#like if it was just the art or the poem on its own it wouldn't hit but i really do think i did my best for both components

[stil-lindigo]

the sunset.

a comic about two outlaws who loved each other, despite everything.

creative notes:

--

all my other comics

store

[chantsdemarins]

Find Tom: Part 2

(a little new art too)

The whole "soccer era" Tom was the push I needed to jump back into a Tom fic, although I am by far much more comfortable just sticking with Loki. I hope this isn't cringey. It’s not that great but I feel like it needs to be posted. 😑

⚠️It's mature so no under 18 readers!

❤️It's a love poem with not a lot of plot!

☠️I used some new smutty words

Lastly, I truly appreciate anyone who takes the time to read my work! No comment is too small, no reblog is unfelt. I wouldn't do any of this if I didn't have readers. You mean the world to me.

@lovelysizzlingbluebird @mischief2sarawr @five-miles-over @lokischambermaid @lokisgoodgirl @mochie85 @ijuststareatstuffhereok89 @kats72 @fictive-sl0th @sailorholly @tbhiddlestan83 @peaches1958 @huntress-artemiss @goblingirlsarah @jennyggggrrr @mjsthrillernp @wolfsmom1 @lady-rose-moon @mygfloki @buttercupcookies-blog @lokixryss @simplyholl @eleniblue @kingtwhiddleston

Thank you-thank you-thank you!

Read Find Tom Part 1

He had stayed an extra week-you had called in to work with hope and a prayer you wouldn’t lose your job.

How could you have known that the remarkable business of bedding a movie star not only included being passionately taken on every mid-modern furnishing capable of withstanding Tom’s athleticism but also came replete with nuanced discussions of such things as little-known facets of British history?

A mere night with this man would have been impossible. His words alone filled the time so completely while his cock took up the rest of the hours left in the day. You needed a lifetime but would have to settle for a week. You also felt like Tom’s spare thoughts were enough to earn him a second Cambridge degree.

You often found yourself pouring strong coffee between glasses of Cab to keep your mind sharp enough to ask intelligent follow-up questions. Which you always did. It was impossible not to notice how his conversational ability effervesced through him, a surging sparkle that galvanized in his eyes, creating a disproportionate lure and the impulse to return the enchanting discourse in kind. Over the course of the week, you had time to observe how many of Tom’s features would appear as backdrops to his emotions.

Like the plane of his nose, its pristine alpine slope, when he was grinding his hips into you. Or how his smile consumed half of his face while his lips found yours.

His eyes were mesmerizing vehicles of his intellect like twin comets streaking the sky. You had to watch them. You couldn’t take your own eyes off them. He saw not only you but what was beyond you, possibly what you would become. He had a witchy sense.

Also, strangely when you least expected it, a pallor of sadness would also occasionally descend between your bodies. A departure from his enthusiastic nature that usually led the way. It was clear something had made a lasting impact on him. Was it another woman? A situation? Strife of the elite? Champagne problems that you could never understand. You wanted to ask him to tell you, but you let the sadness be a silent companion to your passion.

All this revelation was amplified in the vintage quiet of the Sea Ranch cottage you had all to yourselves.

That first night, he took you easily. Perhaps embarrassingly easy. After all, you’d been wet since you saw him from across the crowded room. An uncomfortable distraction while you talked about your lives and listened to the quartet play The Lark Ascending in the main room of the after-party. Something about the tender violin and his deep voice from a place far away. The details. The decorations, wild peach-colored streamers blowing in the ocean wind battering the rafters. A hum in your ears.

The way he leaned in closer when you knew he could hear you. You’d swallow him up if given the chance. Later at his Sea Ranch cottage, what felt like an eternity after so much conversation and ephemera, you were finally a crumpled passionate mess. You remember looking down and seeing him finally enter you, the implications, the spectacle.

You felt your breath leave and never quite return.

Later as dawn coursed through and put the evening to rest, Tom made sure to use the California poppy napkins to tidy you both up but stopped himself short of a full janitorial protocol. There was something a little wicked about his disregard. He liked seeing you wrecked. He liked seeing the lingering elements of the sex you just had, still on you. He didn’t want to make things too neat. You felt exposed but did not want to assemble a wall between you.

The instinct was that of vulnerability. Only sometimes found in casual romance. Only sometimes experienced by you.

By Tuesday, Tom’s effulgent historical discourse had fully found its way into your conversation yet again. You sat on the ocean-facing porch in two aging red deck chairs, a temptation for Tom’s fingers. He easily peeled off their flaking paint and collected it into a neat pile on the property’s 1972 glass Sands Hotel ashtray.

He would continue to move the small pile around with his long finger mixing the chipped paint with the singed tobacco and marijuana wrappings from the day for the hours you talked. Tom would grow quiet only when he rolled his own cigarettes one-handed.

You wondered if he smoked back in London or only when on holiday or business, or as an affront to suffocating California standards of healthy living. The sea wind picked up and moved through his rust-colored hair, salt air conjuring it into full attention.

Apparently, he had forgotten his blow dryer, but now, surprisingly, he seemed besotted with his curls. He ran his hands through them as he resumed your previous conversation.

You tried not to lose your concentration on the details. Tom’s mental ephemera began to have a companion in the details of his being you were collecting in the hallows of your own mind. Topics spun wildly from one to another but often fell back into history and philosophy. You prided yourself in keeping up, even if you had to use the cottage's old ethernet cable and early 2000s PC to look up “ontology.”

"British history is rife with privileged white opportunists, wouldn't you say?" His words were intended for both the relentless waves below and you as he stared off into the inky distance. That was quite the conversation shift. You had both just been talking about Steinerberg, Switzerland. He’d been while filming The Night Manager. He went on.

"Take William Bennett, for example, a complete ass."

"William Bennett?" Repeating his choice of subject often gave you a few vital seconds to collect your thoughts.

"Indeed. He essentially earned his fame from an aquatint print of the New York City fire in 1836. The untold story is that he bought the original sketch from an impoverished Italian artist, Nicolino Calyo. Calyo was there amidst the 700 homes succumbing to flames. Bennett essentially duplicated it, and therefore, as a wealthy, idle British artist, he managed to elude any consequences." You scrunched your nose in a silent response before replying.

"And Calyo?" you finally ventured, already anticipating Tom's reply.

"Naturally, he ended up dead and destitute. The old D and D, if you will.”

You laughed but felt a parallel emerge within you. Your life seemed uncomfortably akin to Nicolino Calyo's. Your mind raced - was Tom, beneath his casual Louis Vuitton button-down, a modern William Bennett? Your thoughts looped back to yesterday's breathy exchange after you’d gone down on him and where you confessed that after a long hiatus, you'd begun painting again. Was he secretly archiving the ideas you'd shared about your nascent series, ready to unearth them during his leisure in Margate - a place allegedly sharing the "spirit and design" of Sea Ranch? While Tom moved your things inside as the chill of the evening overtook you both, your mind was fixated on your previous conversation.

In your carnally vexed state, you'd unveiled your infatuation with the hues of mint green, adobe red, and translucent pink. His curiosity had been particularly piqued by "adobe," which led to a discourse on the disparity between the tangible "true adobe" and the digitized shade we've now associated with the word.

He reflected on his time in New Mexico during the filming of the first Thor movie, where he was first introduced to the color scheme of the American Southwest. It had been a captivating conversation that moved fast. An image of Tom as a reincarnated William Bennett, unveiling his own mint green and adobe masterpiece at a glitzy auction event eight years from now felt lodged in your mind.

Apparently, this emerging anxiety of trusting such a departure from your usual type of lover was hard. None of your other partners would still an idea you had for a painting and make millions from it, but of course, neither would Tom. You were becoming irrational. You poured yourself a new glass of wine, emptying another bottle. Closing your eyes for a moment by yourself while Tom assembled the next part of your evening with his usual intentionality intact, even if he didn’t catch your mood. He tracked even the tiniest details in the short time you’d spent together. You wondered if his sadness had descended, preventing him from noticing.

The next day you made love in the early morning hours, savoring his body. He was deeply asleep his naked luminosity shining against the white of the sheets. Tom still smelled like the rosemary he had picked from the bushes out front. You had watched him in his running shorts and nothing else, springs of rosemary in his hands.

