#it isn't very bad nowadays

[ace-and-ranty]

So I just recently quit a job.

It was relatively chill, with pretty good pay for the amount of work involved. But see, before that job, I've scheduled my own work hours for every job I've ever had. Since I worked mainly translation, well, clients don't care when you're sat down in front of the computer working, as long as they get things by deadline.

The fact that this job had specific working hours, during which I was expected to have my butt sat at the computer, was driving me insane.

It gave me the kind of low-level but constant anxiety that is the bane of my existence. It's the kind of anxiety where I cannot disconnect, I cannot relax, because I know in X hours I need to be at the job, and I hated it so much I, an extremely non-confrontational people pleaser, scrapped together the gumption to quit.

Why am I telling you all of this. You wonder. Well. Because for years now I have wondered, on and off, if maybe, perhaps, I'm like, a little bit autistic? I feel insane, in that I don't relate to a lot of the struggles autistic people often mention, but I feel just weird enough, just a-bit-to-the-left enough that I don't feel neurotypical, and I don't know what's going on there.

And well, one of the struggles I never connected to is "need for routine" because hum, no, actually, I've never really felt the need for a lot of routine. But oh? What's this? Now there's an expectation for how I gotta use my time, so my schedule is out of my control? And it's making me itch out of my fucking skin? How curious??

All to say, yeah, I don't know what's going on under the hood. But thank God for flexible working hours.

[inkly-heart]

Do you have a group discord server? If others want to chill and interact with you. Just wondering

That aside just hoping you’re doing okay Blastic. Still, if you’re not your gotta a lot people care about you.

I look forward to seeing how the rest of the game goofs.

—goofball anon

I don't and sadly I don't think I will make one. It would be fun to interact with people who enjoys my work and wants to chat with me but I just feel it would be too much work for me to handle a discord server. So at least for now I'm not planning to make one.

[redhoodsbf]

man, i don't think I'll ever be able to fully enjoy the imagine side of the selfship community again.

[simptasia]

my 2023 highlights are becoming a D&D player, getting my special temple blessings done and developing a pepsi addiction

[gender-trash]

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

[lexyeevee]

it's wild to see myhouse having escaped the orbit of Doom People, because so much of it specifically riffs on doom in a way that is laser-targeted at Doom People, to the point that i just wouldn't have expected it to be nearly as interesting if you don't pick up on that stuff

right from the outset, "my house" is even a recognizable genre, because doom was among the first approachable platforms for creating a 3D space, and if you give random people the ability to create a 3D space then many of them will just try to recreate their own house. (i want to say jp lebreton even made an effort to play through every house map on the idgames archive at one point, though hell if i can find it now.) there was in fact already a "myhouse.wad", from 1995!

frankly it's incredible that someone (or someones) put so much effort into this map and then had the gall to simply post it on doomworld as "myhouse.wad", because that is a thread title that guarantees the fewest possible people will bother to look. there are posts in the thread where people outright admit that they only checked because they were surprised how many replies a "my house" wad got.

so anyway, okay, the "classic" doom wad experience is that you download a wad, it contains exactly 1 map, and it has zero custom textures or music or other frills. most wads from the 90s are like this; if you're lucky you might get a bad midi rendition of a metallica song. nowadays there are texture artists and musicians and everything collaborating on full map packs, but "just a map" is still kind of the default mapping experience and is recognizable to anyone who's been around doom for sufficiently long.

and myhouse riffs on absolutely every aspect of this:

• the music is the MAP01 music, Running From Evil, which is just the music you get if you supply your own map in the MAP01 slot and do nothing else. so a ton of 90s maps had this same track as their background music, so everyone has heard it a zillion times. it is ingrained into so many people's skulls. subtly fucking with it is a great way to fuck with the player

• the house uses only stock doom 2 textures, or occasionally light modifications of them. again this is just what you get if you make a map and don't supply any other resources, so the stock textures are very familiar. only later, with sufficient poking around, does the map introduce new textures, which really help sell the impression of being swept away to Somewhere Else

• if you take the exit, you go to MAP02, Underhalls. this is the expected experience because doom wads replace what's already there — you're not really supplying a "new map pack" or anything, you're overwriting a map from the original doom 2 progression. (there are ways to fiddle with this now, but in vanilla doom 2, the level progression was hardcoded.) so the "ending" of a no-frills single-map wad is always, always to transition to Underhalls. the opening shot of Underhalls is practically like seeing the credits. so roping Underhalls into the experience is completely unexpected, because Underhalls is the sign that you've escaped back to regular doom

• the super shotgun is "hidden" in Underhalls, in probably the best-known super shotgun location in the whole game, because it's the first time you can get it

• incidentally Underhalls itself feels uncanny, because the player camera height is higher than usual to make the house's proportions feel sensible. (part of the trouble with exact recreations of real spaces in doom is that the camera is weirdly low.) i was actually convinced that myhouse included a modified Underhalls, but no, it's stock doom 2 Underhalls, it just feels off when you're slightly taller

but wait, there's more

• silent teleporters are a feature from boom, a very early doom derivative that added a number of helpful mapping features and is basically considered only half a step beyond vanilla. so shifting between two versions of a space without interruption isn't completely unexpected. it's only later that the portal use becomes more obvious

• although if you're especially canny, you should notice that the second version of the house shows both the upstairs and downstairs windows in full, which is impossible — doom cannot do room-over-room. (in fact this is accomplished with a semi-obscure zdoom feature called sector portals — essentially, the whole second floor and the space outside it are a separate area, and the "ceiling" of the yard becomes a view up through the "floor" of that second space.)

