#is that so fucking wrong??????

[disconnected-dragon]

beyond the spiderverse speculation/unhinged babbling that i hope is true

okay fam just got out of the Across the Spiderverse theater and I have-- a few theories. Well-- more like hopeful speculation that gets more and more outlandish as we go out, so-- please bear with me for a couple paragraphs. Spoilers under the cut.

Okay this is heavily based on assumptions and logic and what I personally noticed from the movie and how I personally think the Spider-Verse runs on, so please bear the hell with me.

I think Miguel’s canon theory is incorrect and that the multiverse has ways of self balancing itself because of Miles’ self correction. He had canon events like the death of Uncle Aaron, IE his Uncle Ben moment. It’s also established that it’s possible for multiverses to exist without canon events/canon events can be tweaked, such as Gwen’s dad quitting, and Mayday existing. It's also implied that if there's a Spider-Vacuum, so to speak, that universe will seek to fill it. Like Miles getting bitten to cover for Peter Parker's death. Ik this theory also works in reverse, like if there's too many Spider-People from one universe, one of them is going to die. But it also assumes the existence of Spider-Vacuum, because of all the Spider-People get bitten at the right time/place. If a universe needs a Spider-Person/will need a Spider-Person, someone's getting bit.

So if it's established that the multiverse can self-regulate itself, then it follows that Earth 42 needs a Spider-Person and that the multiverse/his universe is currently acting to try to fill that Spider-Person vacuum. You can argue that The Prowler is technically this universe's Spider-Person, but if we're going by what seems to be the multiverse's logic AND NOT MIGUEL'S-- that being someone needs to get bit by a radioactive spider and become a "hero" so to speak-- and someone from Earth 42 is gonna have to get bit.

IE-- Prowler Miles.

This is speculation held together by duct tape, spit, and prayers, but I think that due to the timey wimey multiversality, etc etc, kinda bullshit shenanigans of the next movie, Earth 42 Miles is gonna get bit by a radioactive spider, maybe have his canon event of Uncle Aaron dying (big emphasis on maybe there because the death his dad can act as both canon events and its established they can be tweaked), and take up the mantle of Spider-Man. Albeit more of an antihero, and influenced by Uncle Aaron. Because his neighborhood is not friendly and they need a tougher Spider-Man.

Think abt it, if Miles WAS supposed to be Spider-Man in his universe AND in Earth 42, it makes sense that Prowler Miles would eventually get bit, even if it takes more time then usual. He ALSO HAS the canon events of Uncle Ben/the police captain (just consolidated into one person-- hey tweaked canon event!), and there's a Spider-Man vacuum in his home universe. It would also back up the idea that Miguel's idea is wrong, because the universe fixed its "mistake" and solved the "anomaly" by itself. It's proof that the multiverse doesn't need a Spider-Cop for the rest of the Spider-People, and he needs to take a goddamn chill pill and let the Miles Moraleses do their thing.

Hell, maybe these dimensional rifts in the first place are the multiverses' attempts to self-regulate and get a radioactive spider into Earth 42, but Miguel keeps fucking it up and that's why Spot was created. To FORCE Earth 42 Miles into the wider multiverse AND GET HIM BIT whether he wants to be bit or not. This last paragraph is probably not true at ALL-- but i wanted to throw it out there because I don't believe in consistency, like Hobie.

Plus an antihero Spider-Man that's taken some hits/had some bad influences in his life would reinforce the idea that "anyone can wear the mask". Sure, Miles G Morales was the Prowler, and he made some bad choices. His methods are unorthodox even by Spider-Person standards. But he's still Spider-Man, and that mask is his regardless of how it got there. Just like it belongs to OG Miles as well. So c'mon people, let's do this one last time--

TL;DR: Prowler Miles is a late bloomer Spider-Man and is gonna totally own Miguel with multiversal facts and logic.

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[pencilmint]

Sunset in Shinjuku

[shift-shaping]

God I forgot what an absolute lunatic blackwall is

Man is just out in the hinterlands cosplaying. Like replaying the game knowing Solas is the Dread Wolf adds all this cool intrigue and double meaning but replaying it knowing about Blackwall is fucking wild. He looks you in the face and lies directly out of his ass. Solas is all doublespeak and careful omission and Blackwall just fully makes shit up. What a madlad. I'm obsessed with him. he's so fake it til you make it. He would kill it on TikTok just like "oh yeah grey wardens can't get COVID it's right here in the treaties" and no one calls him on it because the treaties are old as fuck and boring. Alistair (who is supposed to be able to sense the Blight) is like oh hey blackwall haha we've definitely met I totally remember you. No you Haven't, Alistair. You've never seen this jackass ever in your life. He looks Solas, god of betrayal, in the eyes and says with full confidence "Yes, I am a Grey Warden." And Solas is like Sure. Iron Bull? Buys his bullshit completely. Leliana? Thinks he's cool. Everyone else is like "you smell like shit but I guess that's just how Wardens smell" and he's like "Damn Right It Is Have I Told You My Vietnam Stories" guy was born in '68. You can flirt with him almost immediately. Character of all time. What the fuck.

[blu-ish]

So.. uh, Sonic X Shadow generations huh?