He remarked about how wild rosemary doesn’t grow in England; at least, he didn’t think so. He joked he would take some of it back in his suitcase. He’d smell like California. He’d smell like privileged things like taking an extra week off. At that moment, you had felt his lineage as if a halo surrounded him - an impenetrable force field.

The afternoon found you both in the living room, wrapped in tartan blankets, partaking in an improvised indoor picnic. Tom had run a 10-mile round trip to Jenner's only grocery store. The sight of him returning with baguettes, ham, brie, and more wine bottles settled his existence in your mind as a true enigma. His sweaty, proud smile covered his face completely as held the baguette up to the sky in a triumphant cheer. You ran to him and held him around his middle.

You always loved the way tall skinny guys felt. It was a too-familiar gesture for such a casual situation, you tried to pull back, but he nestled his head into the crook of your shoulder. You closed your eyes and heard only the ambient sound of birds.

The morning of the sixth day, you dressed in his white undershirt and boxer shorts. You both reveled in the amusement of exchanging clothing items to create new outfits each day. The addition of Tom’s packed subtly luxurious clothing gave you both interesting options. His Armani suit jacket with just your black underwear. Tom amusingly in your skirt, paired with his unexpected choice of nude suede Herve ankle boots.

Your scarf and his sleek Ray-Bans. His running shorts were cleverly repurposed as a strapless jumpsuit. In the end, the clothes would always come off. You would be naked. You would have your hands consuming one another in a shocking discovery of hidden pleasure. The responses were the truth.

The thing you both could trust. In his sighs, in the warm breath that haunted your collar bones. In the flush of his cheeks. In the sweat on his forehead or the goosebumps on your arms when his fingertips traced the edges of your body with the precision of an engineer, you held on to the touches, the utterances of euphoria. With every orgasm, you felt the incredible raw honor of being human.

You wanted to slow it down long enough to feel it truly. To feel a king cuming inside you. To feel his cum and his claim while lost in the gravity of his eyes. Those magnificent extensions of his brain were a lifeline. Your bodies became sculptures, black quartz in the hot sun.

By Sunday, the end of your time together had finally found its way to you. He whispered in your ear after pulling out, catching any breath he could. He could only stay until Monday, he had to go back to London. You stared at the slow oscillations of the Casablanca ceiling fan. “I’ll miss this,” your words were an echo of the real words you longed to say.

His eyes closed, lashes casting delicate shadows on his cheeks.

The woman he would one day choose to marry, you thought, God help her. She would undoubtedly be transformed if your brief moments with Tom were any sign. However, for some melancholic reason, you knew it wasn’t going to be you.

You weren’t destined to be the lover who would eventually turn into a wife. He only had room for the ecstasy of passion and intellectual tête-à-têtes. This affair was incomplete, with no clear conclusion in sight. It wasn't a tale like that of William Bennett and his ill-gotten fame through art theft—a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

No, this was something else entirely. Suddenly, as if he was privy to the endless stream of inner thoughts, Tom spoke. "I met you at the right time, y/n," he said, his piercing blue eyes now open.

He jumped out of bed and casually dressed, slipping on a single item of clothing or, more accurately, an accessory — his Gucci belt wrapped sideways around his bare body. It was difficult to concentrate as he strolled past the expansive windows of the cottage. His muscles and his semi-hard cock were the only things holding that thing in place. Your cheeks grew hot. Tom followed up his emotional revelation with a more practical question.

"Shall I make us eggs on this, our final morning together?”

Without waiting for your response, he ventured into the kitchen, energetically rummaging through the cabinets in search of pepper before swinging open the refrigerator.

As he busily prepared breakfast, his underlying sadness was emerging, defying the rational part of his mind that wished it weren't there. Balancing a glass bowl against his stomach, he swiftly began whisking eggs, his intense gaze fixed upon you. This prompted you to inquire once more, "Why is this the right time, Tom?"

He continued whisking the eggs as he replied, "You found me, truly. Sometimes, we serve that purpose for others, akin to amateur archaeologists. Returning to London, I will be more whole, not less."

You found yourself fidgeting with the hem of Tom's t-shirt you were now wearing.

"You desired this life you have didn't you? You wanted fame?"

"I don't know, y/n. I wanted to do what I loved," Tom confessed, pouring the frothy mixture into the heated pan.

"I doubt it’s that simple, I'm sure you've had to make difficult decisions to reach the top."

"Like parting ways with a beautiful woman I met while on an extended work trip?"

"Yes, exactly like that,” you struggled to say.

"It happens all the time, love, all the time. Regret is my middle name. Thomas Regret Hiddleston."

With that sentence, he refocused his attention on cooking, his hands and mind engaged in a synchronized activity not unlike sex, serving a similar yet less emotional purpose.

You discovered a tablecloth tucked away in the back of a cabinet and spread it over the aged blonde table. Professionally, he placed the plates of food before you.

"Quite the last supper we have here," you remarked, attempting a joke to mask your emerging underlying sadness, though failing in your intended delivery.

Your gaze fell to the floor, unable to meet the sunlight streaming through the windows or Tom's eyes. He continued in his relational eulogy, "Its breakfast, y/n, and many more will come. Someday, you'll have a partner, and I'll have someone too. We'll be enjoying meals with them, and something will trigger a memory. Perhaps we'll be by the sea on vacation, and you'll remember me, and I'll remember you."

So he was thinking similar thoughts as you. He did not feel he met his future wife at a Bay Area film festival after-party. It was a long shot at best. You nervously tried to continue talking.

"Of course, not simultaneously. How could we possibly know if we remember each other at the same time?"

"We will never know, y/n. We will only remember each other out-of-sync for the rest of our lives."

With that bittersweet but strangely truthful statement, he reached across the table and gently took your hand and kissed it. You wouldn’t watch him leave late that night. You skipped the coffee after the wine, and poured yourself another, watching the moon reflect off the darkness of the glass.

[sirensea14]

HAPPY 300 CHAPTERS FOR INKY MYSTERY!!!!!

300 Chapters And the Quest continues May they have a prosper journey As they find the Cure.

[poem lol]

MY 300 CHAPTER ART (w/ text and textless versions)

(this looks straight up brought from an anime scene💀)

[Warning cringe ahead💀]

Because of Inky Mystery, i wouldn't have gotten in this level of coloring (this is my first art of ACTUALLY manipulating colors) my other arts where you see it (tho faintly) are my later application of my color manipulation - i like to call it that way lol. I can tell I definitely improved a lot in my artstyle. Learning rubberhose was a first, I'd say, and Tap and Mercowe's writing? It inspired me to do my own and only (poorly written and horrible) book in wattpad (i will not recommend u the cursed book, also i dropped my wattpad, mainly for storage reasons, and secondary for inactivity)

But all in all, Inky Mystery was one of the BEST that I've read so far (mangas included) I can't be thankful enough that i found this masterpiece.

And i actually attempted to draw a portion of Toon Town, which i can personally say bad, but its a start!

While looking at this piece longer, I can actually see my mistakes... Dont mention it, ik it lookes bad 😂 This is one of my longest and largest art to work on so far (the other one was my Book 10 cover art), tho this one is so large that i had to separate making the bg & text/effects and the characters.

I finished this piece wayyyyy back (just weeks ago) bcoz of school. I know i wont be able to continue this if i extend it even further (i dont rlly want this to finish early, but i was forced to do so, nonetheless i had fun making this!)

