a kind of image—information about space in sound form. On this record the players, the environment and the instruments all combine to become intertwined into one system. I’ll let Oliveros say it: “The Universe is improvising and we have evolution, so improvisation is always happening.”

Cul De Sac—Immortality Lessons, “Blues in E”

Cul De Sac featured Glenn Jones on electric twelve-string guitar before he turned to solo acoustic music. The band played improvised instrumental rock that crossed over several genres: Krautrock, psych-rock, surf-rock and American Primitive. This record was recorded live at a college radio station in one take under less than ideal circumstances and it’s a great example of turning lemons into psychedelic lemonade. This music flows and develops in suites, using various groove/dissolve/solo patterns than unfold with an expansive vibe. Everyone in the band is thinking about the whole arrangement, not just the parts. It’s genre blending, full-band texturing and rewards repeated listening. One can only hope for a reunion one day.

Marisa Anderson—The Golden Hour, “In the Valley of the Sun”

The Golden Hour is a record of solo fingerstyle electric guitar improvisations recorded straight to tape. It sounds like she’s doing variations on open themes and the results feel modern/spontaneous and composed/traditional at the same time. She has a warm, woody guitar tone, often tastefully overdriving the amp in a lush manner, using a nimble rhythmic gait. This works as psychedelic guitar music and at the same time resonates with the old American music traditions she’s connecting with. Her blend of genres is country blues, country and western, and folk, put together in concise songs that always have a coherent flow of ideas with sometimes subtle hints of deconstruction. She’s not afraid of the pleasures of meandering. This is music that sounds like it’s dreaming through guitar history as a kind of meditation.

Shivkumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain—Rag Madhuvanti, Rag Misra Tilang, “Rag Misra Tilang”

Shivkumar Sharma plays the Santur, an Indian box zither, not unlike a western hammer dulcimer. Sharma is credited with bringing this folk instrument, normally associated with the Sufi music of Kashmir, into Indian classical music. Indian music involves several of the elements I’ve been discussing in this list: long duration, improvisation, and drone. There’s something about the cascading overtones of Sharma’s Santur playing that reads as especially psychedelic, unfolding in undulating patterns using his knowledge of tabla rhythms. He wasn’t afraid to risk innovation and prove that a folk instrument could be used for high art. This album is mesmerizing, beautiful, and rejuvenating.

[wormprint]

for the ask meme...heinwald?

WHEW got two of these for hein so here it be

favorite thing about them:

Heinwald is a very pretty man I really like how he presents himself as emotionless or very fact-driven but actually is a very empathetic and emotional person. 

least favorite thing about them:

Idk I don’t really like his english voice, his jp one is great but I think the heavy accent is a bit much in his english lines

favorite line:

that one from the accursed archives event, with them standing in the castle room on the home screen. “do you truly think all of the mysteries have been solved?” or something to that effect. LOVE THAT FUCKIN FORESHADOWING

random headcanon:

Hein gets very very clingy when he’s tired. It’s not uncommon to see him clinging onto Curran in some way, shape, or form when he’s asleep. He also either sleeps for 40 minutes or 14 hours, no in-between. 

unpopular opinion:

idk i don’t think i have an unpopular opinion about hein?? 

song i associate with them:

I literally couldn’t think of anything until I started scrolling through my music and I listened to “visitation of the ghost” which like. lowkey is about committing a murder and framing the scene. so like maybe some shit that hein would look into

favorite picture of them:

oh god okay. my bf drew this currahein art a while back and its literally my favorite work of dragalia art ever

like holy fuck hein is so beautiful????????? i’m gay

[huahsu]

YEAR OF THE BUTTERFLY

previous years: A SONG THAT DEGRADES EACH TIME YOU PLAY IT :: 2018 A CHURCH AND JOHN LENNON’S “IMAGINE” :: 2017 SIKH DEVOTIONAL MUSIC :: 2016 SPOOKY BLACK :: 2015 this year: I’ve spent the past few months working on a book that I’ve always wanted to write but never figured I’d make the time for. At a really basic level, it’s about listening to music with friends. A couple weeks ago, I devoted a few days to reading a stack of books and articles about the emotional experience of music. They were written by philosophers, critics, cognitive scientists, historians. I took from them two overarching questions. First, what does it mean to assign a piece of music a feeling, like “happy” or “sad?” Is the song itself “sad,” or does it just model a kind of sadness proximate to how we feel? What elements of a song do this? The fraying of a voice? Minor keys? Tempo? Is it all a trick of memory? None of the answers really satisfied me, since music is such an intimate thing. A song makes us feel a way for reasons that are often either blindingly obvious or remote and mysterious. An expert can tell you that humans are wired to feel joy when a certain configuration of notes are struck in tandem, but maybe it just reminds you of looking at the front door.

The other question was whether music itself facilitates any unique emotional possibilities--a mode of feeling that we can’t get anywhere else. Music doesn’t mimic the real world, it doesn’t make arguments. One writer suggested that the thrill of music was its capacity to remind you, foremost, that music can thrill you. In essence, each time we hear something new and feel something, we are being reminded of all the times we’ve felt this way before. We’re living in the echo of a former enchantment. Maybe you’ll hear it again, process it, assign it a genre or context, and the mystique evaporates. But music is one of those things that doesn’t happen on our time. We don’t stand in front of it and train our gaze on this quadrant or that. We don’t flip back to make sure we didn’t miss something. You can’t slow it down as it is happening, you merely let it happen. 

