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razorsadness · 6 months

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My life is pretty good, these days. Not perfect, of course, but I’ve had a lot of moments recently when I’ve been in the middle of doing whatever and said to myself, a la Kurt Vonnegut: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

For a while I was going through an “ugly phase,” where every time I saw myself (in photos, in the mirror), I’d go uggghhh. I felt old and hideous. But I’m past it now. I got over it partly by focusing on other stuff that makes me happy—when I’m focused on other stuff, I care less about how I look, but what ends up happening is that the happier I am with other aspects of my life, the better I think I look.

My gender has flipped again, and I once again feel like a woman. I’ve also gone back to using both they/them and she/her pronouns (like, officially; unofficially I’m okay with they, she, and he, especially if people switch them up a lot), for several reasons which I don’t feel like enumerating right now. Every time something like this happens—meaning I change pronouns or genders, particularly when the pronouns or gender align with my AGAB—I go through a brief crisis of: “Oh my god, I’m not really nonbinary, I was just fooling myself the entire time.” And then I remember that I’m genderfluid, and pronouns =/= gender, and even calling myself a girl or a woman doesn’t have to mean just one thing. Like I wrote in my recent novel-related zine, about the character Whiskey (who is me and not-me): ‘Girl’—or any other gendered term—isn’t a box, it’s a signifier. When you call Whiskey a girl, you’re pointing toward a set of characteristics they have, which may or may not be the same characteristics any other ‘girl’ has. You know what you mean when you say Whiskey’s a girl. If the reader doesn’t get it? Fuck ‘em. That’s their problem.

Saturday night was the big Literacy Council fundraiser at the Roma Lodge, which I was an invited guest at, along with some of the other previous and current Writers-in-Residence. And I got a plus-one, so P. went with me. The dinner was good; they served it family-style for every table, so we passed around salad and bread, followed by fried chicken, mostaccioli, and meatballs. The best part of the evening was the timed Scrabble tournament. Our table won, and they gave us all these really nice journals as prizes; but just the playing itself was so much fun, and full of hilarious moments that I was laughing about for days afterward. And it was great to be around so many of my friends, and to have my husband with me—most times when I’m at an event, he’s home with the kids.

Sunday night I attended an online (Zoom) poetry open mic. A lot of my friends and acquaintances read that night, and it was great to hear them, but then there was this mix-up with the sign-up list so I ended up never getting “called to the mic,” and I was bummed. But then the next day I got a message from the host—he felt so bad about the whole thing that he offered me the feature slot for April. I accepted!

And speaking of April… For years now, I’ve thought about applying for [redacted], and I finally went for it, and I got accepted! So in April I’m doing [redacted]. I’m excited, and a little nervous, but mostly excited.

Monday and Tuesday were super warm—in the sixties, which is incredibly warm for the upper midwest in March, especially here by the lake. I spent a lot of time outside, both days. Monday, C. and I took a quick trip downtown, to get this year’s veggie garden seeds from the library; afterwards, we got gelato at the cafe. Tuesday, we took a long walk, and I got to have my first iced coffee of the year.

Wednesday, late afternoon, the temperature dropped, and I got a massive sinus headache (as I often do when the air pressure changes rapidly). It hurt so bad I got nauseous and shaky and wanted to cry; I had to lay in bed for a while with my heated sinus mask on just to make it even somewhat bearable. Sometimes I think my sinus issues don’t count as a real disability, but then something like that happens and I’m like: wait, the pain is sometimes so bad I can’t do anything? Yeah, that’s a real disability.

Yesterday I hung out with my mom. It’s so weird. Half the time she stresses me the fuck out and I don’t even want to be around her (like—half the time I love her but I don’t like her, ya know?), but the other half the time we have a blast and I’m really glad she’s my mom. Yesterday was a lovely day. We went downtown. She treated us to brunch. I had a twist on an Irish coffee, what they call an “Irish Americano”—a cafe Americano with both Irish whiskey and bourbon in it—and the Mediterranean skillet (eggs served over hashbrowns mixed with red onion, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, feta cheese, and hummus). We sat there for a long time, even after we finished eating, and had a great conversation. Then we went to the art museum, and I saw a lot of really amazing pieces, and got inspired, and got emotional, and gosh I just love art so much!! And I’m so happy our town has not one but two art museums! And then I splurged a little in the gift shop. Oh, yeah: I have a credit card now! My first-ever credit card, at age forty fucking two, because I never qualified for one before. My bank offers secured credit cards to help people build their credit, and I applied for one earlier this month and got accepted. I purposely set it for the lowest limit possible, and believe me, I’m being very careful not to overspend to the point where I’ll never pay it off. But if I never use it at all, I’ll never build my credit, so…yeah, I splurged just a tiny bit. I bought a gorgeously illustrated book of excerpts from Pablo Neruda poems (that one’s for me and the kids), and a card game that involves both visual art and poetry, which, well, sign me the fuck up.

We also had a neat interaction with one of the gift shop cashiers—he’d seen the umbrella I was carrying when we walked in, a University of Michigan umbrella, and told us he’d recently moved here from Michigan. We asked him what part, and he said Flint, and we were like hey! We lived there, too! He’d lived there his whole life up until six months ago when he moved to Wisconsin, whereas we only lived there for six years (and left 34 years ago), but still. Small world.

Last night, P. and I had some wild, passionate sex.

On the not-so-good front: this morning, P. started coming down with some unspecified yuck. He’s testing negative for CoViD so far, which is good, but I know there’s a gnarly non-CoViD chest cold floating around right now, too, as I have some friends who’ve had it. Unfortunately, this means we can’t go to the St. Patrick’s Day parade tomorrow, which sucks, but what’re you gonna do? I’m trying to take precautions—I’ve changed out the sheets and towels, aired out the bedrooms, wiped down surfaces, and taken Emergen-C. P. is keeping to himself as much as possible. So far, the kids and I still feel okay, so hopefully we don’t get whatever it is (or that it’s mild, if we do).

I had to go out and run some errands today (post office, grocery store), so I masked up and went out (I’m not perfect about masking 100% of the time, but I always mask if I have any symptoms of anything or if I know I’ve been exposed to something). I had a lovely interaction with an old woman at the grocery store. (I say she was old not as a pejorative, but because she was definitely in her late eighties or maybe even in her nineties.) We were both entering the liquor department at the same time, and she said: “I love your hair! I used to be a redhead, too, before it went white.” “Thanks! This isn’t my natural color, though.” “I know,” she said. “No one’s hair is that shade. But it suits you! And I love your boots, too!” (I was wearing my tall black boots with all the buckles, that I got for my birthday.) “Thank you!” I said again. “And I love your jacket!” (She was wearing a very pretty yellow jacket.) Then we happened to both be going for the Jameson. She laughed and said: “I can’t drink like I used to—I used to be able to put ‘em away with the best of ‘em—but you have to have a little Jameson on St. Paddy’s Day!” “Or just because it’s a day that ends in a ‘y’!” I said, half-joking. She laughed and said: “Oh, I love your spirit, too! Perhaps I will just take you home with me!” I don’t know if she meant that in a queer way or an “you’re the granddaughter I never had” way, but either way, I appreciated it. I love encounters like that with elderly folks; I like knowing that one can live that long and still have that kind of energy.