• swinging doors are a hexen feature (polyobjects) that gzdoom inherited. (heretic and hexen were modifications of the doom engine, and zdoom started out as a merge of all three codebases into something that could play all three games.) they might also be in other fancy engines (eternity?), but they are very distinctly not a doom thing. if you're deeply familiar with doom's limitations then they'll jump out at you immediately, but if you're looking at doom like it's any old 3D game then maybe not so much

• recreations of other humble real-world locales are also a somewhat common theme, and remind me in particular of Doom City, from way back in 1995

• a very common desire for players is to "uv-max" a map, i.e. reach the exit on ultra-violence with 100% kills and secrets. if you can't do this, the map is (reasonably) considered broken. it is comically impossible to do this in myhouse, and anyone with the skill to create the map would be acutely aware of this

• the extra weapon frames look to be borrowed from the well-known smooth doom, which adds extra frames for everything and is just pretty dang slick overall. so it's not merely "ho ho, got you, smoother weapons" but specific integration of another familiar project

• this might be reaching a bit, but mirrors are specifically a nightmare in zdoom's software renderer because they work by rendering all visible geometry as if it were physically present on the other side of the mirror — and if there be any actual geometry back there, it will also get rendered and you will have a big fucking mess. so a mirror in the middle of a room is a laughable idea. this is somewhat less of a concern now that the hardware renderer is basically the default, but it's still a spectre looming over the very concept of mirrors, so the way mirrors play out in myhouse is very funny to me

there's probably more, like, the way it intercepts noclip is a stroke of genius and not something i've ever seen done before. but i hope you get the idea

[cussima]

IM GONNA TALK ABOUT ITTTT

my first shift story time <3

(w pics lmao)

I have absolutely no idea how i woke up last night but I thought of my dr sp and i was sooo up to seeing him i decided i was going to shift.

and i did.

there was no method there was nothing 😭 i simply decided I'd be in a reality with him and i woke up in a university dorm after a morning nap

ᯓ ♡ i did realize one thing: every time i had tried to shift before i had been so concentrated on my body.

so i got up, i knew i had had a class before that and i was going to have another one soon. It was almost noon (checked on a clock) and i had another class fairly soon but i had 1 job: finding this man.

so i walked through the whole university looking for the head master's room (idk what they're called in english 😭) to find a list with all the student's names for that year and try to find his name (yk like psychos do) (under the reasoning that if he goes to the school then i can find him so yk just STALKING like a mad woman) (it was also that awkward time before the technology boom, a few printers but no proper computers like we have now so i figured most things would be saved on paper and I'd have to open every drawer and bla bla bla i was full on detective mode) but the head master's office wasn't empty 😭 (idk why i assumed it would be) so i very awkwardly asked one of the teachers there if i could see the list (after small talk and when she asked why i wanted to see it i had to be like "yeah.. i just want to check something really quick:)" and they agreed, which felt SO WRONG to me because isn't knowing that information like illegal nowadays idk) and when i was going into the office to look for it I saw my dr sp walk out another room and we made eye contact

it could be because i'm down bad but it was so intense (he has a very intense gaze actually lmao) and i just got the most violent butterflies in my stomach he was SO MUCH TALLER THAN ME and he had the cutest eyes and his hair was soso messy it was hilarious. I knew that we had seen each other on campus like that a lot, but we had never had a proper talk (i just knew) and after all that i had to PRETEND like i still had to check the list so i went into the damn information office and went through the papers super quickly and pretended like i had checked whatever i wanted to check

(me reading that goddamn list) after that i was pretty sure i was late to class but i hadn't shifted to go to class i had shifted to see my dr sp and i did so i just shifted back

ANYWAYS THAT'S IT

[beforetimes]

if there's one thing that can be said about peter maximoff, it's that he's always got his ear to the ground when it comes to gossiping. it's like, his thing by now. if anyone wanted to hide their secrets from him they'd be fresh out of luck because despite how much he darts around and lets himself trail off sentences in the middle of them to zip off and do something else because he got tired of slowing himself down in the middle of it, he is surprisingly good at being quiet when he needs to and being at the right place at the right time. he has a very good record when it comes to this stuff, so he knows it's not bullshit when he's figured out that his dad—which, like, wow, his dad?—is in the dating scene. he knows it. what's more of a surprise is that he's gotten all strung up with charles xavier, of all people.

which, like, peter doesn't hate the guy. he doesn't! he was just under the impression that ten years ago—wow, ten years really fly when you really think about it, that day feels like forever ago and yesterday at the same time—that charles and erik hated each other. so he guesses he missed the memo where they kissed and made up after punches were thrown in the pentagon's elevator by a drenched, half-sober man who looked like he would laser erik to death with his eyes the way scott tries to do to peter about four times a week without even taking off his glasses in case he'd accidentally make it stick. though he couldn't, because, like. peter is very fast. duh.

so. the evidence behind his claims goes as follows (of course he collected evidence, peter says to ororo, affronted, when she asks if he even had proof. what was he, an ameteur?):

1. erik keeps taking lunch breaks.

it's not like he didn't before but he was definitely less likely to. when they were rebuilding the x-mansion after it blew up and he was their heaviest lifter, it would be rare to peel him away from all the construction. erik was actually weirdly good at building, which peter didn't really expect for some reason because he was always under the impression all the guy did was like. terrorize people. or kill them. or twist spoons into pretzels just because he could. but no, nowadays he's been taking more lunch breaks than ever and it's a very pointed difference, even though they've already finished construction a few months ago and erik didn't really have a reason to stay. unless the reason to stay was so he could be with charles! (scott stares at him with that unimpressed, laser-eyes look again so peter flips him off and continues past the sputtering).

2. he's also like, weirdly nice now?

which isn't to say that peter didn't think terrorists couldn't be nice. which sounds bad but erik might be the one exception. anyway, when peter saved him about a decade ago he remembered the guy being kind of an asshole when he met up with charles for the first time and yes he knows that it puts a damper on his dating theory, jean, but he's not done yet so wait a second. anyway, he was less of an asshole when he came back to help fix the mansion after trying to kill the whole world so peter guessed he kind of swings on a pendulum between good and evil and whatever they get on that day is like the worlds most important and demented coin flip. that's besides the point. so when he was back here to help fix things up he stayed out of everyone's way and he wouldn't do much to bother anyone because in peter's opinion erik didn't want to scare the little kids who knew of his reputation even if they didn't know his face. but, like, now he's been here a while it's like a complete 180. peter caught him teaching a seven year old how to tie his shoes the other day. a thirteen year old shortstack was rocking back and forth on her heels while erik got her a book from one of the higher shelves of the mansions newly refurbished library (who knew that once you saved the world there would be at least one or two places willing to donate books on top of charles' infinite wealth?). it was like stepping into the twilight zone. but it was real. like, peter saw the hint of a real smile on erik's face one time when he saw the man looking over the grassy field of the school. it freaked him out a bit.