In the spring, the Museum of Chinese in America in Manhattan showed “The Moon Represents My Heart,” an exhibition I worked on with MOCA’s curators, Herb and Andrew. The basic idea was to look at all the ways music had enriched immigrant life, from early opera troupes touring America’s Chinatowns to karaoke bars, church choirs, and after-school violin lessons, fifties doo-wop trios to garage punks and self-taught dance music producers. There’s no legible tradition of Chinese American music so we just wanted to present it as a textured and everyday thing--the experience of the fan could be as legitimate as that of a Mando-pop superstar. While working on the show, people would often ask me for a playlist, but I didn’t really have any to share. It wasn’t really about the music itself, which could sound derivative or amateur to some. It was about the fact that they sought to express themselves through music, in contexts that made them outliers and oddballs. I came to love all the music in our show because of that second-hand thrill--that sense that these moments had been deeply meaningful to everyone in the room. 

You can hear it in the voice of Stephen Cheng, who ended up being the show’s most memorable star. He put out a rocksteady gem in the sixties and then spent the next decade in New York trying to get the Dragon Seeds, his Chinese “folk-rock” band, off the ground. Cheng died years ago, but Andrew found his children, who brought some reels of unreleased music to the museum. I remember staring at them, wondering what was on them. It was a kind of anticipation and wonder that I often miss, when the operative feeling I associate with music-listening on the internet is the frenzy of opening and closing windows, clicking links, proving my humanity to a captcha.

Stephen’s singing wasn’t great, but it was perfect. His version of “Yesterday,” all warbly and over-the-top, has now supplanted the original for me. Somehow, we played some of Stephen’s songs on the radio, including one about butterflies and love. Somehow, one of the people listening was a butterfly expert, and he was about to marry another butterfly expert. Who knew such a song was possible, the groom-to-be told me. Stephen was too obscure to be properly forgotten. Or maybe his song was just dormant all these years. It awaited just the right listener, and now, over forty years later, he would get his propers, sandwiched somewhere between the vows and Kool and the Gang, a couple minutes of people scratching their heads, searching for the right smile, saying Can you believe this? to one another.

### TEENAGE DREAM

Warren Defever/His Name is Alive, All the Mirrors in the House

EXCELLENT USE OF “P.S.K.” Kindness feat. Robyn, “Warning” EXCELLENT USE OF A TELEPHONE Mavi, “Guernica” TECHNICALLY 2018, BUT TAIWAN’S ANSWER TO COIL, JOY DIVISION, ETC SEN, “The Cicada” SAME (2018) BUT TAIWANESE DREAMBOAT VIBES Linion, “Can’t Find” ANOTHER, KINDA BILLY BRAGG-Y Wayne’s So Sad, “Wanderer’s Guide to Taipei” SUMMER IN TAIWAN, AND SO I BOUGHT A LOT OF CDs, INCLUDING THE LIMITED EDITION SIGNED 9M88 DEBUT 9m88, “Love Rain” THEY ARE VERY INTO THE “FUTURE SOUL” THING Andrea, “You Better Kiss Me” THIS GUY HAS THE SAME NAME AS MY COUSIN Yo Lee demos LOTS OF BACKPACKS Hsien, Lately AMAZED TO SEE LIM GIONG REISSUES THERE, THIS IS THE DANCE ALBUM HE RECORDED IN 1994 IN THE UK BEFORE BRINGING RAVE CULTURE BACK TO TAIWAN Lim Giong, Entertainment World (IF YOU ARE UNFAMILIAR WITH LIM GIONG, THIS IS THE GREATEST SONG EVER Lim Giong, “A Pure Person) AND HERE’S 9m88 COVERING “PLASTIC LOVE” 9m88, “Plastic Love” AIR SUPPLYERS Oso Leone, Gallery Love Sunset Rollercoaster, Vanilla Villa I ENJOYED THIS WHEN IT CAME OUT BUT HONESTLY FORGOT IT CAME OUT THIS YEAR, OR THAT I ENJOYED, BUT FOR THE LONGEST TIME MY “2019″ EMAIL DRAFT JUST READ “CHIEF KEEF HNIA KAIL MALONE (sic)” Chief Keef and Zaytoven, GloToven

ANOTHER DEVASTATING DUO Pink Siifu and Akai Solo, Black Sand

MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY Kali Malone, The Sacrificial Code Clarice Jensen, Drone Studies I AM A SLOW WALKER, BUT I NEVER WALK BACKWARDS Michael Vincent Waller, Moments ana roxane - ~~~ A THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT Caleb Giles, Under the Shade Medhane, Own Pace WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR Angel Bat Dawid, The Oracle Art Ensemble of Chicago, We are on the Edge READ JOSEPH JARMAN Joseph Jarman, Black Case I and II RESPECT YOURSELF Helado Negro, This is How You Smile Deb Never, “Swimming” LET’S DO IT AGAIN Tommy Holohan & Casper Hastings- RVE001 Eris Drew, Raving Disco Breaks LET’S DO IT AGAIN AGAIN, BUT SMEARED Burial, Tunes 2011-2019 OR PERHAPS YOU WERE THERE Callisto, Guidance is Eternal, Part I PERHAPS YOU WERE THERE FOR MICROHOUSE AND PEAK MEGO AND BLOGS Barker, Debiasing AT A WAREHOUSE PARTY, ABLE TO HEAR TOO MANY FLOORS, ROOMS, SOUNDS AT ONCE, IN A GOOD WAY Dies Smely, “Neptune Rises” AT A WAREHOUSE PARTY, BUT THINKING ABOUT PLUNDER, THE TRAIL OF TEARS, THE SANCTITY OF EARTH Kelman Duran, 13 Month A KIND OF BLUE Steve Hiett, Down on the Road by the Beach POSSIBLY MY MOST PLAYED ALBUM, 2019 Galcher Lustwerk, Information R.I.P. PRINCE, FOREVER AND ALWAYS Serpente, Parada Moodymann, Sinner Nelson Bandela, Purprain THE OPPOSITE OF “I AM A GOD” Nelson Bandela - “i'm mortal” YOU GOT ME Shane Eagle feat. Santi and Bas, “Vanya” HARD TO BELIEVE JAZMINE SULLIVAN REMAINS SO OVERLOOKED Kindness feat Jazmine Sullivan, “Hard to Believe” WATCH FOR THE HOOK Quando Rondo, “Gun Powder”