I listened to many songs while making this, but this one's the most notable one (and the most fitting for the theme of my art garbage) :

(from Kimetsu no Yaiba: season 3 op song)

@theinkymystery @thisanimatedphantom @mercowe <333333333

_________________________________________

My 2 early versions of the 300 chapter art

Looks bad right? (ESPECIALLY THE SECOND ONE, I MADE IT SO LAZY THAT I JUST PUT THEIR POSSESSIONS INSTEAD OF THEM 💀 Cussing ironic) The new one is basically the remake of the first version (the one w/ yellow bg and the characters' back on the audience)

The other-than-yellow-orange-colored dotted lights represent their souls in the second piece of shit i made💀(its an embarrassing piece but not embarrassing enough for me to hide it, wut--)

Funfact: both the 'Inky Mystery' (yellow bg) piece and 300 chapter art had me suffering of Boris 💀 (had to adjust boris bcoz of his height in the IM yellow bg piece, while the direction Boris is facing is my problem in the 300 ch art. Tried flipping him to the left but it looked off, so i sticked to the og, him facing his right)

[korovaoverlook]

I Sacrificed My Writing To A.I So You Don't Have To

I was thinking about how people often say "Oh, Chat GPT can't write stories, but it can help you edit things!" I am staunchly anti-A.I, and I've never agreed with this position. But I wouldn't have much integrity to stand on if I didn't see for myself how this "editing" worked. So, I sacrificed part of a monologue from one of my fanfictions to Chat GPT to see what it had to say. Here is the initial query I made:

Chat GPT then gave me a list of revisions to make, most of which would be solved if it was a human and had read the preceding 150k words of story. I won't bore you with the list it made. I don't have to, as it incorporated those revisions into the monologue and gave me an edited sample back. Here is what it said I should turn the monologue into:

The revision erases speech patterns. Ben/the General speaks in stilted, short sentences in the original monologue because he is distinctly uncomfortable—only moving into longer, more complex structures when he is either caught up in an idea or struggling to elaborate on an idea. The Chat GPT version wants me to write dialogue like regular narrative prose, something that you'd use to describe a room. It also nullified the concept of theme. "A purity that implied personhood" simply says the quiet(ish) part out loud, literally in dialogue. It erases subtlety and erases how people actually talk in favor of more obvious prose. Then I got a terrible idea. What if I kept running the monologue through the algorithm? Feeding it its own revised versions over and over, like a demented Google Translate until it just became gibberish? So that's what I did. Surprisingly enough, from original writing sample to the end, it only took six turnarounds until it pretty much stopped altering the monologue. This was the final result:

This piece of writing is florid, overly descriptive, unnatural, and unsubtle. It makes the speaking character literally give voice to the themes through his dialogue, erasing all chances at subtext and subtlety. It uses unnecessary descriptors ("Once innocuous," "gleaming," "receded like a fading echo," "someone worth acknowledging,") and can't comprehend implication—because it is an algorithm, not a human that processes thoughts. The resulting writing is bland, stupid, lacks depth, and seemingly uses large words for large word's sake, not because it actually triggers an emotion in the reader or furthers the reader's understanding of the protagonist's mindset.

There you have it. Chat GPT, on top of being an algorithm run by callous, cruel people that steals artist's work and trains on it without compensation or permission, is also a terrible editor. Don't use it to edit, because it will quite literally make your writing worse. It erases authorial intention and replaces it with machine-generated generic slop. It is ridiculous that given the writer's strike right now, studios truly believe they can use A.I to produce a story of marginal quality that someone may pay to see. The belief that A.I can generate art is an insult to the writing profession and artists as a whole—I speak as a visual artist as well. I wouldn't trust Chat GPT to critique a cover letter, much less a novel or poem.

[aestriiea]

─★°࿔ 𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐝'𝐬 𝐬𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 ₀₁ .ᐟ

from polaroids, to poems, to random sketches & songs she's shazaming behind someone's back; astrid's sketchbook is without a doubt the window to her soul. she's rarely without it on hand or in her tote bag, graphite pencils shoveled into the metal coil in case she wished to take note of something (she rarely ever does). she used to worry about people, namely ximena, looking through it however a few offhanded mentions of her latest 18+ commission seemed to steer her clear away from anything remotely art related in astrid's possession. unwilling to let just anyone see or even in her sketchbook; the abundance of names and content relating to valpo residents surprised even astrid when reviewing her latest completed book.

─★°࿔ 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐢𝐝𝐬 .ᐟ

xime: likely from one of their midday trips around vina del mar, astrid's quite fond of photos and will lug around her camera in order to get these shots. she tends to claim that it's for landscape shots as she really should be working on her background work but she often folds and ends up using her film on xime. in this case, she does plan on using it to facilitate her practice for once.

luna: which building is this from again ? it's not like astrid can keep track. she'd brought the camera along to get cold hard proof of any supernatural occurrences but the sign was too eerie for her to not snap a photo of. given that it was toppled and in english she figured one photo wouldn't hurt. that was the last of her film and ghostly encounters had to be recounted purely by word of mouth.

kaito: she never really intended to draw kaito, something of an itchy trigger finger enticed her to snap the photo. hidden behind the other polaroids and recently defaced she knows she should be rid of the photo but can't muster up the strength to toss it. when sandstorm has failed to do its job and ground astrid, she fishes the photo out and contemplates erasing the marks. thankfully, she's stayed strong so far.

leia: after a sweaty morning looking for a gecko she'd spotted, astrid decided to just use the film meant for the reptile on leia while they awaited cool beverages in a nearby cafe. as luck would have it the small animal darted across their feet as they exited the establishment sending the pair on another wild chase ending with clear photos of leia and their beverages and blurry ones of a green tail connected to a body just out of sight.

─★°࿔ 𝐬𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬 .ᐟ

most sketches in this book are humanoid, captioned with idle thoughts that strike her during and/or after the sketch is completed. luna is featured as an elf loosely inspired by astrid's own fleating interest in bg3. it passed fairly quickly however not before they'd been drawn and astrid began thinking up possible names for the piece. it's still a wip. noah is also featured more directly as she'd gotten him to 'model' for her between the fidgeting and astrid's unexplainable aversion to looking into his eyes it's a surprised she'd gotten even half of it done. idle hand sketches referenced from shows and her aforementioned model. poses are likely done by way of photo references hence her love for her camera. asking anyone she knows to sit still and be quiet is a task astrid is aware they're incapable of and she's taken steps to combat the issue.

─★°࿔ 𝐩𝐨𝐞𝐦𝐬 / 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬 .ᐟ

i am a burning ship; a vicinity one must always flee.

mistaking kindness for tokens of love.

i know i make it very hard to love me.

i’ve yet learned how to wear my rage.

i am sometimes so close to drowning that I can hear the rivers singing through my body.

for lack of better word, these are musings! thoughts that come to her in the dead of night; things that crawl from her mind onto the pages. she often wakes the next day and finds it all very cringy opting to cover the lines with photos and washi tape. doesn't wipe it from her mind though and she works on putting it into more polished works (the piles of finished poetry she burns every full moon).

ok! that's a peak into astrid's sketchbook for this month/bimonth? idk, i would like to do this semi-regulary as she grows as a person and artist though. if you made it this far yippee! ty for caring about my lil loser <3

[your-name-is-jim]

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

This became a pretty long post, sorry.

I noticed something that I haven't seen before in Kirk/Spock analysis, so I'd like to talk about it. As I said other times, I'm aware that Star Trek fans in over half a century have probably already written everything about the most popular ship, but that's not going to stop me from adding my own words. :)

What I want to talk about is in the episode Whom Gods Destroy. I feel like this episode is pretty underrated among K/S shippers. Nowadays, it might be because of this part:

"Kirk and Spock call each other brothers, this episode tries to no-homo them!"

Short answer: No, it doesn't.

Long answer: This is not what I actually want to focus on, but I understand that it's important, so I'll try to give an explanation. When we watch TOS, we always need to remember when it was made. I know it's not easy (trust me, I made that mistake too), but unfortunately we can't forget that, in the '60s, homosexuality was still considered a mental illness (if not worse, depending on the people/country), and portraying it in a positive way in a mainstream American show was NOT an option. At the time, it wasn't uncommon for queer people to call each other "brothers/sisters" as a socially acceptable way to say "we love each other", "we're each other's most important person", "we have something special that is different from friendship".

Does it mean Kirk and Spock say "brothers" when they mean "lovers"? Not necessarily, of course, but we need to remember that, unlike contemporary shows where two men can actually claim to be brothers to mean "we're close but not gay", in the past it could have meant "we're close and maybe also gay". I'm not saying it's canon, but the interpretation is valid.