3. charles knows how erik takes his coffee

this is admittedly one of his weaker arguments from the lead-in, peter concedes when he gets blank stares from storm, jean, scott, and kurt. like, even kurt! he didn't think that was a look he could pull from that kid. anyway, peter says that it's pretty damn obvious that erik has a whole thing when it comes to charles being in his head. he's heard from someone who heard from a friend who eavesdropped on a teacher who overheard charles and raven after a faculty meeting that the helmet erik wore all the damn time when he was evil was to keep charles from getting into his head. which explains a lot. anyway erik has a complex about charles getting in his head. but he doesn't wear the helmet now and peter heard charles one morning when he was getting ready to start the day off by eating at least two and a half boxes of poptarts. he heard the man say something like coffee? and he heard erik reply with a hum and charles went how dyou want it and erik said don't you know already? and peter had peered in then and seen erik gesture to his head. and he wasn't defensive about it at all and charles had this really weird look on his face that peter spend a few seconds examining in hyperspeed before getting away from the whole thing because the vibes were so weird. but yeah. erik let charles into his head just for some coffee after spending like two decades trying to keep charles out of his head. which has to mean something (and peter knows he's hooked them now because even scott is leaning in like he's interested and that kid would pretend he had a ticklish throat and needed a water bottle more than anyone else in the immediate vicinity if peter was on fire in front of him).

4. all the chess boards

like, they're all over the place. it's excessive. there's a different game set up in the library, on a table in the garden, on charles' desk in his office, on erik's desk in his office and his bedroom. and no one touches them because no one likes fucking chess except for cute little ten year old jenny because her grandfather taught her before she accidentally turned his house into clouds and seventeen year old thomas who's a prick because he thinks he's more distinguished than anyone ever because he came all the way over from europe or whatever the fuck and peter can't see either of them sitting down to play one game, let alone multiple. and he knows chess is charles and erik's thing because he saw the board in erik's room one time—(you were in his room? ororo asks with a very deep look and peter nods and goes yeah we've been bonding lately but it's kind of one sided because it's more like me showing up and him tolerating me until i leave but like it's progress!)—and peter asked before erik could get a chance to politely kick him out and erik actually paused and told him that chess was a shared hobby of theirs from a few years back and get this, peter says conspiratorially, leaning forward as the rest follow suit. he smiled. like a full on real smile with teeth. and peter was so taken aback he was like that's sweet man and then left before he could be kicked out. and now he knows that the only people who play chess in this mansion are dickhead european thomas and sweet little jenny and charles and erik, all the games all over the place have to be charles and erik's which means they spend a lot more time together than he thought before. and they plan to spend it together because a lot of these games are half finished, like they leave and come back every few days depending on how much free time either of them have. (and now everyone looks thoroughly hooked because the evidence peter brings is good because peter is a hell of a gossip, dammit. he won't have people questioning his skills when it comes to this. he was made to be at old little women's tea parties where they talk about their evil husbands doing war crimes. that's what he guesses goes on there, anyway, considering his first gossip session with his mom went that way)

5. charles is happier now

and jean frowns at this one right off the bat but no one really says anything because the way peter said it was soft and kind of less jokey than the rest of his tirade. because it was something he wasn't really expecting? because charles wasn't sad per se, he was always happy in front of the kids and he didn't try to drag them down with his own moods and ever since the guy got sober he's looked a hell of a lot more put together than when he showed up on peter's doorstep, tired and hungover and just plain heartbroken. but even in that small time frame between defeating apocalypse and the mansion being rebuilt, he was just... sort of happy. happy he lived, maybe. happy the world made it and his mansion was being rebuilt so he could home all these poor kids without anywhere to turn to that understood them. but wow, the stark difference between a charles that was kind of okay and a charles that was happy was like night and day. he was just so much brighter now that it took peter aback sometimes. he hummed under his breath whenever peter walked by him in the halls at a human speed and those old withered plants in his office started to stand taller, as if someone finally started watering them. and hank stopped staring at charles the way he did when peter met them a decade ago—waiting for something to give. so, yeah, charles is definitely happier now when no one even knew he was unhappy at all. and it all started when erik started taking lunch breaks.

and jean and scott and ororo and kurt are looking at him less like he's pulling their legs and more like he's made a point that makes them a little sad which wasn't the goal but he gets it. charles is like, jean's dad in a way, and the rest really look up to him despite only being here just shy of a year, so to hear this guy that they always saw as this strong bastion of optimism and goodwill was just sort of sad all the time right under their noses was probably depressing the hell out of the four of them. but it was the truth. and peter knows it was because he can practically see them recalling how the professor was before he got there and before he made up with erik.

so yeah. peter is right. erik and charles are probably dating and now four more people know that charles is happier than he was before and erik is too. and privately, peter thinks maybe if erik is happy to find family in charles, he'd be happy to find family in peter, too. but that's something for another day. he's just suddenly aware of the fact that he's so glad these guys who were so bent out of shape and angry and irritated and heartbroken and assholeish ten years ago are looking at each other like the sun took up custody of both their smiles or whatever.

anyway i'll see you guys later, peter tells them, and races off before they can say anything. he's already halfway across the school and in his room playing pac-man before any of them can blink.

[headspace-hotel]

I hope I can express this properly and sensitively, but I think oftentimes people need to have Categories and Identities and to be healthily exploratory and playful and elastic about them, else they can get vulnerable to some negative things, sometimes really awful things

I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was something that wrote about whiteness in America as an abyss.

Whiteness is something that sheltered white Americans' ancestors, and at the same time devoured them. They used to have a distinct medley of heritages: Irish, German, Scottish, Italian. "Whiteness" ate it up, the languages, the cultures. There were privileges if you destroyed it, and punishments if you held onto anything that was "Other." In a white supremacist society, white people wanted to be "white" first before any other possible identity or connection they could have.

Yay! You're white. You're on top. You win...what? Turns out the prize for "winning" is just that you get to perpetrate the violence of the game instead of being on the receiving end of it.