ANTE UP Polo G feat Lil Tjay, “Pop Out” “PANTS GON BE SAGGIN TIL I’M FORTY” Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, “Thuggin”

“WHY THEY LET THE TERMINATOR WIN THE ELECTION?” Sault, “Why Why Why Why Why”

HOLLOW BONES Showbiz and Milano, “Guillotine” LADI LUV, “GOOD TO THE LAST DUB” City Girls, “Act Up” MONEY BOSS PLAYERS Benny the Butcher feat 38 Spesh and Jadakiss, “Sunday School” Roc Marciano, “Richard Gear” WARP 30 (1989-2019) Droop-E, “The Droop-E Way” INTERSTELLAR SPACE, PROBABLY KILLER LIVE Blacks’ Myths, Blacks Myths II ALICE NEVER WENT ANYWHERE Sam Wilkes, “Sivaya” Alice Coltrane, Live at the Berkeley Community Theater 1972 RIYL: LYRICHORD, EFFECTS PEDALS Seungmin Cha, Nuunmuun RIYL: EFFICIENCY, INTERLUDES Solange, “Binz” “WHO HERE IS STILL LISTENING TO JOHNNY MAY CASH’S “DRUGS” IN 2019?” Playboi Carti, “Molly” “MOLLY” CZ Wang and Neo Image, “Just Off Wave”

YOU’VE SUBSCRIBED TO “UK STREETSOUL YOUTUBE PLAYLIST” Apiento feat Harriet Brown, “Down That Road” WHERE WERE U IN 2092? Jai Paul, “He”

LIL B, INNIT Voldy Moyo, Paper World SCREAMADELICA Vampire Weekend, “Harmony Hall” Humeysha, Nusrat on the Beach FOLKTRONICA Aldous Harding, “The Barrel” TOO PURE Springfields, Singles 1986-1991 MY AQUARIUM Rod Modell, Captagon ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE Vagabon, Vagabon 4-TRACK TWEE BEDROOM COVERS OF BLINK-182′S DUDE RANCH Colleen Green, Blink-182′s “Dude Ranch” as Played by Colleen Green

KINDA AS THOUGH A PART OF MY 2016-19 LP PURCHASES FORMED THEIR OWN BANDS Anunaku, Whities 024 75 Dollar Bill, I Was Real Joshua Abrams and Natural Information Society, Mandatory Reality

JUST 30 OR SO GECS Cool Fang, Sparring I’M A DEADHEAD BUT FOR STANDING ON THE CORNER SOTC Art Ensemble, SOTC Double Bass Ensemble * Merciful Allah Black Hole Theater * 4/24/19 SOTC Art Ensemble, Variation 9 * Merciful Allah Black Hole Theater * 4/27/19

SONG OF THE SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER, YEAR, STILL UNDEFEATED

[onestowatch]

Del Water Gap on Smash Mouth, Quarantine and “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” [Premiere + Q&A]

Photo: Angela Ricciardi

Some music is just so vivid that when you hear it, you see it. In the same vein, some songs are so personal that when you listen, it’s like peering into someone's innermost thoughts. Each one of Del Water Gap’s songs possess that power. The artist’s newest single, “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat,” effectively peels back the curtain on a wandering mind’s thoughts.  

“Ode To a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” explores feelings of apprehension and angst at the possibility of a lover finding love somewhere else. Frontman S. Holden Jaffe’s soft-hearted vocals flounce over folksy guitars with rock-leaning layerings. The song’s undercurrent is akin to Del Water Gap’s previous classic singer-songwriter style displayed on his Don’t Get Dark EP. But Del Water Gap’s 2020 sound is becoming more and more accented by contemporary touches and heightened tempos. 

We caught up with the man behind the project to find out more about “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat,” his obsession with Smash Mouth, and how his quarantine is going. 

Ones To Watch: So you’re from rural Connecticut, but moved to Brooklyn during your young adult years. How have or haven’t your surroundings aided in creating your sound?

Del Water Gap: At the time I moved to the city, there was still a really vibrant indie scene happening. CMJ was in full swing, and I was out every weekend seeing bands like The Virgins, Public Access TV, The Drums… The Arctic Monkeys, The Antlers, Diet Cig. Bands and bands. Running into Fabrizio Moretti by the NYU library. I was spending a lot of time at St. Dymphna’s and borrowing electric guitars from my friend Dylan. I loved the music I was ingesting and the scene that came with it.

Did you choose music or did music choose you?

Music chose me - but I was an ardent enabler. I remember standing on my living room table and playing harmonica along with the radio as a kid. Everything in C major sounded decent...? I figured out what one-four-five felt like years before I knew the words for it, just staying quiet and listening. My relationship with music has been a bit of an abusive one in recent years, but I know I’m here for life. I’ve fantasized about quitting and doing something simpler hundreds of times, but i know that's not going to happen any time soon. 