As you can see, Garth strongly disagrees with Kirk and Spock when they say they're brothers. :D Unfortunately, it's from the wrong reason: he's claiming that they only have a captain-first officer relationship, without feelings involved. And the episode definitely wants us to think that he's wrong! Kirk and Spock love each other! They have very special feelings for each other, feelings that the word "friendship" wouldn't completely convey. I choose to interpret their "brotherhood" in that positive way, also keeping in mind that Spock does say Kirk is speaking "somewhat figuratively", so he's aware they're not actual adopted siblings. :)

Of course, I can't forget to add what every K/S fan knows: if we consider Roddenberry's novel canon (or at least canonically relevant to a degree), Vulcans use the same word, t'hy'la, to say "friend", "brother", "lover" or a combination of at least two of them. That just makes everything easy! Every time Kirk and Spock call each other "friends" or "brothers" in canon, we can just assume they mean t'hy'la. Checkmate! :D

Okay, back to Whom Gods Destroy. If that episode isn't as "no homo" as we initially thought, what makes it so good for K/S shippers to the point that I'm writing a long post about it? Well, a couple of things. The first one happens before the "brothers" speech, and it's this:

In context, Marta claims to write poetry, so she recites one of "her" poems… which is very obviously Shakespeare. Star Trek writers chose one of the most famous English sonnets of all time on purpose, and it's clear because they made 100% sure every single person watching the episode wouldn't miss it:

So, okay, she didn't write it. We got it. It's Star Trek and its Shakespeare references, nothing new.

Is that all? Hm, I'm not sure. Because Shakespeare's sonnet 18 might be extremely famous, but it's not the only famous poem Shakespeare wrote. And even if it was, since the characters were going to point out that "hey that's Shakespeare" anyway, why did Star Trek writers chose that sonnet specifically? Why did they choose one of the sonnets Shakespeare wrote for another man, to express his beauty? To express his love for him?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

They could have chosen one of the sonnets Shakespeare wrote for a woman. There are a lot more! But no, Marta quotes a love poem by a man for another man, and the camera shows us this:

Just two bros, sitting together, listening to Shakespeare's words about a young man's beauty 'cause they're not gay.

Now… I know, I know. Even nowadays, Shakespeare is too famous to be universally accepted as queer. There's always going to be academics who think "those sonnets were platonic!"; at the time Star Trek was made, I wouldn't be surprised if almost everyone thought "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" was about either platonic love or love for a woman (the latter used to be a theory too, but it was proved wrong). On the other hand, the queer reading has also been discussed for centuries, and supported by famous academics too, like Oscar Wilde. So even in this case, we can't really know what Star Trek writers had in mind. Did they just pick the most popular sonnet without thinking too hard? Did they try to add gay subtext to the scene? Well, it certainly looks gay to me. :)

And now, the best part! What, you thought it was over? Nope, I said I was going to talk about "a couple of things", and Shakespeare was just the first one. Because if you think that his sonnet was probably not meant to be gay in context, and after that Kirk and Spock call each other brothers, and that's also not gay in your opinion… well, maybe we can add a little more fuel to the potential gay subtext.

So, what is Marta doing here? Quoting poetry again.

Right after their conversation about brotherhood and the loyalty of a crew, Garth gets mad at Spock ("Remove this animal!"); Garth's men bring Spock away, and Garth asks Kirk the password to get to the Enterprise. He tells Kirk that he'll make him beg for death. That's when Marta suddenly starts reciting another poem. This time, though, there's a big difference from the first one: the audience can tell it's probably another reference because of her previous behavior, but it's hard to recognize. It's not Shakespeare. It's not even the most popular poem by that author, and she's also quoting it a little wrong.

This is a subtle reference. The average Star Trek fan doesn't know what it is. I also didn't. So, of course, I got curious, and this is what I found:

A. E. Housman, English poet (1859 – 1936)

XIX.

In midnights of November, When Dead Man’s Fair is nigh, And danger in the valley, And anger in the sky,

Around the huddling homesteads The leafless timber roars, And the dead call the dying And finger at the doors.

Oh, yonder faltering fingers Are hands I used to hold; Their false companion drowses And leaves them in the cold.

Oh, to the bed of ocean, To Africk and to Ind, I will arise and follow Along the rainy wind.

The night goes out and under With all its train forlorn; Hues in the east assemble And cocks crow up the morn.

The living are the living And dead the dead will stay, And I will sort with comrades That face the beam of day.

Alfred Edward Housman is another English poet, but very different from William Shakespeare: he lived just a few decades before Star Trek was made. Why choosing him? Maybe because he wrote a lot about men dying during a war, and it's relevant because Garth killed a lot of people and wants to bring war to the galaxy. We will probably never know, but after a little research, I realized that Housman is definitely an interesting-- no, a fascinating choice.

As I said before, the poem Marta recites doesn't look like one of Housman's most popular works, and it's hard to find something specific about it online. It doesn't even have a title, that "XIX" simply means that it's the 19th poem in the volume it's part of. So what is so fascinating about it? Well…

The title of the volume is "Last Poems". I didn't use Wikipedia as my only source, but in this case, I think it can explain context better than me:

OH.

So the poem Marta is quoting in front of Kirk, the poem she wants to know if Kirk likes, is not just a poem about death: it's part of a volume a man wrote for the man he was in love with.

Wait, again? There are two poems in this episode, and both of them are by male authors who wrote them for the man they loved? That doesn't really look like a coincidence anymore.

It's subtle, for sure, especially the second one. The average person watching the episode probably doesn't recognize Housman, doesn't know anything about his life. The average person in front of their TV sees Marta trying to seduce Kirk right after "her" poem, so everything looks heterosexual, right?

Yeah, that's what it looks like. But it's the surface, nothing more.

Because unlike Shakespeare, I didn't find discourse about Housman's sexual orientation: there were probably rumors about his homosexuality when he was alive as well, and after his death, it wasn't really a mystery. A Housman reader, even in the 60s, probably knew.

So, yes, this episode has two poems. Two poets that in different times wrote for a man they loved. Could it be that Whom Gods Destroy is also, at least partially, about love between two men? Well, I basically already said it when I talked about the "brothers" conversation, but let's think about it again. Except for the last few minutes, Kirk and Spock are the only two characters from the main cast on that planet. There's another man, Dr. Cory, who knows Kirk. Kirk seems to care about him… but not enough to risk something while the doctor is tortured in front of his eyes. Also, Dr. Cory isn't present when Marta quotes the poems. The first time, Kirk and Spock are together, and the second time happens not long after this scene:

They try to make Kirk like the girl, but does he really care?

Nope, he just wants Spock back.

They are "brothers (somewhat figuratively)" who trust each other deeply, and even if their enemies try to distract Kirk, it's obvious what he really wants.

It's him and Spock. Spock and… him?

Hmm...

Okay, that's better. :D

At this point of the series, they're so close that Kirk doesn't even consider the possibility that Spock might not recognize him immediately.

Luckily, none of them dies and their feelings are mutual, so they can be happier than Housman. Maybe they'll read his poems together. Or Shakespeare, that's always an option.