What else? It’s Pisces season, still. Which means I have strange, intense dreams nearly every night, and during the day I’m either horny, or sad, or both. I know, I said I’m mostly happy these days, and I am, but I’m still sad a lot, too. Maybe ‘melancholy’ is a better word for what I mean.

I have a crush, my first proper crush (i.e., not a friend-crush, and not a crush on a celebrity) in a while. Her name is K., I first met her back in November, and for a while I tried to convince myself it was just a friend crush. “No no, I don’t have a crush on her,” I’d say to myself, “I just think she’s neat and wanna hang out with her.” But then when I compared how I feel when I run into her or see pictures of her, or just even think about her, vs. how I feel about my friend-crushes, I was like: “Ooooh, okay, no, she definitely gives me pants feelings and a little flutter in my tummy. It’s a crush crush.” Nothing shall come of this crush, but that’s okay. I’m fine with casually crushing on her. It’s nice just to feel those feelings again. Gets the blood flowing, makes me know I’m still alive, y’know? Plus, since she’s also a poet and spoken word performer whose work I love, I’m using some of the crush energy to try and impress her with my literary artistry.

And I have been missing past loves, what else is new. I’ve been missing A.D. and A.C., my two boys with the same first name from the same Chicago suburb. I’ve been missing "Sullivan," and S., and F. And of course other than the two A.s, I haven’t seen or spoken to any of them in years and years. And even with the A.s… I realize that I don’t know them anymore, so when I miss them I’m missing who they were—and I’m also missing who I was back then. What’s that quote about desire? About how it’s not just a desire for a person, place, or thing, but rather a desire to be the person who fits with that person, place, or thing? It’s like that. When I miss old loves (or old friends, or places I once knew, etc.), I don’t just miss them, I miss being the person who fit with them, once upon, however briefly.

But then there’s the flipside to all the yearning for new crushes and old flames, and that’s realizing: I do have a lot of amazing people in my life. I’ve lost a lot of friends over the years, but I still have so many wonderful friends, both old and new. In the past year, I’ve even reconnected with some people whom I thought were out of my life for good, and it’s just good to know—though some friends may leave my life forever, others will come in and out of it. Maybe "Filia" was right, all those years ago. Maybe some “see yas” really do mean “see ya down the road,” not “goodbye forever.”

And romantically—every day, I look at P. and am just so happy he’s my person. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs over the course of our relationship—as of June, we’ll have been together fifteen years—and I know we’ve both had times when we’ve thought of calling it quits. But we’ve always managed to work it out, and our relationship has gotten stronger and stronger, and I just love him so much. I can’t imagine having anyone else as my primary partner.

The kids have been flooring me lately, too, in the best possible way. Again, there are struggles, but overall I’m just amazed by them and love them more every day. Especially as they’ve both been getting into music—both playing it and listening to it. D. has gotten really into Pearl Jam, which is so funny. Partly because until fairly recently, he was ambivalent about rock music, and was more into techno and hip hop. Which is obviously fine; I like music in both those genres, and I’m definitely not the type of parent to force my kids to like what I like. (I introduce them to stuff I like, but I don’t make them like it, y’know?) So it’s kinda cool that he’s coming around to rock and its various subgenres on his own. But it’s also funny because he’s twelve, and it was around that same age that I first got into Pearl Jam.

I’ve been rekindling my love for Shakespeare’s plays, recently. Not that it ever really goes away completely, it’s just that it’s such a long-running special interest of mine that it’ll go on the backburner for a while, and then something will spark and it’s like oh no, I’m obsessed with Shakespeare again. Which is what’s happening currently. I’ve decided that I’m going to study Shakespeare with D. as part of his curriculum next month. We’re going to cover one comedy and one tragedy. I’ve already chosen Hamlet for the tragedy (he’s a moody tween, I think it’s perfect), but I haven’t chosen a comedy yet, because I love all of Shakespeare’s comedies so much.

On a related note: my mom recently had me go through the few things of mine that were still at their house, and one was a book called Shakespeare for Beginners, which I got when I was 15 or 16. I wasn’t even really a beginner at that point—I’d already seen many Shakespeare plays, and had been in A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice!—but I think I got it for a school project because it does have pretty good summaries of all his plays and a bit of his poetry. Anyway, I was flipping through it, and I found a letter inside, from the American Birding Association, thanking me for registering as a Young Birder of the Year, from the year I was 16/17. I laughed my ass off, and thought of that quote from Tight Pants zine about being the strange, smart kid. Because that time in my life was full of similar dichotomies. Yeah, I studied Shakespeare and was an amateur birder. I also had sex with boys and girls, went to punk shows, and got stoned. Punk? Punk! Or, you know, to quote Whitman: Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.

The other week, in my Facebook memories, I saw a post I made in 2017: I declare this year my year of writing like hell and resisting despair. I reposted it, saying that I was gonna try to match that same energy this year, and so far I have been. I’ve got my novel in progress, I write 1-2 mini-zines a month for my zine subscription thing + the occasional installment of my Substack newsletter, and I’m still averaging 1.5 drafts of new poems per day. And then, Wednesday, I did my weekly tarot and oracle draw. This time, I drew one card from the Art Witch oracle deck, and one from the Rust Belt Arcana tarot deck. Both the cards I drew have to do with abundance, fertility, inspiration, and creativity—the Rainbow from the oracle deck, and The Empress from the tarot. I reread the chapter about The Empress in The Creative Tarot by Jessa Crispin, and in a creative sense, The Empress is all about having the ability to take creative ideas and bring them to fruition—and not only that, it’s all about being able to work on many different projects at once, successfully! So, that’s excellent news. Guess I can continue working on my novel, mini-zines, and Substack and still manage the [redacted] in April.

There is one project I’ve decided to…well, not give up on, just approach differently. I’ve decided not to pitch my book idea about [redacted] to [redacted]. I talked to a friend who has published in the [redacted] series, and… For one thing, they no longer offer advances, so even if they did accept the pitch, I’d have to bust my ass for six months to write it and not see a dime until it was published—which could be two years from now! And for another thing, based on what he said, I don’t think I’d have enough creative freedom with it. So I’m still going to write something about [redacted] eventually, but I think I’m going to self-publish it in zine form or as installments on my Substack (or both). Basically, I have such limited time these days, and so many projects I’m already working on, that I’m not going to take on another one unless it pays incredibly well (and fast) and/or I’m super passionate it about it. So I don’t want to start on a project that I wouldn’t see any money from for years and that I wouldn’t get to write the way I want.