What was it that made you decide to grow Del Water Gap from a personal project into a full blown touring band?

I put out an EP in 2012 under the name Del Water Gap because all of my heroes at the time were solo artists using monikers; Bon Iver, Tallest Man on Earth, St. Vincent… and so on. I moved to NYC without any aspirations of being a performer, but the record started performing a bit on local blogs and my best friend at the time basically forced me to play a show. She said “these are songs to fall in love to.” I refused and refused until she offered to play the show with me, and I finally gave in and booked a slot at Sullivan Hall in the village. I think we nearly sold it out.  

Who would you say your music is for?

People who have run out of podcasts. 

You’ve released “My Body,” featuring Claud, and now “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat,” both of which admittedly sound a little different from your previous work. The newer singles still have a folksy charm but seem more electronic-leaning or even more pop-leaning. What’s leading this explorative venture?

As I was finishing college I started producing some indie pop artists with my friend Mike Adubato. It was really just a way to help make ends meet, but I spent a year looking over Mike’s shoulder as he built out arrangements. I really got a holistic education in pop production that way. As artists, I think that our work is defined both by our strengths and our limitations, and as my limitations broke open, my work changed. I would simply sit down to make a song and reach for different colors. I also started consuming more indie pop records, and I eventually made the realization that I could take influences from those records without sacrificing any part of myself as a writer or protagonist. 

We love how tender “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” not only sounds, but actually feels. There’s a ton of intimacy there. It feels like we’re reading a diary entry. Can you give us some more insight into the song’s origin?

The song came out of a slow night in the studio with my good friend Gabe Goodman. We had been in a secret boy band that broke up in 2017, and it was our first time really writing together since things ended. I programmed some drums, and Gabe put most of the music together - we were just getting into a flow when a friend invited us to dinner with one of our musical heroes. We looked at each other and said “Should we go? Do we stop now?” “No, no, no we stay,” we decided. So we kept writing and had a spiked seltzer or two. 

I came back to the studio the next day and moved a few things around and wrote most of the words. I was seeing someone at the time who I really liked, and we had both been walking up to the line of asking the other to be with each other and no one else. Finally, we were sitting together one day and it got all quiet and she goes, “I’ve had this stuck in my throat all day…” And that was the start of our togetherness and the inspiration for the song. 

We were creeping on your Twitter. What’s going on with you, bowl cuts, and Smash Mouth? 

I thought you’d never ask - a few months ago, I was having a coffee playdate with my friend Charlie Burg and he was sketching me from the across the table. He’s really a very good artist, so I was feeling a little competitive and decided I would try my hand at sketching as well. So I grabbed a pen and a napkin from the table and drew this ridiculous line drawing of a horse with a bowl cut and a human face. It looks like something a six year old would draw in art class. It also has this disturbing and surrealist quality to it. We were laughing and laughing at my ridiculous creation and I turned to Charlie and said, “Do you think I could sell this online?” So I threw the napkin on my web store and it sold in five minutes and the whole event was so delightful to me that I made “commemorative” t-shirts and a Horse With Bowl Cut fan club account on Instagram. So a lot of bowl cut content makes its way to me these days. 

Not much to say about Smash Mouth other than the 2001 Smash Mouth self-titled LP is one of the greatest records ever made, and I will gladly teach a college level course on it if any university will lend me a classroom space. 

I read that you draw inspiration from what you eat, But when it comes to flavor, how would you describe your musical palette?

I would describe a musical cheese plate; sweet and savory. Trou Du Cru, a truffle Moelleux des Alpes, a hard Beaufort. Some honey and jam on the side, olives and cornichon. With a generous pile of those really expensive fig crackers they have at Whole Foods. 

What’s been one of the defining moments of your artistic career so far?

My dad FaceTimed me the other day from quarantine wearing a Del Water Gap mock turtleneck and listening to my song “Theory of Emotion.” That was pure power. 

What’s next for you?

I’m putting out the best work of my life so far - a few songs now and a few over the summer and into the fall. I’m touring with girl in red. I’m surviving this pandemic and everything that has come with it. I am trying to be a better friend and take better care of my brain and my body. 

We of course hope you’re staying safe during this time. But how are you keeping quarantine interesting? Or are you?

I am very lucky to be safe and comfortable - I’ve run away to a friend’s house by the ocean, so I have some fresh air and light, and I get to say hi to a seal once in a while. I’ve been journaling and cooking and trying to run twenty miles a week. I’ve been coloring a lot and watching Nashville. The excess of free time has not led to an excess of creation, but I’m trying to be gentle on myself. I think the collective anxiety has taken a toll on all of us. We’ll be writing about this for years to come, but we may have to wait a few years before we start. I shot a music video for “Ode” from quarantine, and have been finishing up my record remotely with Mike and Gabe. One of my best friend’s dad is a practicing buddhist, so he’s been sending me some really powerful literature each day, helping me move towards a more organized spiritual practice. All we can do right now is sit in this and keep in touch with the ones we love, so that’s my work. 

Lastly, who are your Ones to Watch?

I love Rosie Tucker’s record Never Not Never Not Never Not. Miss Grit played one of my favorite shows of the year opening for Daisy the Great at Rough Trade in August. Briston Maroney is making really powerful records. and Claud of course! One of my friends has a new project called Honeywhip, which I have been literally playing on repeat.