[Pictures from s3 e14 - Whom Gods Destroy]

[fearfylsymmetry]

less of an ask and more of a compliment i love the way your tags are organized…”decay as a commodity” “bodies shifting in narrow spaces” etc is it your own original work or quoting from a song/poem/or something?

helloo angel and welcomee to the show, its always such a joy when people appreciate my silly little tagging system. they're all just random sentences i thought up ages ago, , just to make sense of the mess in front of you etc y'know how it gets love. i couldn't really get behind tagging things as "art" "people, faces places things" etc. i needed to inject a bit of flavour to the whole thing (let this not be read as a subtle jab towards any new york based tumblrinas , we're above that c'mon now). i wouldn't say these little phrases are "personal" by any means but they have been motifs i wanted to actively explore in the art i make so no harm putting them up here i guess haha

for posterity's sake i thought i'd just copy an explanation of my tags from an old ask

decay as a commodity : okay so i envisioned this as a way to just summarize modern living? i think of a whole blueish neon color scheme with this one. my line of thinking was,, with the world slowly rotting away and living becoming so expensive and exhausting, whats the one commodity we all share? wouldn't it be decay? aren't we all slowly fading together etc etc. i use this for images with cooler muted tones and anything with a futuristic vibe,, along with some grimey, monochrome photography

the setting dawn: this is the polar opposite of decay, i think of it as "hope beyond hope" a la Prior Walter's line in Angels in America. i know "the setting sun " might sound more natural but i think of it as,, dawn , when the sun breaks through - in this short period the world starts to wake. qs the dawn sets the day kicks in, with all its routine misery. Dawn i think, is the only time the sun is kind to you, because its still hidden away at least slightly. But the day truly starts and itbeats down on you. And yet we continue to live, past the boredom and the pain, we live past hope, past the quiet comfort of dawn. I use this for pictures with earthy tones and things on the more uplifting side

bodies shifting in narrow spaces: this has some overlap with the decay tag, im not as organized as i need 2 be. i use this for figures & portraits ill want to draw or just really any photography i like that features a human presence. think of it as people so dependent on an outside gaze they constantly try to reinvent themselves, or just, everyday people, getting less and less time to live, having to work and forcing themselves into relationships with any real connection

original sin and other contingencies: im trying to fit this in for more risque photography and maybe things on the more gory side. how do i explain this.. okay so... when there's nothing left to do you'll always have sin to turn to just yo keep yourself occupied, along with other methods/contingencies u get the jist

linen that lingers: my fashion tag nothing more 2 it

the canvas as testimony: for art that is made for the gallery or art that is held in higher regard i guess, more high culture. it includes painting, sculptures,along with architecture,, but maybe i should make an architecture tag. i think of the things here as more personal efforts

motion on a still surface: for art that is energetic and really pops off the page. includes comics, manga, fanart, animation. stuff here may be more low culture but really its not. i just differentiate these art tags as ,,one is stuck to the canvas whatever that canvas may be, while the other leaps off the page

word on a wing let me soar: books, poetry, articles, journals , all words that i adore

a conversation with the self: i wanted this to be for things that are very personal to me but i just use my other tags

angels in descent: my little funny haha tag for yknow ,,, funny haha. yknow the "devil's rejects" the movie? like its a way of saying people so horrible no even the devil would take them. okay so i thought " god's rejects " but that's lame. so i landed on this, like idk...imagine angels falling from grace

arcade shuffle: for my little viddy games lol. sorry for being a #gamergirl but yes it happens sadly ,,moving on

jet jump jive: for songs

at the pictures: for movies,, like imagine im going "cant talk im at the pictures wheee ^_^"

there is such a great distance between now and later: to track my art and writing progress but i barely use it cause it barely draw or write these days i blame the wave of despair that washeth over me

proof of concept: photos i took but there's like almost nothing here

misc that are just funny 2 me like i do it 4 a little chuckle i deserve it:

screw it posting hole - for hole the band

bowies in spaaace - for bowie, after the flight of the concords song cmon its a little funny at least cmon now

twink speaks- for twin peaks lol

[filmnoirsbian]

hi joan. so ive written poetry for a few years now, but ive taken a break for a while because i couldn't find the inspiration or motivation to write. recently, ive started reading more poetry and other types of writing, but i find that im being inspired by specific lines (or concepts) more than anything else, and i think im crossing from inspiration into plagiarism. the thing is, in my own poetry, ill mostly either copy things like the structure/message/word choice/feel or what the line or poem itself is trying to do and i can't seem to stop. i can't get inspired on my own like everyone else seems to - it feels like my mind is blank whenever i try to write. and then i get inspired by others, it seems i can only badly imitate the words of another writer. i cant even read someone elses work without getting an idea about my writing or thinking about how it can branch off into my own. i cant help feeling horrible and guilty about it all the time, and it makes me question whether im even meant to be a poet despite the fact i genuinely do want to do it. it's like i dont have anything of my own to say and im just regurgitating everything that strikes me in writing. sorry, obviously you dont have to answer this, its very desperate lol. but would you have any advice (your writing is v good and i admire your thoughts)? in your opinion, how would you differentiate between inspiration and plagiarism? how do you find inspiration when it feels like you have nothing to say (if that happens to you)? and just. anything in general. i just feel so lost and hopeless - it seems like every writer has it figured out and knows the answers, except me. sorry again

Everyone gets inspiration from somewhere. None of us exist in total isolation and inspiration is everywhere, which is a good thing. I think this is something most creators worry about, given how much of art and media these days is derivative (and has, in spite of what we may think, been derivative throughout the ages. Again, no one exists in a bubble. Art being similar in theme or style is also not an inherently bad thing). Really, I wouldn't worry about it unless you are actively copying another person's work to the point where your work is not only similar, but genuinely incapable of standing on its own. There are plenty of talented poets (and artists in general) who have taken inspiration from other poets/artists before them. In this way, art can often be an ongoing conversation across generations. It might be helpful for you to decide what it is you want to bring to the table in this creative potluck, what you want to add to the discussion, what you hope might plant the seed of inspiration in the next poets to come.

[bluemoondust]

i feel like hassel would be the type of yandere who has a massive shrine to his darling. especially like candid photos, sketches and drawings he did of him, stuff that might seem normal if there wasnt so much so hidden away

thoughts?

Oh, absolutely.

He's that type of yandere who'd have things that reminded him of you. Not necessarily like... You know, stuff you've used, but stuff that caught your eye such as a pretty looking shell that you found on the beach or something you made but unfortunately misplaced. But yes, he especially does have photos and drawings of you. You're his muse after all. He even has little poems he wrote out while thinking of you. They range from anything such as your smile, your eyes, the way you laugh, the way your face shifts when expressing a certain emotion, and so on.

Literally, I can see his shrine being its own private room, given how much he has. Some drawings aren't small and are full on canvas paintings. The mention of candid photos absolutely get to me and I fully agree with this!!! Hassel loves to see your natural beauty without the disturbance of your awareness of having your photo being taken. He'd like to see you in a pure, raw state with no manipulation to it. It's truly magnificent to him.

That is why he always takes his camera with him, juuuust in case he spots you whenever he's out.

If you ever gift him any work of art, you bet he's going to hang it at home for anyone to see. Also this just fuels the part of him that hopes you like him back and now he clings to that very moment to the point where he cries at the memory as much as he did when you gave him the gift. It wouldn't go in the shrine, mostly because he deems it too important to keep hidden away.

Still, Hassel without a doubt can name where every photos was taken, what you were doing in the moment, and how he was feeling at the time since he wrote it all down on the back of each one. His paintings always have a note to them, expressing his emotions on each one and as for the trinkets, he's dated them and wrote how you looked at them when you held them. He also keeps a personal journal to keep track of everything, but also to...express any of the emotions you haven't seen. Some entries are frantically scribbled in, especially on days he's upset or jealous.

[brooklynislandgirl]