Funny side note: The last time The Empress was coming up for me a lot was in early 2017. And yes, that year was incredibly fertile, in a creative sense. I did write like hell, and resist despair. But it was also the year I got pregnant with and gave birth to C. Thankfully, since P. had a vasectomy, I know that this time it means only the creative sort of fertility.

I made coconut curried salmon for dinner tonight, and it was awesome. Now I’m in bed, drinking a lil’ Jamo with ginger ale and lime, about to watch a movie, and crossing my fingers that I don’t come down with the yuck.

#ashtrayfloors #dear livejournal #i told y’all i’d be back to personal posting on this blog eventually! here i am!#long post #there’s too much in here to tag so #read at your own risk #oh and sorry for all the redacted b.s.#i just don’t wanna announce it until i announce it

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ghostslimu · 1 year

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introduction 2.0 the updated edition

UPDATE: art account wooo!! @ghostslimu-art hi! this used to be a system blog but turns out we have a lot more to say! cw a lot of text. like, a wall of text. sorry formatting not my hobby

(scroll a little for DNI)

about me ("host" or rather, most frequent fronter): - i go by virgil (or mika), he/him - 18 (body's age) - in a lot of (pretty mainstream, sorry) fandoms but will probably never talk about them here - transmasc (mostly binary, just some guy) bi and on the aroace spectrum!! - in an (outer system) poly relationship with 2 dudes who have no idea this blog exists - formally diagnosed with a lot of stuff but that's none of your business - i write! very rarely also draw - i like horror and romance and sometimes fantasy!!

about the whole system: - we don't have a system name sadly sorry - a lot of alters, even more fragments (50+) - traumatized, putting the dissociative and disorder in DID. being a system is, generally for us, not all that fun - no collective stance on syscourse, so don't ask us about it. each alter is entitled to their own opinion, and most of us just don't care enough to have one, sorry - all information on introjects and littles will be kept off this blog for our own safety, unless they want to participate in posting in the future! - we want to reblog more but are often too shy to interact with other people #socialanxiety, so this blog is mostly just a collection of our stream of consciousness, sorry about that. this is less of a social media profile and more of an archive - all posts are rebloggable and can be reblogged by anyone no need to even ask

strict DNI: - basic criteria. racists, antisemites, homophobes, maps, terfs, etc. - believe in "narcissistic abuse" or "borderline abuse" or any other "disorder + abuse" format - fakeclaimers - porn blogs

loose DNI (aka "it depends"): - proshipper, the term is so broad it can mean whatever so to make it clear: if you fetishize and glamorize incest or pedophilia, that's gross. if you just want to ship problematic (consenting) couples, that's fine!! if you write or read about heavy disturbing topics with critical thought, that's also fine - aesthetic blogs, if you're just here to reblog our vents. our suffering isn't pretty - strong opinions on syscourse, because we won't be able to collectively agree with you. if you only follow strictly pro or anti blogs, then this one might not be for you!! - young people. generally, there won't be anything explicitly 18+ on here, but please beware and follow at your own risk!! also, if you're too young to be on this site, you're also too young to follow. we feel most comfortable with people/systems who are (bodily) 18+ - ed blogs. i get it, i've been formally diagnosed. if you relate to a mental health post, you relate to it. feel free to reblog, just don't add any triggering commentary to any of our posts, thank u system members (here's where there used to be picrews but our appearances fluctuate so frequently, there's not much sense to that): kurt - caretaker/manager/fronting gatekeeper - 27 - he/him salem - former persecutor/now protector - 16 - she/they griffin - protector - 16 - he/they mici - headspace gatekeeper/archivist - ageless - they/he/she meta (formerly bunny) - former little - ageless - they/them svi - persecutor - 17 - he/they freddie - protector - 20-something - he/him the rest won't use this blog/are kept private for safety reasons!! please do not ask about them unless we're friends!! also keep in mind that we don't sign off as we're often blurry and it's just too much work!

#introduction #followers please do ignore this post it is unimportant

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tuiyla · 2 years

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We love Brittany but let's be real, some of the things she says are stupid and and even more often the things she says might not really be stupid but they're perceived by others that way, at least at first. I would imagine people who are not her friends and family who do know her do make her feel stupid sometimes, do react negatively to the things she says or mock her. How do you think she reacts to that, how does Santana? I'm talking post series.

If we really wanna be real I think we have to acknowledge that Brittany was first and foremost, certainly for the majority of her run a comedic character who often said things we simply cannot take seriously. Not because I'm picking and choosing but because it's impossible to ground something so far removed from the dramatic elements of the story. Even her genuine moments, most of which related to Santana, had comedic padding to them.

So yeah, Brittany says wacky things. If we were to take some of these at face value, and god only knows where to draw the line, we get her goodbye scene in 4x22 or her wedding vow. At times like that, when Brittany is allowed to be a fully realized character beyond the comic relief she admits to having felt bad and inferior because of how people treated her. I also turn to scenes like the one in Kurt's bedroom in 3x02, where she goes into with such genuine spirit only to be saddened when she feels like something's not clicking. I think she mostly just shrinks in on herself, though we do later see Britt stand up and say no to what she calls bullying. I wouldn't quite use that word but it does feel mean when people choose to make fun of her instead of at least trying to understand.

Post-series, Brittany knows she's smart. She knows she's not a conventional booksmart type, sure, but she knows her worth. She knows there are things she'll never get but she also sees things, connections and theories that others never will. I think adult Brittany is confident enough that it doesn't hurt and she can comfortably take those mocking her down. Doesn't mean it still doesn't hurt at times but she knows it proves their own ignorance and she has people believing in her. Santana's been saying she's smart and a genius since summer of senior year.

As for Santana, she's always been defensive of Brittany even when she also raised an eyebrow at the things her gf was saying. I think she'd mostly leave it to Britt to defend herself because there's trust there and I don't think Brittany likes Santana fighting her battles for her. But that said, Santana's temper is what it is so if someone is particularly mean or if they say stuff behind Brittany's back, you better be ready for a Lima Heights rant. Those who just don't Get It, they ignore.

#i guess it depends on whether YOU think britt really is stupid #i don't. for various reasons #people mocking her breaks my heart #anon #glee asks #brittany asks #brittana asks

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lawjust · 2 years

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Our biggest design challenges involved making sure the player understood where things were located in the salvaging environment, as well as keeping inputs minimal and intuitive.