[candyheartharry]

Fall Apart - Part II: Bewitched

Author’s note: Hi dolls! 💘 Sorry it took me forever to get the second part up and ready, it took a while to get some inspiration for it, but of course as soon as I got it, I had it done in one day lol. Once again our series playlist can be found here, and if you’d like to be added to the tag list at the end drop me a message and let me know, feedback is EXTREMELY appreciated, happy reading ✨ PART I

Although you and Calum had shared friends, it wasn’t until the two of you started spending more time together that these two groups began to intertwine, but it was going to be just you while he and the band were all around the world on a small promo tour. You’d kept up with him a little while he was away, receiving occasional texts and snapchat videos from wherever he was, usually either a nice picture of the scenery or a video of him and the other guys doing something funny.

It had been a little while since he was away, and you really weren’t too sure when he was supposed to be back due to a few commitments they hadn’t quite confirmed before they left, so the most he could give you before he left was a two week window on when he might possibly be back home again.

In the meantime, one of your friends who worked for an art museum downtown had invited you to an early preview party for a new temporary exhibition that was opening at the museum, so since you had nothing better to do on a Wednesday evening, you got dressed up enough to try to not look out of place among donors to the museum and fancy people who had memberships. Since she worked there she had to be there early, so you were going to be arriving by yourself and meeting her there. As you made your way through the entrance after presenting your guest pass card to the attendant at the welcome desk, you promptly made your way to the bar to help yourself to your one complimentary drink of the evening.

You had tried texting your friend to let her know you were there, but knew that since this was technically a work event for her it might be a little while before she could respond and come say hello. Until then, you decided to take a look around the exhibit that everyone had come to see. Since it was an early preview, it was obviously packed full of people who you never would’ve imagined yourself at a party with. Many people who were leading discussions in small groups crowded around the ornate frames on the wall gave off the obvious vibes that they were professors of some sort, mostly due to their use of words like “tone”, “depth”, and conversations about color choices. Others seemed like doctors, or lawyers, or stockbrokers, or maybe multi-million dollar luxury real estate agents who had so much money they decided to make very large annual donations to the museum in the name of charitable giving. There were of course others who you could tell were just membership holders out for a nice evening, and now that you think about it, you were a little surprised you hadn’t run into any of your other friends, assuming that you weren’t the only one your friend Cora who worked there had invited.

After a while of doing your best to see what types of painting and small sculptures were in this new exhibit over everyone else crowded closely around them, you still hadn’t heard from your friend, so you decided to take a break from listening to conversations about “what this shade of blue here means versus the other shade of blue in this area” and made your way out of the gallery over to the elevators that brought you upstairs earlier. Once you entered the glass elevator, you decided on going up one level to the contemporary floor. When the doors opened one floor above, there was instantly a difference in the atmosphere, not just because this area felt more spacious and open, and the pieces were much larger and not in ornate gold frames, but the first room of the gallery was completely empty with the exception of two security guards who welcomed you once they realized they were no longer alone.

After admiring a few pieces near the entrance, you followed a distant noise across the first room into the next to see where it was coming from. The only sound in the otherwise quiet gallery came from a massive mountain of speakers stacked from the floor to the ceiling, playing very quietly, but playing slightly ominous music overlapped with a few various sound effects and dialogue from movies and TV shows every now and then. Something about how gigantic and illusive this mountain of speakers was drew you in, and you found yourself wanting to stop and listen rather than explore the rest of the empty gallery. Of course, since the gallery was empty due to everyone else being downstairs, the bench across from this colossal structure was empty as well. You decided to take up a seat across from the speakers and recorded a quick video of the scene for your Instagram story. After posting, you put your phone away in the small clutch purse you brought, and decide to enjoy the peace and quiet compared to the party full of people you don’t know that you had just left.

It was nice in its own way, the quiet accented by the almost white noise coming from the speakers. It should be unsettling, but it was almost calming. Something about it felt like it was putting you in a trance, it was something so monumental, it almost felt like it had a secret that if you watched and waited long enough it would let you in on what it knew.

“Mind if I join you?” a familiar voice interrupts your from your thoughts. You look up to your right to see Calum grinning down at you, dressed in a black and white striped shirt that looked very nice on him, and a drink in his own hand. “Oh my god, Calum, hi!” you exclaimed while you instantly broke into a smile of your own after you realized who it was speaking, and rushed to set your drink down on the bench to your left before turning back to open your arms up to him.

He accepted your invitation into your open arms, starting out for a hug before he was even properly seated yet, both of your arms wrapping around his broad back and he squirmed to set his drink next to yours behind your back so he didn’t spill it on you. Once his hands were free they wrapped carefully around you, pulling you closer into him.

“Oh my god, you’re the last person I ever expected to be here, when did you get back?!” you ask once you both pull apart.

“I got back pretty late yesterday! Did you come with anybody else?” he asks as he leans around behind you for the two drinks, handing yours back to you as he holds onto his own.

“No, it’s just me. I didn’t know anybody downstairs so I just came up here,” you told him. It was still just the two of you in the gallery with the speakers, which have gotten his attention. The backing track its playing almost sounds like music that should be playing in a horror movie when the antagonist is introduced, but the overlapping track is a scene from Pride and Prejudice.

“Damn, what’s the first song you’d want to play on these if you got to pick?” he asks, turning to you before he takes a sip of his drink. You look away from him and back up at the towering mountain of speakers across from you both and think about your answer.

“Are we choosing loud songs or sad songs?” you ask, needing to narrow down what type of answer he wants to know.

“Well my answer is by Cigarettes After Sex, so pick something different for variety’s sake.”