And that's the nasty twist—there is no prize. The deeply embedded vice of "Southern pride" is not just what the Confederate flag stands for, but also why they've got to cling so hard to that symbol of traitors and losers: they need to be on top of something so bad that even a pile of shit will do. My ancestors were ultimately dirt poor, loads of them ending up in prison or breaking their bodies down doing hard labor, but they were white. Their reward, and their pride, was being stepped on by the violence of poverty only, instead of also by the violence of white supremacy.

"White pride" is all about hate because white supremacy didn't give these folks anything to be proud of. It stripped away the culture and heritage their ancestors had in favor of "whiteness." All those jokes about how white people have no culture, well, it's true isn't it? This shit is how we ended up a primarily monolingual nation. And what looks like happened is that white Americans wound up just...scavenging most of their culture from those they oppressed. Food, music, all of that stuff. Our white ancestors didn't GIVE us anything that was their own to start with.

And this is something that really strikes me about the white supremacist and fascist movements nowadays: the starvation and hollowness behind them. These folks are empty inside. They were given nothing by white supremacy except a very vague sense that they deserve something, and they see people of all different cultures celebrating and flourishing in their unique heritages and identities, and they feel like...they've been cheated.

Equality is so threatening when you're in this situation because it feels like you've got less than everyone else at the end of the day. Not just because of comparison to previous privileges, but because your whole identity was "person that gets to step on everybody else" and your whole inheritance was "shit stolen from everybody else" and in a world where all is set right, you have no identity and nothing. You are nothing.

Anyway I was looking just now at a blog that seemed really white-supremacist-leaning and it was 99% about like, Norse and Proto-Indo-European paganism and "traditionalism" and that's what got me thinking about this again.

This person had apparently done DNA tests on themselves or something, and were really fixated on figuring out their Norse and Germanic ancestors and separating out their genetic and racial identity at a level of precision that seems really pointless that far back in time. And honestly all the paganism stuff seemed like totally arbitrary speculation as well.

And how to become satisfied as a person like this? I am just as much Germanic or Norse as they are, but I don't believe that distant ancestors determine who you are to such an extent that I have some sort of innate cultural tie to Vikings or Visigoths or what have you. I know what percentage Celtic or Anglo Saxon or Norse I am—zero. I learned about those things in books the exact same way I learned about all the cultures and past kingdoms of the world that I presumably don't have ancestors from.

I feel like the experience of being a baby ally and obsessing about apologizing for being white is the same kind of thing in another direction, or another outcome of the same process. Some people seem to get really twisted up for a time over how to stop being guilty about being white.

It's part of the same thing as this guy who is trying to genetically identify his ancestors from like 3,000 years ago. It's the emptiness and meaninglessness of "white" identity apart from white supremacy.

I talk about deradicalization sometimes and I've had the notion a few times that fascism appeals to people who are hollow and starving in terms of identity, and if it wasn't for the sense of emptiness and hunger, they would be less easily radicalized. But it's also a little bit awkward to talk about the deeply unsatisfying nature of white supremacy, because...well, that is pretty low on the list of things bad about white supremacy.

I think this concept is worth talking about in general, though: People want to feel like they come from or are part of something meaningful. They are drawn toward Identities and Categories and Belonging to groups. This is something I think is commonly true about humans, I think it is normal and not a bad thing, and I think we could stand to be a little more upfront about its reality.

I think this means that wanting, and seeking, a sense of cultural identity as a white person (particularly an American) needs to have some kind of non-horrible outlet for it. Because right now, it's nothing but a way to get radicalized, and the dominant other option people take (becoming the Guilty White Person) is liked by no one and helps nothing.

And maybe it doesn't need to have anything to do with race or culture or your ancestors or any of these things that can lead a person down such terrible paths. Maybe more of us should be furries!

As just another thing to consider, I'm reading the book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and the author of the book uses the word "cracker" not like, with the gravity of reclaiming a "slur" or something like that, but seemingly because that is just the word she most strongly identifies with, the word that best articulates who "her people" are. This feels very solid and levelheaded to me, something that comes from someone with a good sense of themselves.

Personally I've thought a long time that more people should reclaim "redneck." Not in the sense of reclaiming a slur exactly, but in the sense of putting it in neutral usage among the folks it always referred to, instead of letting it increasingly be associated with any Southerner (regardless of working class background) that is the sort to wave a Confederate flag around. The very idea of gatekeeping "redneck" away from racists is just absolutely hilarious to me, I won't lie.

[sir-ballister-boldheart]

"Having gay characters in media nowadays isn't very impressive, or pushing boundaries because gay people are soooooo accepted by everyone today, but this character from 20 years ago who was once maybe hinted to be gay by one of its actors is revolutionary" sure is a statement. Especially when that statement is made about Nimona, you know, the movie that Disney almost killed for the super accepted gay kiss at the end.

I am not insulting queer coded (actually queer coded, NOT queer-baity) characters that had to exist that way because it was the only way to get their stories told. I am not even saying that queer coding is necessarily a bad way of telling a story. But some of you really need to get out of your fandom biases and give two thoughts about what you are saying

[dinanikto]

Spoilers: Episode 4 of the Walten Files

I think people misunderstood Felix as a character?

I've seen so many fans WISHING that Felix would actually die?? Like, "if I was Jack, I would beat the shit out of Felix" or "Felix, do a flip".

I thought it was shown pretty well that he is not in the right state of mind.

Before reading this, please, gather all of your compassion and sympathy, and listen to what I'm about to say with a clear mind.

Let's speak chronologically:

1) Felix and Jack meet in college and decide to create animatronic-based restaurant. They are teens/young adults in the year 1958-1964 (not truly canon, but close to). According to Martin, they're very close, they love and trust each other.

2) Jack meets Rosemary, they start dating. She creates designs for Bon and other characters.

Felix is, presumably, left alone to himself, as he doesn't have anyone else.

3) They graduate and contact CyberFun Tech.

Felix meets and marries Linda, while Jack and Rosemary have their first kid.

4) october 30th, 1964.

Linda notes Felix's heavy drinking and his poor self image. She's stressed and scared.

Felix is close with the Walten family. Jack and Rose get two more kids, and they all call him uncle!

And yet, he doesn't feel welcome. He uses alcohol as a coping mechanism. "He drinks for the sole purpose of drinking!"