@silverjetsystm {{xx}}

If she stopped to think about, she would have no real answer to give him. Though incredibly skilled in the gifts laid at her feet by genetics and will, the important ones died over desert sands what feels like aeons ago. She has no knowledge of the workings of mind; telepathy, dream-walking, psyche. She is bereft of the art of connection; of distances and portals, of summoning that which is beyond her visual reach. That perhaps hurts her most as it is the one thing she so maddeningly seeks. So the question remains; how did she know Mr Knight was in imminent danger, how did she know where to find him? While he no longer seeks the patronage with his celestine, Beth is still on good terms with her own. Perhaps it could be said Hina took pity on him, and Her grace is unmatched. Perhaps it was a passing shadow of blood on Her lambent face as Beth passed by the windows, urging her to not only venture out into the dark ~small and frail and terrified~ but guiding her as if she and the tide were one and not two separate entities. What she finds is the aftermath of a mess. Not all of the blood is his and thank providence for small miracles. It would be so much worse if it hadn't been the case. The same could be said if his particular opponent or opponents were still on scene. In order to fight fair, Beth really can't and a lot of people get really tetchy about her abilities when used in an offensive manner. She would be only slightly better than his adversaries. Certainly, he… they… wouldn't quite see her in the same way again. And of course he dips into awareness. Murmurs something that could be a song or a poem, a prayer half remembered from his Siddur. Regardless of what it is or where it's from, it touches her heart. In turn, she helps him to his feet, acts like a steady sort of crutch. Hopes he doesn't see the blush splashed across her cheeks. When he flows out and away from her, she gives something of a half laugh, little more than a shift of her shoulders and a soft sort of sigh. She steps back and does a quick series of calculations of how this will work and the only solution that bears out is that she needs to borrow strength. To augment herself to be like a bear, like a tree. A port in a sad man's storm. She feels the magick flowing through her veins, and while there is absolutely nothing flashy about her workings ~she doesn't turn enormous or green, there's no halo of glimmering lights that encase her from head to toe~ there is a sort of calm. The only problem that remains is how to explain the situation if anyone asks. Fortunately no one does, not even when she shifts from the first carry to the next. Just because she can lift him doesn't mean it's particularly comfortable or ideal for either one of them, especially trekking through Manhattan. In the middle of the night. With blood she'd rather not explain now staining her, too. When he surfaces again, she isn't insulted that the first thought is about Duchamp. The subconscious is not subject to the same rules governing the conscious, or there wouldn't be a distinction between them. If anything, she might find herself flattered given time to think about it. "Yeah, Marc," she replies with some winsomeness. She would know it if this were Steven, and Jake would be far more cavalier and try to tease her about it. The body tells its own story. She says nothing about the other, Mr Badr. Truthfully she doesn't know the man better than hearing his name in passing and Beth is leery about actually meeting him. She doesn't really know his story but she gets the impression that the man is an Amenti, and beyond her wheelhouse. He shifts in her arms and she has a split second where she wants to be all teeth, swimming very fast in his direction because it's awkward, bordering on uncomfortable, requiring a lot of expenditure of concentration. And maybe that's how he does it. Catches her entirely by surprise. It isn't even the kiss, though that in and of itself is sweet. Soft. Not exactly coordinated.

What makes her eyes starry, what gives them a wide elvish quality, and what gives her pause as in the aftermath her lips part to admit a sigh, is that this is really the first time she's ever seen Marc. Oh she knows him from the neck to his collar. She knows his hands and his feet and could draw them almost photo-realistically. She has some very personal ideas of what lies beneath the Suit. But this? This is different. She scours what is revealed, and tucks it away like a precious letter in the back of her mind. "Hi." Breathy, fluttering. Two letters on the tongue that feel like stone. Maybe her only disappointment then is that she can't find anything to be disappointed by. The tip of her tongue chases his ghost across her lower lip. "S'wha' friends are for, right? Only about anoddah block. T'ink you can make it on ya own, or need me t' see us dere?"

[class-1b-bull]

1B with a writer SO?

i am not projecting at all right now what are you talking about

thank you :) have a nice day/night

Not proofread we die like men

Awase - he loves listening to you tell the plot of whatever your writing currently and he'll even jump in every now and then with his own ideas

Sen - his favorite pass time is takeing you both to random pretty places so you can sit on a bench and write while he takes pictures of the scenery. Just the two of you doing your own thing next to eachother is more than enough for him

Kamakiri - he would read over whatever you wrote and correct your punctuation and grammar for you with absolutely zero judgment for whatever you wrote <3

Kuroiro - he writes a lot too I think so the two of you would proof read eachothers stuff. his will always be some dark and edgy poem, while yours is always a different genre lol

Kendo - shes always so eager to proofread your stories. After she reads them she will tell you what she thought and gives you genuine feedback while complimenting the work itself. Shes your number one fan.

Kodai - she loves listening to you ramble about whatever story your working on almost as much as she loves proof reading it to make sure the grammar is all right

Komori - everytime you write she asks to be a character in the story <3 even if its just a shop keeper that only appears for 5 minutes shes always jumping for joy if you put her in the story

Shiozaki - she is the queen of getting you out of writers block. She loves watching you write and hearing your story ideas so she dedicates herself to make sure you dont get into that slump ykyk

Shishida - he makes you some tea for you to drink whenever you write. Hes also happy to help with litterally anything, grammar, the story or character themselves, anything at all.

Shoda - he spends most of his time staying in the same room as you when your writing. Just far enough to where he isn't in your immediate area but close enough if you need something. (Please ask him for a glass of water or smthn he just wants to help in any way he can)

Pony - shes not scared to cling to your side and ask questions about your story that youve been working on. She always comes up with some dramatic ass plot twist that is 20x better than whatever you had planed lmao

Tsubaraba - hes constantly joking about how you should write a story about him being yoir knight in shining armor but he actually stops functioning if you actually make him a story like that <3

Tetsutetsu - hes constantly calling the main characters or heros of the story manly while scolding the villains for being so un-manly. Youve had to explain to him that good stories have ups and downs like 20+ times lmao

Tokage - she would be so intrigued by your writing that she would start writing too. She wouldent tell anyone that shes writing a story and the only way you knew is because she showed you the finished product <3

Manga - you two will make comics together and its honestly the best <3 you do the storytelling and he draws the comic itself. Its to the point that the entire class is anticipating its end (in a good way I mean)

Honenuki - writing (by computer, on a phone, or by pencil) for extended periods of time can cause a few issues with your hands so honenuki makes sure that all of the muscles in your hands are worked out and dont have any pent up stress after each writing session

Bondo - he loves reading your stories and helping you with ideas while your writing but most of the time he just stays near you if you need a second opinion. He only leaves to go make you both tea and get you some snacks

Monoma - this is the only thing monoma wouldn't tease you about. Hes a big fan of all things art related (art, writing, theater, ect.) He heavily encourages you to write and even compliments it often (not on front of the others ofc)

Reiko - she canonically reads a lot so I like to think she writes a lot too. You both would write for eachother and proof read eachothers works. It helps you both become better writers at a pretty quick pace.

Rin - hes your number 1 fan. Everytime he reads something you wrote he would give you feedback while simultaneously telling you how much he loved it. Hes also pretty good at getting you out of writers block.

(This was 100% me projecting)

[lutik327]

i so want to hear the thoughts behind your end poem ultrakill comic, if you have any to share.. its so lovely and makes me feel So much. especially contrasting the tone & events of the game.

i'm usually against telling people my thoughts about my own art since i prefer to let the audience find their own meaning in it, but, sure, i can tell something about this comic since there are a lot of things i've hidden :)

the fundamentals of almost all of my art is the exploration of love not as feeling, but as of a higher meaning to exist - so when i first read the end poem a couple of months ago, i was 100% sure that i want to illustrate it, but i didn't know how exactly until like a week ago ultrakill being the choice of all of these illustrations (not just this one thing, but all the others) may seem like an odd one but i think it's perfect because i want to tell people that this game is actually about love - it's just a slightly different outlook on it. there's a lot of philosophy involved which i don't want to talk about since it would drag on too much but if we combine this with the fact that v1 is essentially an object with questionable sentience, you open a pandora box of themes and narratives you wouldn't possibly imagine in a game like ultrakill once i came up with this, the whole comic began to bloom with references, ideas, palettes... it's hard to follow my trail of thought when i'm in the middle of it all. but i salute you if you can actually pinpoint all of the refs lol a significant part of these references came up as an air kiss to those i've befriended and those i'm inspired from in this fandom - dream's end come true being the most obvious one, of course. this fandom creates branches out of the game so beautiful i couldn't help but marvel at this community as a whole i'm really glad you enjoyed it and i hope to deliver more tl;dr this is both a study of life and a love letter to all who reads it love yourself and don't forget to drink water

[roter-zirkus]

Ma'am, I just work here

Working in a pawn shop in Baldur's Gate sometimes means being privy to the most interesting items, even those that maybe you should have never put your hands on.

or: Raphael visits the most unfortunate little pawn shop worker

It's another quiet day at the "Brokering Gate", a little smarmy pawn office that lies between the recently collapsed Steel Watcher Foundry and the Guilt docks, a blocked-off area for incoming trade that remains just barely under the table. Ever since the rubble of that huge flying brain mass came down, there has been a weird rotting note to the air that borders on repugnant just barely. To keep the worst of it out, most of the "Gate's" shutters have been closed and enchanted with a shield-type spell – Yas doesn't care much for the details – due to their windows being blown to shittereens during the initial blast. It's a wonder, or curse depending on who you ask, that the shop still stands.