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Simulating a zero-g environment and providing players with full movement within it is incredibly challenging, but equally fun, to tackle. The challenges of a zero-gravity physics simulation We’re far from the first people to explore these themes, and we knew the work that came before us would both help us see what had been done before and what we might be able to offer today’s audiences thinking about the future of work. Le Guin, Joseph Heller, Cory Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ray Bradbury throughout the game’s development. We read the works of John Steinbeck, Ursula K. We didn’t stop with movies and television, however. Movies like “Alien”, “Moon”, “Outland”, and even documentaries and dramas like “Brazil”, “Blood on the Mountain”, “Deepwater Horizon”, and the seminal blue-collar, construction site thriller “Steel” from 1979 all helped point us toward different ideas for the game’s setting and tone.

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We also had regular movie nights to explore the balance between satire and dystopia. Mixing references and inspiration is a great way to explore and design your fictional world as you build it, and we often looked toward 80s and 90s Anime for our industrial design to visual effects. While intentionally heightened and sometimes satirical, the dynamics between the working class and corporations in Hardspace: Shipbreaker are broadly the same as those throughout the history of labor and industry, and it’s easy to see those dynamics at play even today. We looked at existing welding and grinding equipment, and tried to bring that tactile, rough-and-ready look to everything we created for the game, staying away from science fiction technology that looked too sleek or unblemished. The industrial challenges of salvaging these ships are mostly solved through brute force.Īlthough Hardspace: Shipbreaker takes place in the future, our goal was always to show that the tools of labor often look similar, no matter the time period. There is no faster-than-light travel, nor is there teleportation or advanced AI. Striking a balance between futuristic elements and details from our current reality was tough, but we set some ground-rules to make the game’s world internally logical. You can come up with a lot of interesting ideas just by thinking through what a day in the life of one of these workers would be like, and how technology might help or hinder their work. the idea that in a fictional work “the limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness”) as we stay immersed in the science of space travel so we can also engage with these designs in practical terms, working out how the game’s ships, tools, and systems might look and function in real life. Yet our approach is not just based on the rule of cool (i.e. We pored over the blueprints for real-world ships, explored and photographed a derelict ferry, and even rented boats to ride alongside massive cargo ships to examine their construction.Īs a team of space lovers, we find a lot of challenge and joy in designing striking, iconic designs for the ships in our games. This means establishing the design language of our spaceships was crucial to achieving a sense of immersion, and our extensive research on contemporary seafaring boats and ships was key to making the game’s world feel lived-in and real.

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Hardspace: Shipbreaker is mostly played as a first-person zero-g workplace simulator as you explore the often dangerous inner workings of decommissioned spaceships waiting for salvage. To help shape the specific blue-collar shipbreaking setting and the plot related to it, we looked at many different things for inspiration, from the Luddite rebellion, to America’s Gilded Age, the Ironworkers who built the first skyscrapers in the 1920’s, all the way to the modern-day Shipbreakers, particularly in places like Alang Beach in Gujarat. To build the lore and general context in which the game takes place, we heavily researched emerging technologies and theories about the future of human space travel and the industrialization of space, as well as the history of industry and human labor. Our vision for Hardspace: Shipbreaker was retrofuturistic – and more specifically inspired by the “ cassette futurism” aesthetic which draws from 70s and 80s technology. Our zero-g spaceship-salvaging sandbox game Hardspace: Shipbreaker releases on consoles September 20, and we’re here to share some insider details about how its futuristic world came to be! Hi everyone! We are Elliot Hudson (Game Director), Chris Williams (Studio Art Director), and Vidhi Shah (Senior UX Designer) at Blackbird Interactive.

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wandasallerdyce · 4 years

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Being Scott’s Boyfriend Would Include…

Fandom: X-Men (Marvel)

Pairing: Scott Summers & Male Reader

Requested: yes/no

Warning(s): none, just fluff

Notes: so um lmao I had this in my mind and I just needed to write it. I think it may be a little too long but that’s okay I hope you guys enjoy it! 💕

(GIF not mine)

Cuddling 24/7

Mans cannot function without cuddling at least once a day

Having movie night dates every Friday (mostly always Star Wars)

He will always pay even if you protest

“Borrowing” the professors cars along with Jubilee, Jean, Ororo, Peter, and Kurt

Xavier has given up at this point

Always dressing up as something Star Wars related

One time, you dressed as Leía as a joke to fool around with Scott. Let’s just say he stopped functioning and had a nosebleed when he walked into your guys’ room

Always comforting him and making him food when the anniversary of Alex’s death comes around

You make sure he takes it easy and cuddle in bed all day with him if that’s what he needs

At first he was nervous to show pda since he was new to this whole dating a guy thing

Eventually, with some reassurance, he now proudly holds your hand in public

If he’s feeling extra confident that day, he’ll wrap his arm around your waist

Scott being amazed at your powers even if the other kids were afraid of them

Everyone knew not to mess with you unless they wanted to get badly injured. I mean, they all saw the incident with the tree

You being his sparring partner since you could easily put up a shield with your energy powers

If you get injured during a mission, he will instantly rush you to the med bay once you arrive to the mansion

He will baby you once you get out of med bay. Scott will run a warm bath for you, dress you, and tuck you into bed

Constant I love yous whether it be across the room, table, in between classes or in the hallways

Small pecks here and there

Scott’s kisses are passionate, slow and full of love

He will hold you by your waist while you wrap your arms around his neck

On stressful days tho, his kisses are rough and messy

Scott will always show you off

Sometimes, you’ll be walking down the hall and you’ll hear:

“Have you met my boyfriend (y/n) yet? He’s the greatest person to ever exist” or “My boyfriend (y/n) can do it 10 times better than you”

Scott can get jealous very easily

He will feel threatened by every guy that talks to you that’s not him, Charles, Hank, Peter, and Kurt

If a guy starts to get a little to flirty with you, he will wrap his arm around your waist and kiss you on the cheek which results in you kissing him completely

He gives the guy a cocky smile, knowing that you acknowledge him as your boyfriend and don’t try to hide it

When you guys settle for the night he’s always the big spoon. It makes him feel that he’s protecting you in a way

You’ll wake up first and turn around to look at him

He looks so peaceful and at ease when he sleeps so you just nuzzle into his chest and fall asleep again

Eventually, after 6 years of dating he’ll pop the question. Sure, you can’t legally get married yet, but you’ll both be married in each other’s eyes

It also doesn’t bother both of you that other people think that your both too young to get married. It’s your guys’ life

You guys go to Paris for your honeymoon. Yes, it’s cheesy but Raven suggested it. She said it’s actually pretty fun when your not getting shot at. Whatever that means

And, a couple years later, you and Scott “adopt” a kid in a way. A kid named Bobby who’s dealing with being a mutant and, with being gay.

