#indescribable . truly

[be-queer-do-arson]

Aftg is such a trip because like. The timing is objectively off. It's better that way. It's badly written but actually no it's not. Here's a whole new sport. We lied, its just lacrosse in a silly hat. Trauma galore. By all known laws of book tropes, the main couple should be toxic as hell. They're too cagey and paranoid and possessive not to be. But the main couple, not caring about trope law, creates the healthiest relationship ever written anyways. It's problematic as fuck. It's the best series ever. It's completely unrecommendable. It's gay, but not how you think it'll be in the first book. You'll hate it the first time you read it. Six months later you'll have a whole blog for it.

Aftg isn't a book, it's a fucking experience.

[uncanny-tranny]

I'm by no means recovered fully, but it genuinely feels so... freeing and exalting to be excited to eat, to look forward to a meal you're making. I can feel it changing my brain chemistry 💛

[goldensunset]

kingdom hearts is like ‘here’s a complex web of profound gentle loving platonic relationships between a bunch of tragic kids that are so deeply and divinely intimate that they’ll bring you to tears just thinking about them’ and people wonder why this story has such a chokehold on me

[visceravalentines]

u know the porn is high quality when you write "he makes an indescribable noise" and feel okay about that

[bittershins]

Rough record of WKCR report beginning ~9 pm

absolutely no guarantee of verbatim work here - I do not type fast on my phone and the stream was a bit choppy, so there are more than a few gaps. Thank you so much to the folks at WKCR for their brave work this evening.

[waugh-bao]

what’s the lore about voodoo 👀

@agentidiot 1993-5 was…wild.

The origin of the album, according to Charlie:

“We spent three months there [in Barbados]. Mick and Keith were there first and then I joined them and we just played. So by the time we got into the recording studio, we could play something and you'd go, ‘Oh, I remember that... I did this and that on it.’ You're already a third of a way to getting it together by doing that."

Which all sounds pretty benign, they’ve done albums in a particular place away from the UK pretty much since Exile. But the outtakes from those sessions are downright insane (so much so that I can only mention a handful here, there are many more I didn’t even have room for).

Probably best example of this is a song called “Alteration Boogie.” It’s 5 straight minutes of Keith singing about Charlie’s clothes and his body, which starts out with him making fun of how old fashioned his taste in tailoring is (in a very detailed way) and ends with two comments about Charlie’s ass and a comment about how “cute” he looks in blue.

Then there’s “Sparks Will Fly.” That song actually did make it to the album, but in a radically different form than it started out. So Keith wrote it:

“We had a big bonfire going one night out in Ronnie’s garden. I was throwing all these logs on it, and these sparks started flying. I started running backto the studio – ‘I’ve got one! Incoming!’ Charlie was the only guy there, and he and I played the thing. “

And he and Charlie were the only two who worked on it until it was completed:

"Sparks Will Fly was actually eyeball-to-eyeball with Charlie Watts more than anybody to start with, because we would not let anybody else play on it until we'd honed down that rhythm track thing dead right. You know, it was like, three's a crowd for a minute, until we'd worked it out. And then we let everybody else in. It all has to do with the rhythm and the guitar, and after that the rest of it fell into place. Charlie's laying down the law on that one. You've got to know a guy so well to play that tight together. It's unspoken, because it's all going by in front of you in 3 seconds."

The lyrics of that song, especially when you consider the context in which it was written, are somehow maybe even more crazy (and suspicious) than “Alteration Boogie.”

Mick ended up completely overhauling the lyrics, but his weren’t any better. Of particular note at the time was his decision to include the line “I’m gonna fuck your sweet ass”, which he claimed after the fact he didn’t even remember doing.

Oh yeah, and Keith’s thing about Charlie “laying down the law” was pretty literal. Charlie was playing him every night during album recording and rehearsals to the point of actually being on his knees, which Keith bragged to the press about.

“According to Don Was [their producer], Charlie was the driving force behind these rehearsals. They started each night around 10 p.m. and finished 10 or 12 hours later, whenever Keith collapsed, but Charlie was still going strong.”