Please note, the year is 1964!! Even nowadays not many people can get help and cure their addictions. Not many people believe that they can, or that they deserve it.

5) december 25th, 1970.

Krankens and Waltens are so close they spend Christmas together. And yet, Felix is burdened with something.

Jack and Rose are lovey dovey, Felix and Linda are not. Waltens have three kids that love their parents deeply, Krankens do not. Jack is happy, and Felix is not.

He's still using alcohol to calm himself down.

He can't control himself anymore.

Linda tries to talk to him, but Felix doesn't respond. Or rather, it's how Linda frames it.

"He feels bad about it, but doesn't try to change."

Honestly? Sounds like he tries to communicate, but his depression isn't letting him do it well. Again, it's 1970, and I don't think anyone has ever truly tried to help him.

He's a man. Why can't he man up? Jack is doing fine, why can't you, Felix?

Or why won't you just tell everyone how you feel? It's not like men have been bottling their emotions for decades now, right?

6) april 1974.

The Bon's Burgers is about to be open in a few weeks.

Felix and Linda have a fight (verbal). He hurts her feelings.

Jack asks Felix to pick up kids from a school party. Felix says no at first, but Jack won't listen.

Eventually, Felix says yes.

7) morning of may 2nd, 1974.

Linda leaves Felix. Only thing left after her is a note.

No talking, no nothing. His wife of 10+ years left him.

Have you ever gone through a breakup? A breakup with your spouse? Were you in an intoxicated state of mind when your wife left you? Were you depressed when seemingly everyone have left you?

Wait, right, he has Waltens. So of course he's gonna get those kids home, that's the only thing left for him! Everyone are asking him of it.

7) evening of may 2nd, 1974.

The car crash happens.

8) may 3rd, 1974.

He's awfully drunk. He's depressed. He got almost killed. He tried to kill himself twice. He has no one to talk about this with.

He has killed two children. Children that he loved.

Jack is going to hate him. And he does! Jack DOES want to kill him, Felix knows it even before speaking to him.

Note that he's not afraid of Rosemary.

9) may 3-6th, 1974.

He hides. He doesn't sleep for three days, and gets hallucinations.

He's scared. But the fact he actually faced Waltens is surprising. He's trying to fix things as best as he can.

10) may 6th, 1974

He lies. What else can he do?

Jack disappears. Susan disappears. Rosemary and Charles disappear. Brian and Ashley disappear.

And THIS is noway near his fault.

Bon's Burgers close. He has no money, several murder cases. Everybody is dead.

_____________________________________________

And after all of this, people don't find Felix even a little bit likeable? But support an agressive, irrational Jack, who was blind to his brother's struggling and pain? Who was the only person to not notice Felix's drinking problem?!? I'm confused.

I feel like Felix almost constantly. The mentally ill guy with no support system, that has no one to talk to. Never the one to get any help, even when having a "family".

And it's not like he thinks that he deserves love and attention. He never goes searching for Linda. He tries to end his life multiple times. He's masking as a nice corporate guy, while suffering internally.

He suffers more than anybody else in the series. And why? What did he do? Did anyone teach him how to deal with these situations?

In conclusion: don't hate people. Never ever wish the worst for them, especially publicly.

And if you associate yourself with Kranken? Try to get help. Again, and again, and again. We live in a scary, but wonderful world. Your life is worth living, you deserve to be happy. Don't give up.

[imagine-shenanigans]

werewolf soap who was raised in a pack/healthy dynamics etc etc and is very very well versed in wolf life because hes got neices and nephews and he's got cousins who had partners turn... and he discovers freshly turned werewolf reader

maybe a victim of one of the enemies, but werewolves and creatures and such are still largely hidden from the public eye so he scoops reader up and reader imprints on him without realizjng it but Soap just knows. Immediately uses all his knowledge to make it worse, make reader more dependent on him, his poor sweet pup :( Doesn't know anything about the world. No matter he'll teach them :)

And reader KNOWS something is wrong but the wires in their brain from not being helped by a sire and imprinting on Soap are all crossed and mangled in the early stages of their transformation. Most wolves nowadays are born into it, because it takes a signifcant effort to turn someone (not just a bite in this case. I'm imagining like. exchange of blood of varying amounts but typically a couple cups worth at least bc lycanthropy tends to be blood-bound like vampirism) so his poor baby is just so confused and distraught, all sickly and needy and confused :(

He's more than happy to help of course, and poor reader KNOWS that Soap isn't being normal about it, some gut instinct says this can't be right, and he's way too into this, but they also didn't know werewolves were real until like. a week ago when some douchebag kidnapped them.

So reader is trying to be understanding but can't because they're also feverish and the longer the month goes on the worse it gets as they get closer to becoming an actual werewolf.

By the time reader has any inclination that Soap has been treating them like a mate, not even courting, jsut straight into it, it's FAR too late for them, his metaphorical and literal jaws have snapped around their neck and he's never letting them go.

and if we're throwing a lil ghoap x reader into it, ghost as a vampire or some other creature who also knows jack shit abt werewolves other than Johnny (who is a bad example and has also been taking advantage of his ignorance to press Ghost's boundaries until Ghost asserts dominance. Soap swears one day he'll win, even if it means losing. Ghost thinks it's cute but narrows his eyes at Johnny anyway.)

And Soap is using this cute, disoriented civillian who he's got on him at all times to brush right past Ghost's boundaries because rhwy were ALL given the order to keep an eye on them. So Soap just walks up to Ghost and tucks reader into his arms with a blanket wrapped around them and presses reader's nose to Ghost's pulse point so they'll get used to his scent. Says soemthing about training recruits, and Ghost thinks its awfully cute the way reader sniffs so curiously like a new puppy at him, memorizing his scent. Thinks the smug way Soap looks when Ghost lets reader sleep on his chest is cute too, but instead of coddling Soap like he does reader a bit, Ghost wants to make Soap beg for forgiveness, the man grinding up into the sole of his boot desperately.

Ghost just snorts and says "Pushing it, MacTavish." and continues to let reader sleep on his chest, aware only that Soap is up to soemthing but hasn't quite figured out what yet. (He's not up to that chapter in the book about werewolves he's been reading, but Ghost decides he'll put in extra time later.)