You both greeted Bobby when he arrived at the school and somehow since then, he’s become a son of sorts to both of you. He was really happy that you both accepted him even if he was gay, somehow not knowing both of you were married.

When he does find out tho, he’s ecstatic and ever since then, all three of you had become somewhat of a small family. And it was perfect. Everything you both ever wanted. A family of your own. And it was perfect

Fin

#male reader #x male reader #marvel oneshots #Scott Summers x male reader #x men x male reader #x men imagine #headcanons #marvel imagine #cyclops x male reader #male reader insert #male reader imagine

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kuiinncedes · 3 years

Text

all of my enemies started out friends

@gleeadvent day 1: apology (a day late but 🤪)

how do i post fics again lksdghf

also if u missed it me and meg r doing the glee advent thing ahaha :DDD go check it out if u want lol

this is uhh a kurtana fic !!! set in 6x03 because you knowwww tbh i'm not super confident in my characterizations i guess of santana in general i haven't written her much and of kurt in relation to santana 😬 so idk how this is in terms of that lol but i'm pretty happy with it for nowww so yeahhhhh :D

title from "the archer" by taylor swift it makes sense in my head but i don't think it's a very obvious connection lmao but yeah idk (omg what if i make the titles also follow the alphabet along with the prompts slkdhsfj jk)

word count: 768

under the cut and on ao3 !!

Kurt sits alone in the choir room, plunking out quiet notes on the piano but his heart’s not in it, his mind’s not in it, just a swirling mess of --

judgemental --

-- shrill --

-- sexless, self-centered --

-- utterly, utterly intolerable --

His fingers slip on the keys and the discordant notes cut through his thoughts for a moment.

Living with Santana -- hell, just being her friend, being in her presence for four years -- he did learn not to take everything she said to heart. He learned, as best he could, as much as she allowed, about the spiky walls she put up around herself, and how she might let him get past them sometimes. He’d thought he was somewhat past that stage with her -- that they’d become close enough to not warrant all the guards anymore. But he supposes that can always change. He supposes, really, that he did something to make it change today.

It’s funny -- ironic, a little sad, honestly -- to be back in this choir room. On the one hand, it’s full of mostly happy memories; it’s where his closest friendships were forged, where his skills and character were tested, where he felt so much struggle and hardship but also where he escaped from more of it, and where he felt so much love and found himself comfortable enough to give it, too.

And now, here alone, seemingly with none of that -- a love who has anything but love for him, one friend he loves but who’s more focused on herself at the moment, and another friend who… has an admirably extensive vocabulary, he has to say.

Guess you really do have to lose everything to… what, be happy? Find yourself? Well, he’s waiting for that part.

Enough of the fucking pity party, Hummel. He does want to help Rachel, and gain some valuable experience and academic credit for himself as well, so his best option is to take this seriously. Focus on the work like Rachel is. Maybe everything else will fall into place.And if not… he won’t be completely doomed. He does have something.

The sound of heels clicking against the ground doesn’t catch his attention until they’re almost right in front of him, and he looks up to see Santana on the other side of the piano.

Kurt almost cringes in surprise and in apprehension for round two. He hopes it just comes out as a flattening of his lips -- his mouth like a cat’s ass --

“I owe you an apology,” Santana says.

Kurt… wasn’t really expecting that. He meets her eyes, dark and guarded as ever. Her expression… doesn’t really show him anything. He’s not sure if he should wait, or --

“I went too far,” she continues firmly, “and… I need you to know that you do matter to me.”

Kurt almost laughs -- in any other situation, he’d be able to focus on Santana’s clear reluctance to say this, maybe poke fun at her a little bit in a very different situation. But part of him also warms with something close to pride -- not that he’d ever tell Santana, for fear of the razor blades in her hair and in her words, the latter of which he’s already been a victim to more times than he really ever would’ve wanted.

He can see that this is hard, he knows it is, so much harder than verbally spilling insults and borderline cruelty but she is doing it for him. And that alone confirms her words in Kurt’s mind.

“I need to apologize, too,” he says in lieu of an expression of genuine forgiveness, at least for now. He’s not sure if it would be very appreciated. “I… shouldn’t have taken my own problems out on you. I’m so happy for you and Britt, Santana.”

“Fine, enough with the platitudes, Hummel,” Santana drawls after a short pause, rolling her eyes and bringing a hand up in front of her, examining her fingernails. “A little too late for it.”

Kurt huffs, and Santana’s mouth quirks in a slight smile, and he knows they’re leaving it there.

Because he has the walls, too. And when they’re both raw in different ways, guarding pure happiness or heartache against even some of the closest people, and neither of them is putting them down for now, it’s probably best to just leave it there.

So he starts actually playing the intro to something, giving her the excuse she wants to leave under the guise of being sick of all the bursting into song. And they’ll leave it for another time, when they’re feeling more vulnerable, to let those walls down more.

#glee advent 2021 #glee fanfiction #glee #kurtana #kurt hummel #santana lopez #uhhh not proofreading one last time like i usually would bc i'm in zoom lecture now XD #so i will almost certainly edit things later but i just wanna post it now lmao #edit: i did edit things later >:) lol #my ficsssss

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todaydreambelieversfic · 3 years

Text

Author Spotlight: Heartsmadeofbooks Day 2

Author: @heartsmadeofbooks

Share one of your strengths.

I like to think I'm good at writing angst. At least it feels like I'm at my best when I'm writing it.

Share one of your weaknesses.

The language, probably. It's gotten better with time, but at first it was so difficult to write in English, as it's not my first language. I'm very lucky to have a wonderful beta who hasn't yet killed me when I make the silliest of mistakes over and over again. So shout out to Christine for that.

Which fic has been the hardest to write?

There are two, I think, if not three. Syrup and Honey, because it was one of the first, when I felt like I was at the worst when trying to use the language to craft something decent; Quicksand, because it deals with some personal stuff at some points and it was really hard to get it out; and Hidden in the Deep, because that first chapter sat in my drafts FOREVER, and I hated it every time I went back to it, but I was determined to write that story even if it felt so different from anything I had written before.

Which fic has been the easiest to write?

Flowers in the Window, I think. It was like going back home after a very, very long time away, and the whole story was written in a month and a half (probably because of quarantine, but also because I just wanted to do nothing but write all day every day) despite being a rather long and complicated story.

Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?

I think it's a bit of both. For most of my life I wanted to be a writer, but I never fall in love with any of my original stuff. I think I still haven't found that one idea that makes everything fall into place, the way I feel about writing fanfiction. But hey, why can't writing fanfiction be my passion, as well?

Is there an episode or character or arc above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?