“To me, it was all tied in with Charlie. If Charlie Watts is willing to experiment in the studio, then I’m the happiest man in the world.”

Coincidentally, Keith was also very eager to tell everyone about Mick’s private practice sessions with Charlie (who also bragged himself about his closeness to the drummer in this period and some of the songs they collaborated on):

“The more that Mick plays [the harmonica], the more differently he sings. Suddenly he starts to sing the way he's playing the harp, phrasing differently, instead of thinking of it as two separate entities, you know...And he played all year. He would do 2 hours a day with Charlie just playing harp, before we'd even come into rehearsal or whatever. And I can hear it paying off a lot in his singing too.”

And another one of the songs which made it onto the album, “Suck on The Jugular”, which Keith was dying to credit to Charlie (he literally credits Charlie with the success of every song on this album):

“Mr Watts again. I mean, it's all drums. The arrangement is all to do with the drums. Charlie laid down that beat and I said, 'Well, if you can keep that up for several minutes, we've got a track! 'Hey, no problem? And he always makes it look like it isn't.”

Has these lyrics:

The fun didn’t stop when they finished the album, though.

They made a music video for the song “I Go Wild” which can only be described as steampunk Marie Antoinette meets geriatric gay BDSM. (Mick is literally in some kind of chain link sex swing for part of it, Keith seems to have a gag in his mouth at point, and they’re both dancing around Charlie. He even goes so far as to bend down in front of the kit and mimic giving oral s*x).

The band has since disowned the video, it appears on none of their official sites or YouTube channel, but you can find it here.

In the interviews which surrounded the actual Voodoo Tour, Keith was very adamant about how close the “trio” were and how much they were enjoying each other’s company:

“Even when we’re not touring or recording we stay in touch. We’re all so close - like a family. In fact, we’re probably closer than a lot of families are.”

There was a video game released on CD-ROM to support the tour, which includes a section where the player enters a bathroom where Keith makes a variety of sexual comments, screams, and then comments on Charlie “peaking”: here.

A documentary about the album and tour made by MTV has also since been memory holed and only promos for it can be found any longer.

Other than that, I suppose I should mention that this was also the era of Keith kissing Charlie on stage and both of them giving him flowers:

As well as the return of the “nipple pincher” bit:

But, more than anything, it was truly a period, despite occasional disagreements, of real closeness and sweetness between those three:

[swiftlydnp]

something about "it's so important to just find someone you can be that compatible with" and "it's quite important to have someone in your life where you can be like 'yeah, we're pretty weird' "

[kikizoshi]

I came across the realisation that Nikolai's motivation to kill Fyodor, as we understand it now, isn't compelling. I think that's my biggest issue with him. There are all these fanfics about it, and yet the one I've read where Fyodor's death is compelling, Nikolai hasn't ever even thought of killing him and doesn't want him to die (and yes, I'm including my fics with Fyodor's death in the "not compelling" category).

So, I tried to reframe it, taking some of my current experiences and what I know about Gogol, and I think I may have figured something out: Nikolai's core motivation right now could be to escape from reality.

This could be foreshadowed earlier on with things like a distaste for factually accurate (read: dull) stories, a love for acting and exaggerated impressions, and an aversion to talking issues out in his personal relationships.

But now it's worse, and has grown to an extent where he can't stand anything--he just wants to escape everything, but he can't. (This change would be brought about by some sort of terrible or tragic event--something that makes all his flawed coping mechanisms collapse entirely in a way they never have before. In my story, it's Fyodor disappearing and Nikolai finally giving up hope that he still lived. Anything awful enough would probably work, but I think a lot of care needs to be put into exactly what is the thing that pushes Nikolai over the edge--it says a lot about what he values.)