Meanwhile poor reader who is literally in constant pain/feeling sick/etc is now undergoing a significantly more painful process of imprinting on TWO people, and the poor wires in their brain are so jumbled they'll never escape (which is what Soap wants)

[ghcstao3]

(cw minimal mentioned drug addiction)

thought about this post about informant ghost and thinking that. maybe this is the backstory

so AU where instead of returning to the military after helping tommy get clean, ghost becomes a… contractor of sorts, after a long series of events that follow deciding to help his brother.

ghost knows that part of tommy's downward spiral was a cause of falling in with the wrong people—the other part an aftershock of their father's piss poor attempt at raising them—but he never realized just how bad said people are, nor how severe the kind of debt tommy had accrued.

so the actual helping tommy get sober ends up being the easiest part.

ghost finds himself working odd, legally-questionable jobs in his brother's place, everyone more than happy to use the military grunt over a (now ex-) drug addict—and ghost happy enough to do it, so long as it keeps tommy out of it.

then the jobs become less legally-questionable and more definitely illegal, but now that ghost is known to these circles, and now that he is continuously sought out because it turns out he's good at these things, there isn't an escape. people keep insisting that tommy still has a debt to be paid off, but ghost begins to suspect that they're almost past that point, if not already, but ghost has become too much of an asset, and he knows too much, so he can't leave. they can't lose him.

he doesn't. they don't. years pass and tommy is plenty sober and no longer indebted—has a wife and kid now, too—but ghost is still at work, though at least he makes good money now. dirty money, most definitely, but good money nonetheless. and now he has the freedom to pick and choose jobs as he pleases.

then one day he's approached by an old colleague from before he left the military, john price, who is now the captain of a special task force. he makes a promise of even more money, clean money, as well as protection for ghost to play both sides, like a double agent of sorts. an informant. ghost thinks about it, eventually agrees, though on the condition that the money goes to his brother instead. price says that's no problem. they shake on it.

tommy finds out, obviously, once the number in his bank account goes inexplicably up, and gets pissed at ghost. says he's already done more than enough, says he still feels guilty for what he's roped ghost into, but ghost is dismissive. tells his brother to take the money and shut up, he's out of danger now, shouldn't he be happy? ghost is doing fine. but tommy says he'd only be okay with it so long as he can help in some way, to feel at least that he's not getting paid for nothing. for his brother's work. ghost reluctantly agrees to allow him to help from afar, from out of danger. lets him be a witness to any meetings with military personnel.

ghost isn't contacted very often, but he proves very useful. price relies on a criminal probably more often than he should, but ghost is diligent. knows how to cover his tracks.

but it's this part-time gig that leads him to meeting one sergeant john "soap" mactavish, who couldn't look more displeased with coming to ghost to get information to help a mission—and he doesn't try to hide it like most do.

ghost decides pretty quickly that soap is his favourite of the people price has sent so far.

he appreciates the honesty. he seldom experiences it nowadays.

[ratcash-wasgud]

Farmer!Mizu x reader headcanons!!! (yay)

About Mizu:

Hence living in the countryside her whole life, she grew up with a small accent, but since Akemi didn't have one, she secretly practiced to speak withouth it.

She grew up alongside Eiji, who owned a farm, and her mother who sometimes visited, but not really out of love.

She never really had friends, since the farm was kinda isolated, exept for Ringo was the son of a noodle shop owner, and bought supplies from the farm.

Akemi moved down to the country side when Mizu was already 17, and she was the first "city-person" she interacted with.

Taigen was the son of the sheriff of the town, who loved to accuse Mizu to be a criminal or low life of some sorts, since she was usually covered in dirt from helping Eiji.

Mizu inherited the farm from Eiji, who just randomly decided to retire one day and move to small cottage. That man does whatever he wants.

Mizu quickly got the hang of the farm life, and by 22 she became used to everything and learned to love the hard work too.

She keeps chickens, cows and horses on the farm, along with a dog.

The dog's name is Stew and she got him from Ringo, claiming she needs someone around to not feel lonely. Nowadays Mizu talks to Stew about random things when she feels bored.

She also got a favourite chicken named Braces. She named it that because of it's crooked beak.

She also has a guy who reguralry comes back to the farm to train the horses she keeps, named Mikio. Her mother really likes nagging her about marrying him, since "she needs a husband soon and he's a man with money", but Mizu isn't really interested.

She doesn't like the idea of being a housewife. She likes doing the hard work herself, and caring about her farm.

She also mostly grows corn, carrots, tomatoes, and pumpkins. She can get really excited when it's time to harvest, and always brags to Stew about how good her crops look.

You and her:

One day though, a random van parker just outside of her yard, and stayed there. And a big one at that. Big enough for someone to live in it.

Mizu usually knew how to mind her business and enjoyed doing it too, but this time she got pretty curious.

She stayed outside longer that needed, fixing a piece of fence that could've held out even withouth repair, just to catch a glimpe of this mysterious new neighbour.

And there she saw it...you.

A woman who was very obviously from the city, wearing hipster clothes (or that's how she'd call them) and a having weird haircut.

She then, after thinking she calmed her curiousity, shrugged and went inside.

The problem was that she caught herself staring at her ceiling at night, thinking about how much she doesn't care.

The next morning she decided to put out this itching feeling in her brain about this mysterious person, and cut out a generous piece of cheese out of a big wheel she just finished and walked to the van.

You opened the door casually, and the smell of hyacinth punched her in the face. She had to blink a bunch to pull herself out of her head.

"Hey there. Uh...can I help you?" You ask, casually leaning against your van's door. Mizu had to quietly clear her throat before she spoke up after shoving the cheese into your hands.

"Here. Take it." She says, a little harshly, even if she didn't mean it like that. "Name's Mizu. I live in the farm next to ya. We're neighbours." She said, deadpan. You nervously accepted the girft with a chuckle.

"Well, thank you." You smiled at her. "That's very generous of you. How should I thank you?" You ask, casually putting the cheese on the counter next to you.

"No need...is' just cheese." She mumbles She can't help but feel a little nervous. You seem very carefree, and casual...but you're also very different from what she's used to. She likes looking at you, and hearing you soothing voice...and that hyacinth isn't a bad smell either.