“Can I be super cliché and go with The Less I Know The Better, Tame Impala. You said your band, but what’s your song?” you ask, shifting your position a little so that you’re facing him a little more.

“Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby,” he replies, and even though it’s just the name of the song, for some reason hearing the way he says ‘baby’ gives you chills.

“So what brings you up to the contemporary floor in the first place? Didn’t want to hang out with all the art critics downstairs?” you ask to change the subject. “Oh, you posted on your Instagram, so I came to find you,” he replies casually, sending your heart into your throat, so you take a sip of your drink to try to calm down. “Plus some of the Picasso’s downstairs looked like they could’ve also been villains on Courage the Cowardly Dog, so,” he adds with a shrug, making you laugh.

Neither of you said anything for a moment, even though there was so much you both wanted to say. He wanted to tell you every detail about his time away: the cities they went to, the people they got to meet, how he spent time with his mother which made him feel the most like himself he had felt in a while, but he probably wouldn’t tell you about how about halfway into the trip he realized he missed you a little more than he normally missed his friends when he was away. You wanted to ask him all about what he saw in the countries he had left, he always had such a more interesting life than you did, but that wasn’t all you wanted to talk about. You wanted to tell him about how mundane your life was here back at home while he was gone, and that the most interesting thing you had done was meet up with an old friend from your hometown who was passing through on a business trip. You wanted to tell him how ever since he had been gone, you had been hearing his new song on the radio nearly every time you started your car, so it almost felt like his way of saying hello even when he wasn’t around. You wanted to tell him how the barista at the coffee shop inside the bookstore you both liked had asked where your friend was the last time you went, and how you realized you actually felt kind of lonely when you told her that he was out of town. Instead you both just sat in the silence for a little while more, and listened to the mountain of speakers play a scene from the 1996 Romeo and Juliet overlapped with organ music that sounds like it could be in a haunted house.

“I missed you,” he admits after a moment’s silence. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice that his left hand is resting on the bench in the space between you two, and when he feels you noticed it he moves his hand ever so slightly closer towards you almost in an invitation that he wants you to take it.

“Sorry, I cant help it that I’m just so charming,” you tease him, nudging him with your shoulder, which makes him laugh and shake his head. When he stops laughing and is just smiling softly at you still, you place your hand on top of his.

“I missed you, too,” you continue more seriously, giving him a soft smile of your own. “The stripes are a nice look, by the way,” you add after not so subtly checking him out. You’d be lying if you said he didn’t look fucking amazing, but telling him that word for word would very likely get to his head.

He slides his hand out from underneath yours to properly hold your hand now, leaning down to place his drink on the floor before he guides you to stand up from the bench you had been seated at. “Do you want do dance with me?” he asks once you both are standing.

“Calum, this is literally a sample of a Pink Floyd song and dialogue from Titanic,” you try to oppose, setting your own now empty glass on the bench where you had been sitting. Instead, he guides you into a twirl while he shrugs his own shoulders.

“I know what I said,” he continues, reaching for your other hand and pulling you in so that you both are standing with your elbows bent and your joined hands are level with his chest, so close that if you were to let go you could reach out and touch him, but you knew better than to give in so you kept them safely joined in his in the space between you both.

In the daytime, the gallery is lit up from the natural lighting that the skylights allow, but in the evening, the darkness casts an inky blue across the room, with just a little light coming from the moon and from the occasional spotlights that illuminate certain pieces of the artwork.

“You’re supposed to say that I look nice too, you know,” you playfully point out as Calum guides you both around in a circle in the empty gallery in front of the speakers. He grins down at you before he extends his arm and lets go of your hand to guide you into a twirl again. After he spins you around he doesn’t join both your hands again, and places his free hand on your waist to pull you just a touch closer than you were standing before.

“You know I always think you look nice,” he replies. ‘Nice’ isn’t the word he wants to use, he wants to use amazing, incredible, entrancing, beautiful, captivating, but just ‘nice’ will have to do for now. Distance must have made you both a little bolder, because this evening there seems to have been an unspoken, but mutually recognized tension between you two. Staring into his eyes is almost too intense, even more so once you catch him looking away to glance at your lips for a moment, so you look away yourself to admire another piece in the gallery across the room.

You notice you’ve been in the gallery for so long now that the track on the speakers has looped back to the beginning, when you hear the same scene from Pride and Prejudice playing again. “You have bewitched me, body and soul,” is the first line you notice has started playing back, and you notice as well that Calum has started to look around the room at the other art. You take the moment to admire how he looks in the shadows of the darkness, searching to see if he’s any different now than when you left him. His hair looks like it was recently cut a little shorter, and he’s gone back to black instead of a silvery blonde. You’ve always thought the contrast of the two reminded you of night and day, and now he’s gone back to night.

“You have bewitched me, body and soul,” repeats again, now mixed over the bridge of a Lana Del Rey song you both like. He notices the song and meets your gaze again. He almost asks why you’re staring, but lets it slide in hopes you’ll return the favor eventually and let him do the same someday without questions. This time he’s the one who notices your gaze down to his lips, seeing if his smile still starts on the same side of his mouth that you remember.

He inches his face just a little closer to yours, embracing the boldness he seems to have found in the time he was gone. “Hey,” he says softly in attempt to get your attention. Your eyes flash back up to his, and he notices how where you’re standing allows you to be lit up perfectly in the moonlight.

“Sorry to interrupt, but it’s unfortunately time to call it a night. Everything wrapped up downstairs a little while ago,” a security guard announces from the archway, causing you to both nearly jump out of your skin in surprise. “Okay, thank you,” Calum nods to the guard. He drops his hand from your waist and takes a few steps back to the bench to pick up your discarded cups. You reach for your clutch purse and hold it in both hands in front of you, following his lead back to the elevators once he asks if you’re ready.