Most of my stories are AU, so I don't focus much on episodes, but I do love writing blangst. I'm so sorry, because Blaine Anderson is nothing but sunshine and rainbows and he certainly deserves all of the good things in the world, but there's something about seeing him broken that makes my inspiration flow like a damn river.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Don't stress about every word being perfect right away. Just make sure you pour it all on the page, and you can always come back and fix it later. It's really liberating.

What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Write about what you know. I'm sure it works perfectly for others, but in my case, it would make for extremely boring stories.

If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?

I'm pretty sure most people would say Syrup and Honey (and wouldn't that be a dream come true?), but I've always really loved Sitting, Waiting, Wishing. It would make for a great rom-com, I think.

What’s your process? Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order? Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines? What are the perfect writing conditions for you?

I start with an idea and I make a doc with all the details and an outline of chapters and characters. Sometimes that initial doc has a fragment of a scene that will later be included in the story, if that scene was a big part of why I wanted to start writing the story in the first place. Then I write the story from start to finish. I can't do it out of order, I just make a mess of things and get constantly lost.

My perfect writing conditions include silence, preferably, but I can work with some music on, mostly instrumental or in some way related to the story. Otherwise, it's distracting. A cup of tea is always nice, if it's cold weather season, or even a glass of wine. If I plan a long writing session, I usually have a candle or flowers on my desk, too.

However, if I really, REALLY want to write and none of those things are available (not even the silence), I can write anywhere. I've written at work and on my phone in a crowded train, and in the middle of the night after waking up from a particularly inspiring dream.

***

Check out Heartsmadeofbooks’s Fics!

The Awakening - Kurt Hummel has put his perfect life together carefully, making sure all the pieces fit exactly how he wanted them to. But all it takes is one name from his past to make all his hard work go to waste - Blaine Anderson.

Flowers in the Window - This is the story of four men - Cooper and Blaine; Burt and Kurt. This is a story of heartbreak and loyalty, of pain and hope, of loneliness and family. This is the story of how, even when the sun stops shining, love finds a way to bloom.

Solid Gold - Ten years after breaking his engagement to Blaine, Kurt's life isn't the fairy tale he once hoped for. Forced to leave New York, he goes looking for a second chance, not expecting to find it in the town he always wanted to run away from, or with the man whose heart he shattered.

#author spotlight: heartsmadeofbooks

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gretavanfleetlove · 3 years

Note

Hey love, I came across your account and saw you did måneskin ships. I don’t know if you still take asks so if you don’t, do not mind my this, it’s totally fine.

I’m a swedish pansexual woman with quite long, blonde wavy hair and green eyes. My pronouns are she/her. I have to much energy, and when everyone else is on their way to fall asleep, I’m still up dancing around (probably drunk) to weird music no one likes but me. I love learning languages and I’m currently learning both Italian and Latin. I’m a dog person, but I’m such an animal person in general. I own two chihuahuas (or demon dogs, whatever you wanna call them) but they are actually nice compared to other chihuahuas. I don’t have a certain style, and I experiment with it a lot. One day I look like Kurt cobain and the other like some hippie straight out of the 80’s. I lovee horror movies and true crime documentaries. I don’t really have a hobby, but I enjoy reading, taking photos and thrift shopping I guess. I speak fluent sarcasm and my humor is terrible and dry. I laugh to everything, my own shitty jokes included. My personality type is istp. I’m pretty good at writing, mostly poems as a way to express my feelings. I started playing the guitar two years ago and I’m not that bad. I also sing but unfortunately, I can’t say I’m as good at it. I’m extremely ambitious and stubborn. Not gonna lie, I’m rather intelligent and my friends says so aswell. I’m a Taurus sun, Aries moon and Cancer sun if it matters.

I think that’s about it. Thank you in advance <33

You’re very welcome 💕 I’m really sorry it took so long but yes they’re open! And this is one of my my first maneskin ships so bear with me!

Four your friend ship I chose Vic!!

Ok so you would see Chili running around in the street

And you went over to pet him obviously

“Hi baby do you have an owner?” You asked the dog even though you knew he wouldn’t respond

“Hi sorry!” Vic said sweetly, whistling him over

And after that y’all introduced yourselves

And now you’re best friends ✨

Definitely going shopping together

Or going through each other’s closets

Either way so many fashion shows

She’s so happy she has another girl to jam with

You definitely play guitar to Morirò da re while she plays bass and sing/yells the lyrics

Definitely tried to help you with Italian

But couldn’t stop laughing

She is no longer your Italian teacher

I don’t know if it’s just me but I feel like Vic would get really excited during horror movies

And you guys would would have nights where you get under a big blanket on the couch and watch scary movies

Chili always attends of course

Usually sleeping in between you guys

You guys are balls of energy together

Ethan will typically be tired on his phone laying down and you guys will blast music and dance like idiots together

Victoria adores your chihuahuas

She tries to get them and chili to play

But she loves playing with them herself

Also Vic thinks you are so smart

Definitely asking you how to spell things while she’s texting

I’m asking politely to be invited to y’all’s parties

They’d be the best no doubt

Thinks your humor is hilarious no matter what you think about it

She definitely introduces you to the whole band

Always asking if you have a crush on one of the guys

“Noooo Vic I told you no!”

“Okay okay but two of my best friends dating…”

“No I don’t like any of them!”

“Not even Damiano?”

“Shut up.”

And Victoria was right. Your relation ship is Damiano✨

As soon as Victoria introduced you two he was a shameless flirt

Once he realized you had a thing for him

It was nOnstOp

But that gave you the extra push you needed to ask him out

I feel like you guys both have very similar sense of humor (we’re not talking about the ‘man walks into a cafe joke ok?)

So you would joke around a lot while everyone else is like huh?

Dance partiessss

All the time

He spins you around even on occasion (when he’s drunk)

He’ll dip you

!!This man thinks you are so interesting!!

You and Damiano have long conversation very often

But during those conversations he asks you so many questions

Like not enough to be annoying but enough to make it known he’s very interested in your personally

Since Vic failed guess who your new Italian teacher is??

It’s Damiano!!

He loves being able to teach you something

Sometimes he feels like your intelligence overrules him (obviously not in a bad way he loves it he’s just happy he can help you like you help him ✨)

You guys definitely go thrifting

You and him both have styles that pretty much change everyday

So I think it would be so much fun going shopping and finding things for each other!

You obviously have a strong relationship with Bidet and Legolas

So strong that when you brought a dog home they didn’t absolutely despise you

He definitely sings while you play guitar

And it’s so cute

Because he’ll just hop in on whatever song

And you love hearing him of course

Vic, Damiano, and you… period

The most energetic friend group I’ve ever seen

Y’all are insane alone together

Then you add Vic to the mix when she wants to hang out with you guys

Crazy-

But in an epic way

Damiano also loves when you read to him!!