Yas hates, absolutely loathes working at the "Brokering Gate" on account of its weird customers and despicable owner, but she also hates not having anything to eat or a roof over her head, so in the end she just has to bite the bulette. And with the evasion of total annihilation comes some perks. People find the most interesting things to sell amidst the chaos coming to their silly little pawn shop, their competitors having mostly been wiped out or turned into ilithids.

One of those people had surprisingly been none other than THE hero, Tav, and their merry band of weirdos waltzing into the store, most of them heaving under the weight of overfilling pouches and backpacks, the jingle-jangle filling the air when the bags hit the ground. It had been a bad day for their accounts but a good one for stuffing the shop up the roof with items of varying usefulness.

One of these items had been a trilogy of diaries. As soon as Yas opened them during a lull in the shop she knew she had found her new obsession for the next weeks. Two of the three books were filled to the brim with mischief, silly little poems, intricate plans, or just daily developments, all written by some seemingly third-grade bard working hard to fill his made-up fantasy with lore. The third one however stopped halfway through, leaving an open end to the saga of the writer, a self-serving schemer hungering for power over the Nine Hells, and his assumed dalliance with the so-called hero, a tadpoled fool trapsing through the world the writer seemingly controlled.

Usually, Yas wouldn't go for such bottom-of-the-barrel fiction, but after skimming over them she had decided to fully embrace their weirdness.

Now it's deep into the afternoon and instead of having another go at the inventory she stands entranced at the counter ruffling through the pages, giggling to herself.

"Predilection. Who talks like that?", she quietly murmurs, although a part of her envies the artful usage of these special little words. With a grin, Yas comforts herself by imagining the fop with this kind of speech trying to order a beer at the bar she works her evening shifts at.

The soft little chime from the bell above their entrance takes her back to the store and she mentally readies her customer service personality. In walks an older man, a slight limp to his right leg, steadying himself on an intricate wooden cane with golden inlays, the soft tock of it accompanying the scraping of his "good" foot across the floor. Yet something about his demeanor stops her from emphasizing with him. His "warm" smile sends shivers down her spine, not the good kind, his left hand readies itself in the air for a grand gesture and his clothes look preened and faultless. She knows she probably can't hide it behind her fake smile, but all she feels is disdain.

Yet when the man starts to talk, she does notice that his voice has a deep rumble that resonates with her. Yas gets a good look at his sharp features and soft skin, since no matter what he says, he can't seem to stand still, instead opting for theatrical movement and emphasis on his words with every twitch of his face. "My dear bespackled attendant of this fine éstablissement, may I use some of your precious time to inquire about some items that might have found their way into your possession? Obviously, your help will be well compensated should you have any of these items at hand. I have had quite the adventure searching all over town and imagine my unbridled surprise upon finding out that there was still one last market to peruse. Resting amidst the-"

By this point Yas has already put two and two together, looking forward to the peacock finishing his exhausting monologue and confirming her suspicion. In the meantime she nods politely along, adding some "Uhuu's" and "no way's" here and there, nearly draining her affirmative vocabulary, until she finally has it and simply moves the diary she had been reading across the counter.

That shuts him up all right. As soon as his eyes spy the unassuming, worn-down cover, a wave of joy washes over his features, quickly hidden away just so, behind his noble mask.

She hopes that between his grandiose entrance and the following speech, he never realized that she was actively reading one of his diaries, before pushing it out of the way. When trying to glean his face for a reaction all she gets is the usual calm demeanor.

"I'm sorry for interrupting you, but from my colleagues' descriptions, this book and its siblings might be the item you're looking for. If you would like we can verify this by counter-checking the text with your description." Yas is trying everything not to let her face betray that she knows about the innards of this book or that she can't believe that the writer is the guy in front of her. It's never good to directly laugh at a customer.

A shadow crawls over the customer's face and suddenly her giddiness dissipates into fear. Unlike before, this time she feels like the show of emotion is meant for her. Yas quickly puts up her hands in defense: "I'm so sorry that my colleagues rustled around in your private property but they had to make sure none of the books were cursed or dangerous in a similar fashion. Obviously, I have no interest in further violating your privacy."

Now a toothy smile flashes across his features and instead of the cane he now leans onto the counter, somehow still being taller than Yas standing at full height. "My dear friend, I am so very grateful for your understanding. The loss of these precious memories has left me quite hurt and it would not do to add to this pain. There is no need for you to read more of the text, there should be a sigil on the blurp, simply lay it out here and I will show you."

With an unsure grin of her own, she does as he bids and lays down the book, blurp for both to see. A swift motion later he holds a dagger in his hand, much to the shock of Yas, yet before she can exclaim her bewilderment, he simply pokes himself in the finger and vanishes it just as quickly as he conjured it. A distinct smell of sulphur fills her nose and she gets a bit queasy looking at two drops of blood spilling on the page of the book.

A second ticks by and suddenly a fiery symbol burns itself into the book.

The silence afterward is palatable.

"Yeah. I guess this is yours, huh." Yas is sure that she is not getting paid enough to deal with what kind of fiery devil shit this might be, so she just shrugs and goes to the backroom to get the other books. She wants this man out of the shop as soon as possible.

As soon as she comes back into his view, he starts up again: "Thank you very much, dear. Say, you don't happen to have some hellishly delicious paintings lying around?"

Oh no.

She knows very well where they are, but considering what Cambrin, her boss, has done to them, she decides she won't be the one to bring this up.

"There might be some more in the personal vault of my employer, but he is unfortunately not in today and won't allow anyone else into his office." Before she finishes the sentence anger flashes into his eyes and his nose scrunches, but she has an idea to smoothe him over immediately. "I'm sure he will come in in the evening to make sure everything is up to speed. Considering how late it already is, it shouldn't be long now."

That somewhat appeases her customer and she allows herself a moment of respite.

He purses his lip, a hand to his chin as if to seriously consider what she just said. "Well, I think I can offer up some more of my precious time for your employer, even though it will certainly throw around my plans for the evening. Will some of your other colleagues be there tonight? Specifically, those that wanted to sate their curiosity with these books?" He is all smiles but there's a dangerous shine to his gaze, that renders his brown eyes almost black.

"The evening shift should be taking over then, yes. We usually stay open late into the night, so we have to change it up. Considering the work plan they might be there, but I can't make any promises."

He pushes himself further onto the counter to lean closer to her face as if to share a secret just between the two of them. "Surely you have heard of the little idiom of the fortunate rat, fleeing the ship before it tragically goes down with its captain. I suppose, there are certain situations in which one should adhere to that principle, saving one's skin before it is too late." He gifts Yas another smile, this time arguably more toothy than before, his canines growing before her eyes.

She can't stop herself from mumbling: "That would make me the rat I presume." They both lock eyes and all he does to acknowledge Yas is a slight tilt of the head.

Living in Baldur's Gate is hard enough as it is, with weird tentacle monsters, bandits, and bloody murders seeping into the daily survival. And now this… thing was making it very obvious that the shop was going to see his reckoning. Maybe it was finally time to leave the city for good.

With a deep inhale she takes a step back and fishes the key to the store out of her pocket, puts it on the counter with a soft clink and slips it over to the stranger.

"A very wise decision."

Without another word or acknowledgment, she steps out behind the bar and slowly makes her way to the exit. Before she can fully leave, however, the stranger has to get in another sentence:

"I do hope you remember to keep privacy matters a higher priority from now on, my dear. After all, you never know who might be watching."

She can only nod, locking eyes with him once again before she all but runs out of the store.

The next day she will walk past the store, finding it surrounded by Flaming Fists trying to put out the fires and talking about the charred corpses inside.

[amarriageoftrueminds]

Just saw your post about Steve and Oscar Wilde, and I'm headcannoning that Steve was a Wilde fan through and through, and a prolific reader. I'm mainly doing this because a girl can project her own love and hobbies onto her favourite cahracters.