"Oh, come on, don't be like that." You playfully bump her shoulder with your fist. "Come in, at least let me make you coffee."

Mizu then withouth even notcing it, walked inside the van, following you. She took in it's cozyness, and also...your form from behind too.

Through her time of sipping some "machine made coffee", she managed to have a nice conversation with you.

She learned that you've been hired in the town's saloon as a singer, and you sing there every other night. It pays well. plus at least you're living your dreams even if you live out of a van. You're an artistic spirt.

She also learned that you are indeed from the city, and you left behind everything to come here, which she admired. She had this stable life on the farm ever since she was small, and she could never imagine just leaving it behind.

She observed you during that conversation, noticng the little chime of your giggle, and the way you lean onto everything that's next to/behind you instead of sitting down, for some reason.

And somehow...she just felt drawn to you.

After she finished her coffee, she bid you goodnight and returned to her farm.

When she arrived she kicked off her boots on the porch, and took off her big hat as she simply sat down on the steps, staring into nothing. Stew came running to her, making himself comfortable on her lap.

"Ya're not gonna believe this." Mizu started to Stew. Ringo was right, Stew was indeed very nice to talk to. "The girl who moved there, in that van...she's pretty nice." She says, petting Stew as she stares at the sunset. "Did ya know she likes music with like...noise in it? That's crazy. She sings at the bar too." She murmurs. "Maybe I should visit one night?" She looks at her dog, who just nudges her head with his nose. "Ya're right, that would be too forward... Ya think she fancies ladies though?"

The way your lives melted together (nsfw warning!):

After that, Mizu started bringing you her produce every other day, varying from cheese, eggs, milk, to even mayo and oil.

She noticed that you never let her leave withouth something in return, let it be a cup of coffee, or even a whole slice of pie, maybe a discount ticket for the bar.

She thought she was laying it on thick, even though was just shoving stuff in your hands with a deadpan expression, then listening to you talk about random things and your day.

Until one day, she decided to get a little bold. While you were cooking pancakes, and she was sipping her coffee just a meter away from you, she suddenly stood up and hugged your waist from behind, pushing her hips against yours.

You didn't say anything, but you didn't push her away, and she could see your cheeks reddening too. That was enough for her after months of pining.

Things let to eachother, and somehow you ended up sitting on the counter, with Mizu standing between your legs, agressively making out for the last thirty minutes.

Her hands kept feeling your body up through your clothes, grabbing at everything that's soft, while your hands slowly wrapped around her neck, slowly untying her bun.

"I'd be so good for you...I promise." She whispered breathlessly into the kiss. She sounded depserate, and honestly? She was. She was pining after this woman for months now, not having the guts to even imagine them being together, so now, that she had opportunity take her, she needs to give everything she's got. "I'd take good care of you...you'd love it on the farm." She says, as she pulls away lightly to start kissing your neck. She slowly lifted your shirt, letting her hands snake inside your bra too, feeling herself melt into your skin. You were so warm and welcoming, like your body soft body was made to be touched.

Made to be touched by her calloused hands though? That one she wasn't sure of. But she wanted it to be like that. Her rough hands grabbed at your soft breasts, kneading them while she listened to your gasps. The only thing you said during the whole eccounter was her name, and "please". Oh, and pleased you got.

"I know, I...I don't have one. A...dick, I mean, but believe me..." She started a little nervously, looking longingly at you as she started to pulls off your pants. "But I could make you feel good withouth one..." She says, and you can feel her calloused fingers on your abdomen, crotch then folds. You body shook a little when you felt her teasing your entrance with her index, and clit with her thumb. You reached out in an attempt to try and undress her too, and maybe give some pleasure back, but she gripped your wrist with her other hand.

"No...I don't want you to. I want to focus entirely on pleasing you now..." She says, and you can feel her almost playing with the juices that dripped out of you. After she made sure her hands were wet enough, she started to slowly push her finger inside, and that alone drew a moan from both of you.

"That's so nice...you feel so warm. You're squeezing me." She whispers right into your ear, as she gently kisses your earlobe, using her other hand to support you, and not letting you just simply slide off the counter. She started slowly moving her fingers in and out first, but only a little, to let you get used to the feeling.

Mizu wanted to do this for a while, and she always imagined what i'd feel like, so she practiced on herself a couple times. She wanted to learn how to please a woman, and she was the closest one to herself, so...

When she heard you whisper her name once again, she started to curl her fingers inside, managing to perfectly rub against your g-spot. She went deeper and deeper, and just like that, the louder you became too. She herself started to pant a little...it felt so good to feel you like this. When she physically started to feel you throb around her fingers, she pushed in as deep as she can, and moved her fingers in a way that could've sent you into a coma.

As she felt you nearing the edge, she pushed her lips against yours, invading your mouth once again, her brain melting as you came on her fingers while moaning inside her mouth.

Aftermath:

After that, you fell alseep in her hands, and Mizu carefully set you down on your bed before she left in silence.

She went home, absolutely giddy, and gushed about it to Stew, whispering the lewd parts, as if anyone else besides her dog could hear it.

She even added "It's a secret though" at the end.

In the following days, when Mizu brough over the produce she sually does, somehow you always ended up sleeping together, and Mizu sometimes even stayed the night.

You both knew it wasn't just about the sex though, since you needed to talk about something for at least two hours before every session, and Mizu always remembered everything new she learned about you.

After thinking about it for weeks, and having two silent breakdowns in front of your door, she asked you to come live with her. The answer was an obvious yes.

You parked your van in her yard, and moved your more important things inside the house.

When anyone asked why Mizu suddenly started supsiciously living with the city girl, Mizu just said things like "Out of conveniece, since she loves to cook and I don't have time for it", mainly to her mother, and mainly to just brush her off. Only Ringo knew the thruth.

And they were roommates, lmao.

[strawberryrafaxzd]

⋅˚₊‧ Oikawa Headcanons ⋅˚₊‧ Gn reader enjoy ⭑.ᐟ

✮Whenever Oikawa is with you, he lets his "tough guy" mask fall off. That's why, most of the time, you two tend to have calmer dates, deviating a bit from the usual, like picnics in parks, watching movies, and other things.