He throws away the cups in a trashcan by the doors after pressing the call button, and shoves his hands into his pockets while you wait. When the doors open, he extends an arm in gesture for you to enter first, and he follows behind before pressing the button for the main floor. In the process, you notice the time on the silver watch on his wrist reads that it’s nearly 11:00 PM, meaning you and him must’ve been up there alone for nearly an hour and a half, and neither of you had realized. You press your back against the glass to try to ground yourself again after whatever that was between you that had just happened back upstairs. He doesn’t turn to you, and instead stays just a step ahead with his back facing you the entire short ride four floors down.

“Did you drive yourself or do you want a ride?” he asks as you two exit the building through the lobby. You both fall in step side by side across the courtyard outside. “Oh, no, it’s fine, I drove myself. Did you park in the deck across the street?” you ask in return.

“Yeah, I’m over in that one, Cora gave me a pass for a reserved spot on the first level with my invite, did she give one to you too?” he replies, referring to your friend who had invited you both in the first place, and ended up never seeing the entire night. You nod in reply as you both make your way to the crossing. You had thought for a moment upstairs he might’ve been about to kiss you or say something at least before you were interrupted, but if he was going to act like everything was normal, so were you.

As you make your way into the parking deck across the street, you notice your cars are both just a few spaces apart from each other. You both stop in the empty spaces between to say goodbye before going your separate ways. “Let me know when you want to get coffee at the bookstore again, it’s been too long since I’ve been able to go,” he says after a moment.

“I’m ready whenever you want to go! The girl who always rings us up was asking about you the last time I was there,” you tell him, which makes him smile. It’s always nice to hear the home misses him just as much as he misses home whenever he’s away.

After you get your keys out of your purse, he holds open his arms to wrap you in a hug before you go, and you step into the space you’ve missed so much while he was gone. You close your eyes as he buries his head against your neck, pulling you in for the most proper hug you’ve had in a long time. You don’t realize it at the time, but the last time you’ve felt so secure and safe while wrapped in someone’s arms was his own the last time you saw him at his house the day before he left for the airport.

“Get home safe,” he requests, rubbing his hand across your shoulders before he lets go. You still feel so electrified from whatever sort of trance you both must’ve fell under in front of the speakers earlier that you can’t let him leave before giving a quick, still friendly and as casual as you can make it kiss to his cheek before you step away from him. You tried to act as if was an old habit between you both, your usual routine whenever you part ways, but you’ve never kissed his cheek before, and you both know it no matter how hard you try to not acknowledge it. Once you’ve stepped back, he doesn’t know what to say, and all he can do is blink at you for a moment.

“Be safe, I’ll see you soon. Let me know once you get home,” he requests again in attempt to snap himself out of it while he takes a step backwards towards his own car. You nod and ask him to do the same, heading around to the driver’s side of your own car in the process. Once you’re both safely in your own cars, you give each other a quick wave from the window before you go your separate ways.

You were all he could think about while he was gone, and now that he’s back it seems that you’ll be all he thinks about while he’s home as well.

tag list: @yessii-i @rexorangecouny @calssunflower @notsooperfect @outofmylimitcal @ayee-style @madbomb

[universal-kitty]

Tell us about your PC, Aki!! They sound really cool, and I love D&D!

   [sLAMS MY HANDS ON THE TABLE] WELCOME TO a now split party, but a rad af tiefling and her even COOLER little brother.

   Meet Quinzy (and Carnon, to the left side!)!! (Art by the lovely @tiny-pastel-unicorn.)

   Quinzy is a tiefling barbarian who- much like her weapons- dances between a fine line of badass and princess. She loves her bow and flower crown, but her gladiator set, too. She’ll flirt as much as she’ll crave the fight, indulging in the bloodlust that had been encouraged by her demonic father. (A tall, blue demon my DM and bf ended up naming Avnas... Accidentally based him off of Castlevania’s Dracula, Naruto’s Madara Uchiha, and DMC’s Vergil tho, LMAO.)

   Her brother, Carnon... He’s more the sweetie of the troupe. Quinzy’s protective of him as all hell, but he’s STRONG. (Fighter class...and DM allowing him to be Stronk for the fun of it, bless him.) He can’t really read, doesn’t much like to, but he IS a little artist, drawing the group’s adventures as the days pass! Very much wants to make himself known to be his sister’s equal, too, since he doesn’t want to burden her with being weak and defenseless. (Despite the fact he has proficiency in Great weapons.....LMAO.)

   Full family story (plus art of the parents by the same artist!!) beneath the cut~!

   Meet Melita Valentina (the woman) and Avnas, the kid’s parents!! Avnas met Melita after a harsh fight with a blood hunter during a blizzard in her town. Thankfully, she had spotted him in the spotty darkness, forcing him to accept her help, healing him (with the aid of a friend’s potions), and eventually...the two falling in love.

   ...As it wasn’t quite a secret that Melita had a preference, and it certainly wasn’t in humans...!

   Quinzy was the first born... Born with wings, like her father. However, as she grew up and the teasing and harassment from the village kids got to her, she eventually ripped off her wings in an attempt to be more like them. Avnas took this as a sign of her strength, and began training her in various weaponry.

   Before too long, Carnon was born, though Avnas hadn’t been traveling for some time. He decided to leave them for a short while to fight more. Amass more power, and so he left.