I visualise his wanting to escape reality with Stanzcyk (the Polish painting). Nikolai is the jester, but desperately wishes he could be carefree like the celebrating nobles in the background. But he can't. No matter what, no matter how he tries, he can't escape reality, and so he does the next best thing: he does the unthinkable. He becomes what any normal person can't even fathom, does what any sane man couldn't, and desperately tries to lose himself in it. (In my story, this is a worse version of what's already occurred: a few years ago, Nikolai became an actor in hopes of losing his misery to the stage, but when that failed and he became suicidal, Fyodor helped him pull through. Now, Nikolai tries to lose himself in a much more involved and self-destructive way (notably still through acting), and Fyodor, though much more negatively now, is still the force that's keeping him alive.)

At first, he may have even deluded himself into thinking he'd somewhat succeeded in losing himself, but then Fyodor makes his "in opposition to God" comment, and Nikolai is at once violently dragged back into himself. It's a wonderful feeling to be understood, yet terrible, because as long as such an anchor exists, he can never escape (bonus points if in a backstory fic, Fyodor being Nikolai's anchor to reality was a positive in their relationship, creating a contrast here).

And so now, every time he thinks about wanting to share a thought or idea with Fyodor, the only person with whom he can genuinely converse, he first gets a nice feeling at the thought, then falls into despair at the thought of losing that connection (Fyodor is constantly putting himself in mortal danger, and as much as Nikolai believes in him, it also makes sense to me that he'd be worried out of his mind at times), anger that his emotions still control him, and this reinforces his feelings of needing to escape. It's a constant merry-go-round of love and misery, and he just wants to be on stable ground, essentially.

And I think if I do that, it starts to be compelling. It's not quite there, let alone polished, but it's a lot farther than I've gotten before. And 'Arcane' story analyses are really helping me with contrast, callbacks and foreshadowing.

[selenealwayscries]

This transition caught me so off guard I actually screamed out loud irl

[romansmartini]

can you fucking grow up and post rpf with me

[itsokbbygrl]

Shoutout to Han @swiftispunk for entertaining my live ramblings as I watched Saltburn (and for reminding me to watch it with the posts on my dash) 🫡

[volivolition]

I say this in the most loving way possible, how the fuck can you write the most expressive and magical tags ever?? How do you have the mental energy to form words? 50% I can only say "nice post op". You inspire me to spread positivity to everyone but I literally can't be this positive and kind all the time. Just want to send you love and know that I appreciate you <3

HKJGH AW RED!! :'] <3 it does take a lot of energy, i understand :'0 i keep a lot of cool art in my tumblr drafts. the art stays in there until i have energy to type all my thoughts out. a lot of things stay stuck in there… i try to make sure art from my friends get out soon though :0 don't feel bad if you can't type a lot!! anything you can manage is okay! no one can be positive and kind all the time, and that's normal! just do what you can. i promise it's enough. (<- these are things i need to remind myself too <3)

a lot of it is literally just me needing to scream hkjfh, i have a lot of thoughts and i love sharing them always. i love rambling, can you tell? (<- joke) also i have a lot of love to give and i love artists and their creations. like WOW someone made a thing!! and they wanted to share it with the world!! AND I GET TO SEE IT!!! i GOTTA tell them i enjoy it!!!!!

it's also my empathy acting up because im also an artist!! and he's like "hey!! you love people writing nice tags on *your* art!! imagine if you were this artist, wouldn't you be happy to see someone tagging it with nice things? :)!" and im like yeah!! if this makes me happy, i should make other people happy too :3

ANYWAY I APPRECIATE YOU TOO RED YOU'RE DEAR TO ME!! SENDING LOVE BACK!!!! <33

[secretstartrekblog]

i mean yeah you could be a crabby purist about media you claim to love but it’s actually much more fun to just admit that new trek (AOS, discovery, strange new worlds, etc) does in fact go hard as fuck <3

[losangelesvalorant]

I really do think Winston’s kit in ow1 was perfect like there was absolutely nothing to improve upon. But team 4 managed to do it anyway by giving him a fucking sniper shot

[wire-smith]

About twenty minutes before totality. Taken with my phone camera through eclipse glasses after a lot of messing around with the settings.

I don't have any photos from totality itself because I was too busy waving my arms like a loon and saying "oh my god, look at it"

[bunmurdock]

i meed to see his cock and balls once