[clownowo]

been replaying the Portal series I think this is where its heading

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[rogueshadeaux]

“I hate the script, the vault dwellers sound so cheesy—“ my Brother in Steel you realize that’s the point, right? They were bred to act like the physical embodiment of an HR e-mail. Did you not catch the memo that Vault-Tec put out regarding their experiment facilities?

[giantkillerjack]

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

[stellarspecter]

@pscentral event 20: antagonists ↳ THE LORDS IN BLACK in NERDY PRUDES MUST DIE

[lxvvie]

fuck nasty!Ghost who shows you how much he misses you.

You were out running errands, leaving Simon, home from his latest deployment, to his own devices. All was going well—so you thought—until you heard the telltale ping of your phone and saw that he had texted you.

Simon probably needed you to pick something up for him on the way home. Mm. Doable. You opened the text under that innocent assumption.

And you know what they say about making assumptions.

Because right there in front of your very eyes was a picture of underwear. Your underwear. Your favorite pair of underwear. Your favorite pair of underwear you'd been searching for while you were getting dressed this morning.

They were covered in cum. Simon's cum.

You receive another text not even a second later: Miss you, sweetheart.

It was a miracle you didn't drop your phone.

[lotus-pear]

lore accurate teen soukoku. the worsties ever

[incredubious]

same old, same old

[ print available here ! ]

[clouvu]

Nothing in the world belongs to me But my love, mine, all mine

[ceilidho]

soap developing an unhealthy attachment to his therapist post his brush with death after being shot at point blank range. he was reluctant to see a therapist at first because he didn't like what it said about him that he was being more or less strong armed into seeing a shrink (like no one trusts him anymore; they don't think his head's on straight since being shot), but as time goes on, he grows to cherish the relationship he's cultivated with his therapist because,

well,

she understands him. she listens to him. where everyone else seems to want him to just hurry up and get better (the nightmares, the mid-sentence brain fog, the erratic mood swings, the silent brooding when he can't find the words, aphasia on the tip of his tongue, the constant, constant headaches and auditory hallucinations that he can't seem to kick), she doesn't put any pressure on him to heal right away. she works with him and his medical team; gives him the space to process what happened to him, and has a seemingly bottomless wealth of patience for him.

he can talk for hours in her presence. it's a shame their time together is limited to an hour and a half every week. the dulcet sound of her voice is such a comfort to him. it's a shame she politely but firmly rejects his advances when he finally asks her out, tells him that it wouldn't even be appropriate for them to be friends outside of his sessions. that it would in some way hinder his healing journey. which pisses him off because Soap has progressed in leaps and bounds since those early days when he used to stumble over his words sitting on the couch across from her, head in his hands when the language felt beyond his grasp, a fine tremor still running through his hands that he's since managed to contain,

and

his head is throbbing again. a sharp pain above his eye that pulsates like a drum in his head and -

he thinks about her constantly. in and out of sessions. she's a frequent topic of conversation when the brass finally lets him back out in the field, Makarov finally dealt with (resting six feet deep in an unmarked grave). he ignores the looks oscillating between concern and worry that Price gives him. ignores the way Ghost barks at him to quit bothering the bird in the tight skirt and fuck someone that won't get him discharged. ignores the way Gaz pulls him to the side to ask if maybe he needs to see another therapist, y'know, mate...get some distance.

they act like this is something new. an abberation and not his very nature. like he hasn't always been the type to lock onto a scent like a hunting dog. a sniper by training. he sits and he watches and he waits; waits for the right moment that he alone knows.

it comes to him on an inauspicious day, when he's leaving the training facilities and spots his sweet thing rummaging around in the boot of her car, her ass beckoning him forward like a siren's call. now, now, now, the little itch in his head says, the voice that knows when the time is right. it's a sense acquired through conscious and unconscious observation, letting it all filter into his frontal cortex until he knows without knowing that the parking lot is empty apart from the two of them and the men at the base gates half a mile away.

it would take nothing for him to come up behind her and push her into the boot. nothing to wrestle the purse from her hands and slam the trunk shut. nothing to drive off base with a flick of his fingers to the guards that hardly ever bother to question him before he leaves (though they know what car he actually drives), made complacent by familiarity.

and he knows that it's wrong, knows that there's a line that he shouldn't cross, that choices have consequences, but,

his mouth salivates when her hips twitch, the urge to take settling over him. surely they'd forgive him one indiscretion.

[p4nishers]

i cant get over the ball being so CLEARLY all for crowley i can't get over aziraphale trying to woo him with a WHOLE FUCKING BALL because that's what he knows that's what romance IS for him because he's been wanting to dance with crowley ever since dancing was invented and he's so stuck in time with the way he dresses and talks and he still thinks a dance is the high of romance AND HE MADE A WHOLE ENTIRE FUCKING BALL FOR CROWLEY JUST SO HE COULD DANCE WITH HIM like now it's so fucking obvious he gave away his BOOKS without a second thought and it was all for crowley he organised a whole JANE AUSTEN THEME BALL just so he could have an excuse to finally dance with the love of his life and i can't get over this i'm shaking my fists and pacing up and down he did not give a single fuck about anything other than dancing with crowley and HE BARELY TOUCHED OTHER PEOPLE'S HANDS WHILE HIS WHOLE FUCKING PALM WAS PRESSED TO CROWLEY'S AND i need to lie down