He thinks it’s the sweetest thing in the world

Especially when he’s sick he loves it

Either way y’all are adorable 🧡 I hope you enjoy it :) @idasksjsj

#maneskin ships #maneskin #damiano maneskin #victoria maneskin #Damiano David #victoria de angelis #thank u for the asks!

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xmxisxforxmaybe · 5 years

Text

Decryption_Error: “Undefined^Behavior”

Summary: Refusing to give up, refusing to shatter the trust she had worked so hard to build, Y/N fights to get Elliot back; only, when she reaches out, she meets someone new.

Decryption_Error: All Chapters

Word Count: 6200

Tags: @sherlollydramoine @rami-malek-trash @teamwolf2411 @limabein @txmel @alottanothing @ouatlovr @backoftheroomandnotbelonging @moon-stars-soul @free-rami @ramimedley @hopplessdreamer @sweet-charmie @polarcrystall @hah0106 @clumsybookworm18 @diasimar @ramisgirl512 @aboutthatmelancholystorm

Warnings: Angst and believe it or not, SMUT

I hung up the phone and pushed my chair back from my desk, standing to stretch and shake away the agitations of the day and of my life. Lying for Elliot all week had my mind bouncing between irritation and a desperate, black sadness threatening to swallow me whole if I let myself get too close to it.

As I walked to the panel of windows in my office, I thought back to my conversation with Darlene. When Elliot missed work on Friday, I had texted her that evening to see when she could meet me. Leaning against the cool class of the window, a comforting chill creeping across my arm and my forehead, I was reminded of how she and I watched the people from the coffee shop window as we talked about her brother.

Darlene was not one to get out of bed until double-digits popped up on her alarm clock, so we agreed to meet at a coffee shop about a block from Lafayette and Broome at noon on Saturday.

My eyes swept over the muted beige walls and the dark wooden tables of the small, cozy seating area, and I saw she had snagged a corner stool at the high-table built to look out onto the street. I smiled as I took in her legs as they stretched out across the stool beside her, unapologetically taking up twice the space a person needed. My smile split into a grin as I saw the two extra-large coffees clearly purchased without her even bothering to take off her heart-shaped sunglasses.

Darlene let her legs flop to the underside of her stool as I approached. She spun to face the window, reaching up to slide her sunglasses to the top of her head while I shrugged out of my coat and sat down.

“Thanks for meeting me. And for caffeinating me,” I said as I took a cautious sip, cringing slightly as the scalding coffee washed over my tongue. I longed to guzzle it considering I had barely slept since the incident with Elliot.

Darlene looked over to give me a flicker of a smile as she twisted her coffee cup between her fingers, her apprehension palpable.

“No big. What’s up?”

I pressed my lips together as I took a breath to buy a moment as Darlene watched me from the corner of her eye.

“Have you talked to Elliot, uhm, since Thursday night?”

I glanced at Darlene’s profile as her big eyes watched the people on the sidewalk scurry by. For once, she was holding back.

“Don’t,” I pressed. “We know each other too well to start holding shit back now.”

Darlene huffed and swirled on her stool. She leaned back into the wall as she looked at me in that same searching way as Elliot, like a child deciding whether or not to reveal their secret for fear of being punished.

“I haven’t talked to him, okay?”

“You know what happened.”

Darlene fidgeted as she plucked at the tights she was wearing under a pair of a stone-washed denim shorts. “He wasn’t answering my texts so I went to see him last night. He was a dick. So I left. We didn’t really chat.”

I took another sip of coffee, formulating what to say next. Any conversation with either of the Aldersons had the potential to turn bad pretty fast. Darlene was always the easiest of the two to be straight with, but if she felt like she needed to protect her brother, I knew I wasn’t going to get very far.

Mostly, I didn’t want her to feel like she was making a choice: me or him. Darlene and I were both on the same side, whether she fully believed it or not.

“He wasn’t himself on Thursday night,” I stated, opting to avoid another question.

“That’s just it, Y/N. He is himself, right? Isn’t that what’s so fucked up about this whole thing?” Darlene pushed off from the wall and swiveled on her stool again, returning her gaze to the sidewalk. “And he wasn’t, like, the crazy version of himself. He was just . . . a dick. He gets like that sometimes, too.”

“We can all be dicks.”

“Duh. But this was different,” Darlene said, her voice quieting. “I interrupted him.”

A prickle of fear crept down my spine and I tightened my grip on my cup.

“Interrupted what?”

“He was writing a kernel rootkit. When he noticed me looking, that’s when he told me to get the fuck out.”

“And I’m sure you smiled politely and did as he asked,” I said with a huff of a laugh. “I’m guessing there’s no way to swing that it was work-related?”

Darlene chuckled darkly, “Maybe your ship’s gone to shit since you moved up to the big office?”

“Elliot was supposed to be working on new scripts to track WiFi vulnerabilities.”

“Definitely not what he was doing,” she said as exasperation tinged the edges of her words.

I turned away from Darlene’s profile. People were passing quickly by on the sidewalk, tucked into their coats to stop the early-spring wind that always seemed to hold the threat of rain. I watched as cars sat bumper to bumper, waiting for the light at the crosswalk to change.

The longer our silence wore on, the longer I watched such seemingly normal bits of life pass by, the louder my mind repeated the names of the people who had been hacked at my company and at Dad’s.

Colin. Bill. Kurt.

The other anonymous hacks flashed through my mind, the ones I couldn’t assign a name to, and I wondered, really wondered if Elliot was responsible.

Don’t be crazy.

Elliot and I were together more than we were apart up until a few weeks ago. What could Elliot have even gained from those hacks? They had nothing to do with E Corp, which was the only hack I was really worried about him committing: a vengeance hack.

“This is such a mess,” I forced myself to say to distract my thoughts before they could spiral. “I need to see him.”

“Give him space. It can be awhile before he’s normal again.”

“He missed work, Darlene. I . . .”

“What?” she said, turning her light blue eyes to my face.

“I lied. Said he had a death in the family.”

“Fuck!” Darlene said too loudly, making me jump and drawing the eyes of other patrons.

“Jesus,” I hissed, “What’s wrong?”

“I fucking hate this!” she said, her voice low again. “We were hanging out more. Having fun. He was . . . happy. I was happy. Things felt normal for fucking once and here we fucking go again. I can’t keep doing this shit.”

My lips turned down in a frown of compassion. Sometimes I forgot how young Darlene really was.

“You aren’t his keeper, Darlene. He should be taking care of you. Actually, you should be taking care of each other.”

She made a little huff of derision.

“Yeah fucking right.”

“I’m serious. You need to prioritize your own well-being.”