✮He likes to lie on your lap while you play with his hair. He complains about how he hates geniuses like his kohai Kageyama (ahhajaja lol) and other things that annoyed him. You just laugh at the cute and funny way he imitates them and give him a peck while his cheeks turn red and he kisses you back.

✮As silly as it may seem, he has some kind of shame about feeling this inferiority complex and hates showing that he feels insecure. The only person he feels safe to talk about this with is you, so be prepared to take his late-night calls and comfort him. Believe me, it will take hours for you to convince him that you are serious when you say he's an incredible player. Even if he thinks he will never measure up to the "geniuses," that's the biggest lie because he's already superior to them just by the effort he puts in "to reach their level."

✮Oikawa often gets "mad" and throws a tantrum because you refuse to go see him play and cheer for him because you're afraid that, one day, one of his crazy fans will throw a rock at your head out of jealousy (akhajajakakakak sorry, I had to write that). But it turns out he always convinces you to go by looking at you with his puppy eyes and that pout. No matter how hard you try, you always end up losing to your sweet boyfriend. But maybe it's not so bad to lose since, in the end, he will always be there thanking you for being the best girlfriend in the world, cheering for him while he showers you with kisses on your face.

✮When his family has special events, his mom always invites you. She definitely loves you, always saying how Toru finally found someone to straighten him out. The gatherings always end with you and his nephew doing his makeup and styling his hair with ribbons and braids. In the end, Oikawa always ends up toppling both of you over, tickling you until his mom sees the three of you sleeping on the floor hugging each other (she always smiles, sighs, and covers you with a blanket, saying,( "these young ones nowadays").

✮In that same vein, when Oikawa sees you and his nephew bonding and having fun, he thinks of one of his greatest dreams. Aside from his volleyball career, it's to marry you and have a family together. He definitely can't wait for that.

✮One of the dates you love the most is when Iwa joins you two. You always die laughing at their fights. You and Iwa get along very well. To be honest, when you buy or make sweets or any kind of food for Oikawa, you always make extra for (wa to eat too ;)

✮Omg, who is that person who isn't even from Seijou that is screaming nonstop in the Aoba Josai cheering section against Karasuno? Wait, the person just called Karasuno's number 9 an idiot.

(Stories say that when Aoba Josai lost, you cried more than the players themselves. Yes, you are Aoba Josai's biggest fan.)

✮One of the cutest things ever seen was you going to his school to deliver his glasses that he left at your game night on Friday and putting them on him, giving him a kiss in front of everyone during recess. By the way, he didn't use to wear glasses because he thought they looked ugly until one day he asked what you thought, and you said he looked "super hot" with glasses hehe (Matsun and Makki still wonder why

Oikawa suddenly decided to wear glasses every day and almost die when he forgets them).

✮Oikawa always wears the sweaters you wore and the ones you drew little stars on. When Iwa notices that he always wears sweaters with stars and a perfume that doesn't belong to him and asks why, he simply says, "it's my way of showing others that I belong to my angel."

Bônus ⊹˖ :

Iwa still has nightmares about the time when Oikawa had gone to Argentina and hadn't settled in yet. Only he knows what it was like to hear you crying out of longing when you went out to bars together after your video calls with Oikawa. At least now he can sleep well knowing that Oikawa is finally okay and has managed to take you to Argentina with him. Now it's Iwa who gets the video calls from the two of you😊🥹🥹

𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼 𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚

Sorry for any mistakes, English is not my native language I hope you enjoy it, it's the first time I've written headcannos so it definitely wouldn't have been that good, I hope you enjoyed it

[genderqueerdykes]

i was asked recently to describe what my experience is as a trans man with visible facial hair who dresses very femme and wears makeup whenever i go out. i thought this was a good question, since i don't think i've ever discussed my experience with this. i know public restrooms are a huge source of stress for a lot of trans people, they're stressful for me at times as well, which is why i try to avoid them when possible.

i will say that i am lucky enough to not have a bad experience using public restrooms. it might be because im rather physically intimidating, having a lot of muscle tissue and not being particularly short, it's hard to say. generally, i use the men's room, even if i'm in a dress or skirt. i don't make eye contact or particularly even look in the direction of other people using the restroom, which i find makes it easier.

looking nervous and making eye contact can, for whatever reason, threaten cisgender people and i'm not sure why. public restrooms are stressful for everyone, not just trans folk. i will use the women's bathroom if the men's bathroom is full, or disgusting, but that happens very rarely. i have also had no issues with using the women's restrooms. even when i lived in Missouri which is a red state, I didn't seem to have issues because I walked in and out with confidence and ignored whoever else was in or around the restroom with me

long hair generally isn't an issue from what I've observed because a lot of men nowadays are wearing their hair long. generally speaking, the voice is one of the most gendered part of us and I have no idea why, but it helps to keep any comments or conversation to an absolute minimum- having no conversations or interactions is ideal. if someone says "excuse me" or something to that effect, nod or shrug or respond with body language instead of verbal language.

i would say utilizing the masks we use for covid is one of your best shots at making the experience a lot less stressful. covering up any potential facial hair, a strong jaw, etc. can help a lot with people minding their own business. this is not to say that if you just mind your business and try to avoid other people that they won't react. but i find the process goes smoother whenever you have something that can obscure part of your face (I'd say even putting your hood up if you have one could help in a pinch).

if someone does decide to cause problems: leave the restroom as quickly as possible. pull out your phone and make it look like you are calling for help (or actually call for help). people who start trying to cause problems generally do not want witnesses. do not confront them or attempt to correct them about your gender. this will only make them angrier. do not let them corner you. slip out from beside them if you have to. do not push or touch them unless they have grabbed, pushed or hit you first.

tell staff of the location you are at that someone is being belligerent in the restrooms- if you don't want to mention it's due to transphobia, you don't have to. but if you feel the location is accepting enough, please do, because that can get you help right away. if you live in an area that's not as progressive, just refer to how violent the person is being and skip the gender talk.

i feel like this isn't super informative, but i hope it helps some folks out there. i know how stressful this can be and it can't be avoided all the time. the best we can do is try to do our best to avoid confrontation altogether, and when it happens, get witnesses and support as quickly as you can. i hate that we have to tell each other these things just to use the bathroom in public. it's asinine. but i hope this helps at least one person