Imagine a queer Irish asthmatic kid who isn't allowed to go out and play with the other children at school because of his weak immune system and the fact that his mother is a TB nurse who he has close contact with. One day he picks up a book to pass the time and is immediately hooked on reading.

Mary Shelley. John Steinbeck. Agatha Christie. Virginia Woolf. You name it, he's either read it or it's on his list.

Until one day he picks up Oscar Wilde, and Steve is reading something written by a man who is queer and Irish like him.

Imagine a queer Irish Brooklynite visiting a dingy, beloved bookstore and pestering the owner if he has any more Oscar Wilde.

Books, plays, or poems, Steve has everything that has Oscar Wilde on the cover of it.

He saves up the money from his art commissions to pay rent, food for himself and Bucky, and of course books.

How do you think Steve reacted when he walked into a modern bookstore and saw all the contemporary classics that he had missed in the ice. Would he cry while reading The Book Thief? Would he like Fahrenheit 451? What about The Kite Runner?

Unlike how the MCU has portrayed him as (a man who is so out of depth with the future and stays that way, not helped by Tony's antics of reminding him of it ever single scene), I believe Steve would love learning and reading about the future.

What's your opinion?

(the post)

I wouldn't say Steve stays that way! He hasn't been out of his depth since 2012, that phase was already over for him by the time of CATWS. His wardrobe was updated, he had a smartphone, a to-watch/listen list, his own sound system, familiarity with the internet, modern cookery, modern medicine, etc. etc. And he was a man ahead of his time already in the 40s; he was passionately antifa, his values were advanced enough to see him ostracised, and he assembled a team more diverse than the Avengers.

He was well prepared for the future, and that was before he got Bucky back! So it's really only Tony's daddy issues/seething inferiority complex running its mouth, and later the dipshits of EG talking a pile of steaming shit about a version of Steve they did not, in fact, portray.

Ahem.

That said: it must be absolutely wild to Steve, to have both the spending power and this number of books available at the same time, in the future?

(Plus, coming from war time, paper rationing, pre-set novels shipped out to the US Army... not able to choose his reading material, etc. What a breath of fresh air!)

.

I have an old headcanon about Steve and his mum having an 'Irish shelf' in their humble apartment, consisting of Irish authors exclusively, including Oscar Wilde! (James Joyce, WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth.)

But I also have a headcanon that Steve would listen politely to whatever SHIELD thinks he ought to read, nodding attentively...

And then ignore everything they said, get hold of a list of 'Banned Books of the 20th century' and read every damn one, in chronological order, first chance he gets! 😂

(So yeah Fahrenheit 451 would be a good start! Nineteen Eighty Four would be on there, since he'd be interested to see the 'next' take on a Brave New World.

The 'disillusioned soldiers of WWII as authors' would be an interesting demographic to him initially, I think; to hear what other guys like him felt. But it would be difficult because I think books set in the actual war itself would surely be too painful to read, at first. It would take a few years before he could stand it, IMO. So I don't think he could manage, eg. Slaughterhouse 5, The Book Thief, etc.

I headcanon that he'd go decade by decade, learning the history, and then reading the 'big novels' of each period, to get a feel for it.

I think he'd be interested to read the beatnik/silent generations works too (eg. On The Road), out of a suspicion that -- if he had come back from the war -- he would've been one of them, wandering around America, rather than one of the faceless 1950s suburbanites.)

It's mind-boggling to consider how many classics he wouldn't have read or heard of!

But he'd read anything that's being banned from schools, especially -- and he'd make sure to get snapped reading them in public to increase exposure for banned authors. 😇

[grandhotelabyss]

What do you make of Molly Brodak's poetry?

Just speaking personally, not only wouldn't I have published either her suicide note or her sexts, I don't even want to be especially unkind in this circumstance, but, since you asked: it sounds (to me) pretty much like all the rest of that kind of poetry, at least from what I saw circulating on social media.

Prosy commonplace thoughts with a few "interesting" metaphors (though what "line"? a power line? are there "spokes" on such "lines"? can we actually see anything here? or do we just loosely know what she means? and is that enough for lyric poetry?):

An effectively bittersweet Whitmanian catalogue, pleasant enough but with hints of horror and malice (more vague rhetoric—the low song that "stays," whatever that means—though the precise images—the imitated hug, the cookie wrapped in panties—are very good):

Now something more ambitious, along the lines of Glück in her mythic-vatic mode, a bit too portentous ("I know"), and I'm not sure I can gloss the title unless it's just meant to conjure the desired aesthetic mood and a relevant historical atrocity. I do finally sympathize with the conflict it stages between "carnation" and "man," with the counterintuitive (do I dare say gnostic?) hint that its Biblical God of vagueness and vagary is on the former's side, as against our own spiritual part, no doubt a poignant idea in light of the present controversy over the late poet's now publicized private life:

It occurs to me that we have the balance all wrong in the way we think about these things. We're lax where we should be severe and severe where we should be lax. We're needlessly brutal to the life and lazily lenient on the work. When Lowell wanted to publish lines from Hardwick's private letters in his poems, Bishop famously told him, "Art just isn't worth that much." On the one hand, I hate that line, because moralists use it as a cudgel, in a way quite foreign to Bishop's own exacting and non-moralistic sensibility, and because art is worth everything. It's certainly worth enough that we should want better poetry, demand better poetry, be willing to say that the poetry now praised is not good enough, is not beautiful enough, does not reveal enough, does not mean enough. Bishop was probably right, though, in the limited matter of Hardwick's letters, and the woke feminists are probably right in the limited matter of Brodak's suicide note and her sexts, even though their critique has ironically been the occasion for the literary world to push back as a body against them at last, now of all times, when they might have a point. (I haven't read the whole memoir, I admit, just the Paris Review excerpt, and I grant that its awful clarity is harrowing in a way that his avant-garde novels are, in my experience, not.) I've given a great deal to art, but, as much as I could help it, only what was mine to give.

[szif]

HAIIIHAIHAIHAI I CAME TO ASK ABOUT ELEINA :3c

what are her likes and dislikes, how tall is she, which other oc is she closest to, whats her fave hangout spot, whats her favorite song :ooo

her main thing is fashion and enjoying life. she picks up a bunch of hobbies she's very interested in for some weeks then drops them then goes onto the next thing - she loves shopping a lot! she has like, several wardrobes worth of clothes. her outfits are usually very coordinated and look well put together because she knows what she's doing. she's also the type of person to get along with everybody (on a shallow level) and get into everything others do. she doesn't get any complex poems or any more abstract art but she does love reading and looking at these and go "wow, neat!"

her fav hangout spot is probably her own apartment, within that her balcony despite her going to cafés and being outside all the time. it's super well-decorated with little trinkets, she also knows how to decorate rooms very well (she has a good eye for these sorts of things) so her entire apartment probably looks very "aesthetic". haven't set out a height for her but she's pretty tall for a greyhound. + she probably listens to what would be considered pop music (and its subgenres) and ambient, these sorts of things. she doesn't like any "rough" sounding music (she wouldn't be into metal) but she does love a burst of energy in a song! i haven't found any songs to fit her yet (i also just started to broaden my music taste so i probably don't even know anybody who even writes songs that would come close to be anything she would like) and she's closest to..... her boyfriend! she has a boyfie and she lets the entire world know this. she's super duper in love with him and they're seen together walking in the city a lot. his name is steffan and he's this borzoi dog who owns a modelling agency (two of them pictured in this cropped image i just pulled out:)

and she's found a real great friend in one of the models of her boyfie's agency, named odette, who was a bit shy and lacked confidence, but later on became very social and got herself together to the point of being unrecognizable to the ones who've only known her from before. this was mainly because of eleina's friendship and active couragement (but let's not discredit odette for being the one who tried and succeeded in gaining self-esteem.) - pictured down below

(i love putting cropped pictures)

+ fun fact about eleina: in-story, they usually call her june (second name) but she always puts her entire name (eleina june juniper) whenever asked to write it or if it's needed for anything. she thinks all of these names are "super fancy" and "sooo full of vibe, yknow?" so she has this standard for her name to be used like that. but she doesn't mind anybody calling her something else, it's more about herself