   Unknown to him, however, is that Carnon’s horns had grown too soon. Deeply hurting Melita, though the pain wouldn’t become an issue until a month or two later. Her old friend’s potions kept her going for a time, but none had the power the old ones had; the one, for example, that had helped Avnas’ wound. She attempted to send Quinzy and Carnon for it, having staved off some of the ill effects of her injuries and infections... (Knowing the little boy til he was about 3.) However, when they came back?

   Melita had passed. Cold when they came back for her.

   They stuck around for a few months longer, avoiding the room her body lay in and eating up the food the best Quinzy could make of it. Only being forced to leave home when the villagers realized Melita hadn’t been seen or heard from in months and Avnas had been nowhere in sight, either. No sounds of training...

   The villagers burned their home down, Quinzy and Carnon taking their last, precious objects from home (a necklace Melita owned for Quinzy, and Carnon taking a toy his mother had altered for him; so it looked like a tiefling) before running away.

   Quinzy would make a few spare friends (in a brothel, of all places) steal food and money if it meant taking care of Carnon...and eventually, start fighting for money.

   This led her to the beginning of the campaign she started in, where the group would meet Carnon at the door to the underworld of Highwater (he wasn’t allowed down there), and meet Quinzy, the star fighter and the champion of a goblin-run fighting ring. Of course, the curiosity of new fights catches her ear...but considering a hasty shot by a guard caused Carnon harm?

   That goblin didn’t live much longer.

.:.:.

   Over my time playing as her, I got to learn a few things!!! First off... I’ll start with Her Song. The song that makes me think of her every time! Sweet but Psycho by Ava Max (and Youth by Glass Animals for Carnon).

   The energy... The “you’ll love her, but she’ll drive you crazy while you do”.... That’s Quinzy Energy. (And Youth? That’s pure “from Avnas/Quinzy to Carnon” right upfront. Right down to “feel your mother at your side / don’t you know you have my eyes?”) I have a whole WIP playlist for this family, but I’ll be real with ya.....most of it is Avnas pining music (he loved his wife; thus the comparison to Castlevania’s Dracula) and Quinzy’s erratic music tastes. Mostly because-

   Quinzy has HUGE self esteem issues. Being tiefling has always been something that’s bothered her, not that she acknowledges it any. LOTS of false bravado and ego boosting that’s just....empty, if you know her well enough. She’s hypersexual (though polite; if you’re uncomfortable by it, she won’t persist her flirting or sexual comments), but also lowkey repulsed by it....largely due to being exposed young (the brothel), her esteem issues, and events from the campaign. (Where her flirtations and attempts at getting the upper hand via seduction not only got her in trouble, but got her CHARMED by the Bad of the segment- nat 1 (her only nat 1 ever)- and got taken again.....but more forcefully and without her full control of the situation, shaking her up since the encounter.)

   All she wants to do is protect her brother, but during the events of that campaign, she ALSO found out about her dad’s cult. Which wasn’t a big idea until she saw him frail and missing his right eye. Wings gone. From what? Who knows.

   But what she does know is Carnon wouldn’t fight alongside him. Quinzy wouldn’t side with her father if it meant harming Carnon...and led to the first time she ever told him “no.” The daddy’s girl telling him no and the both of them realizing how far apart the other is for the first time in all of this mess.

   Quinzy, hoping her father would fix things.....and he’s essentially gone mad. The patient, honor-driven fighter is gone. Her father is gone and she’s lost. (A breakdown commenced for the first....I’d say 3 or 4 turns until she finally listened to Carnon and engaged, getting in two harsh hits before her attack rolls started slipping.)

   She’s still reeling from that. Last the campaign did, she was suddenly gaining feelings for the resident drow blood hunter, Jivan... The very blood hunter who’d given that wound to Avnas all those years ago. (The wound that was weakening him and driving him mad....but also the fact his wife was dead.)      (And yes, Quinzy likes them- typically- bigger than her, just as tough...older than her, and also has a preference for drow. Dunno where that came from, but she sure as hell does. Ah, on that note...... She’s pansexual.)

   Jivan was upsetting her for, well....existing. Pure, unfiltered emotion isn’t something Quinzy can quite handle. Despite the fact it’s what she used to sorely wish for. To be a badass, warrior princess and to fall in love with someone and be in love as much as Melita and Avnas were.

   A handsome drow shows up with his shit together, nose in a book a majority of the time (a nod to V from DMC5 by my bf, the DM), smooth lines, and a damn good fighter....and now she’s sick to her stomach. Warring with herself quietly. Something only Carnon sees.

   What’s left of a family, falling apart at the seams. And Quinzy, who can’t keep pulling it together by herself.

.:.:.

   WHEW, THAT WAS LONG, but um?? I hope you enjoyed reading this???? I know it’s super long, but I REALLY wanted to talk about all the stuff I keep thinking about regarding her and aaaaaaaa.........

   As a final note! I show you their dolls! They came in...a few days to a week ago from Apocalypse_Too and I adore them!! (Communication was horrible, tho.... Done quickly, but it was a NIGHTMARE to get in touch with them.) And combined with a LOVELY candle from @lemonyflicker (seriously, check them out; their stuff is SO GOOD I cannot praise this custom order I got enough), it makes for a wonderful set~!

   (Also note the lil Quinzy icon in her dice set; we were using those as our “figures” to map out placement. According to a weird, fourth wall breaking canon, Carnon drew them! That’s his art style!)

   ....Okay, ACTUAL last thing: Carnon doing art!!! This was the first page Carnon ever did for the campaign! We stan a little artist!!!!!!!