“He’s all I have, Y/N. He’s all I’ve ever had,” Darlene said sadly, then with irritation, “But I’m sick of his fucking shit.”

“I wanted to talk to you today because I’m not giving up on him without a damn good fight. I promised you that.”

Darlene took a big gulp of her coffee and without turning to look at me, she linked her arm in mine as it sat on the tabletop and leaned into me, resting her head on my upper arm.

I sighed, “Let me take care of him this time,” and tilted my head so it was resting on top of hers, the slight warmth radiating out to my cheek.

We sat like that for a long time as I reminded myself that all Elliot needed was one more reason to close himself off forever. I started our relationship knowing he had an inability to trust people, an inability to even like people. It was clear he had never let someone in this far before and the appearance of this other told me I was right.

We watched the people outside, feeling like we were actually the outsiders, looking in on something we couldn’t understand. As I breathed in her scent, oddly similar to Elliot’s, I realized that Darlene hadn’t let anyone in this far either, not in a long, long time.

* * * * *

I pushed back from my office window and rubbed at the cool spot on my arm, nibbling at my lower lip as I thought about how I took Darlene’s advice and gave Elliot space.

Except that under the guise of giving him space, I was actually scratching a very selfish itch.

My parents had kept their apartment uptown as they transitioned to permanently living in Greenwich, deciding that it was more convenient to keep it while Dad still sat on the board. Their apartment was close to a library that was open late into the evenings because of the slew of after-school programs it ran for kids with nowhere else to go. So, instead of going home to my empty apartment, I took the 4 uptown and spent most of the evening diving through psychiatric volumes on disorders that fit Elliot’s symptoms. I was smart enough not to so much as google anything slightly related to Elliot’s possible condition; I didn’t trust that he wasn’t keeping tabs on me in the best, safest way he knew how.

I started with the list Jill had ticked off months ago, and after eliminating anxiety and most stress disorders, I was left straddling dissociative identity disorder and schizophrenia.

After spending so much time with Elliot, I couldn’t recall any instances when he seemed to hear or see things that weren’t there. I couldn’t even really recall him being flat or withdrawn, something schizophrenics tended to be as a result of everything that was going on in their minds. Elliot was almost always happy, or at least content and relaxed, when he was with me; if he was distant, it was because he was sad and it almost always had to do with him believing I was unhappy or upset with him.

I also hadn’t noticed any episodes of him losing time aside from the server room incident and Jared’s smashed nose, which both surely qualified as being traumatic enough to trigger a flashback.

According to my research, traumatic experiences didn’t trigger schizophrenia—that was DID. And what I witnessed on the Fourth and on Thursday was someone protecting Elliot. The more I pushed about the cause of his changes or outbursts, the angrier that protective personality got.

Both disorders scared me because I knew neither one could be addressed without psychiatric care. Schizophrenia, at least, could be managed with medication, but DID was a developmental disorder with no medication available to treat it, psychotherapy and behavioral modification being the most practiced options.

After nearly a week had passed with no word from Elliot, I texted Jill. I was armed with my research and ready to seek a medical opinion. Being a PA in an ER had exposed her to a lot of patients with mental health issues. If anyone could discreetly give me some more information, it would be her.

I finally walked away from the window and back to my desk, settling in to answer the cache of emails that never seem to stop growing. I glanced at the clock on my computer five times before I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to focus on work until I needed to leave.

I kept all my texts ambiguous, no longer trusting in Elliot’s promise to ask, not hack. My message to Jill was lighthearted, a simple, friendly check-in since I hadn’t seen her much since Christmas.

It was just after 7 when I popped into the hospital cafeteria, my eyes catching the wave of Jill’s hand as I scanned the room.

“Hey, babe! It’s been a minute!”

“A long, long minute,” I said as I sat down in front of her, twisting to hang my tote off the back of my chair.

“What happened?” Jill asked, as she bit into her sandwich wrap.

“I don’t even know where to start.”

“Weren’t things literally rosy on Valentine’s Day?” she asked, her words slightly muffled as she chewed.

“Yeah,” I sighed, “Things were.”

I stopped and bit my lip, surprised by the tears that filled my eyes. Sometimes friends could bring out your vulnerabilities just because you knew they loved you without condition.

Jill put her wrap down and waited, her face soft, compassionate. It was no wonder she was so damn good at taking care of people.

“I guess … we just stopped communicating. And it built into this weird tension.”

I knew I had to be careful—I trusted Jill, but there was no way I could tell her, or anyone, about E Corp.

“Do you remember the night you met Elliot?” I asked in a rush.

“Hard to forget. Handsome and wounded. Rescued by the one person who’s always trying to save everyone from their worst selves.”

I smiled, a quick upturn of my lips to show my appreciation for her assessment of me.

“You have no idea just how wounded, Jill.”

I took a deep breath and recounted what happened in my apartment a week ago with as much detail as I could. My eyes were fixed on her sandwich as I fought to maintain an even tone.

When I finally lifted my eyes, to meet her serious gaze, I continued, “And he—whoever he is … was—that was the last I saw of him. I’ve tried calling, texting, emailing. And I tried from work, too. I had to lie to HR today so I know I’ve got to go see him. I can’t just let him fall into the void, but I need to know—what the fuck was that?”

“Shit, Y/N,” Jill breathed.

“Any ideas? I know you’re not a psychiatrist, but you see a lot of people in a day.”

“You said it was like he wasn’t himself? Like he was a completely different person?”

“Yes.”

“Did his voice change pitch?”

“No … but the intonation was different. The words he used were different. It wasn’t like Elliot at all.”

“Was he Elliot when you first got home—like for sure?”

I thought for a moment and nodded yes.

“Did anything happen, even something seemingly normal before he changed?”

“What do you mean?

“Well, like a tic. A neck crack, a twitch, body tensing, fluttering eyelids—even a prolonged blink.”

“Yeees,” I said slowly, then excitedly, “Yes! His eyelids fluttered and … and it seemed like he was withdrawing into himself.”

Jill was quiet, her brows furrowed as she thought. With an even voice, one that I recognized as her doctor-voice, she said, “I really think it’s dissociative identity disorder.”

“I do, too,” I replied with a sigh of relief. “I’ve been researching.”

“Unsurprising,” Jill said with a small smile.

“What do I do? Do I tell him—”

“No,” Jill answered quickly. “He needs to see a psychiatrist. DID is an incredibly complex disorder. People who have it spend a lot of time pretending to be normal, and there are parts of Elliot that may believe they are perfectly normal—maybe not normal, but at least in control. It’s all a part of the system’s coping mechanisms. If DID was easy to detect, it wouldn’t serve its purpose of protecting the core from their trauma.”

“So my research was right—DID is the result of severe trauma.”

“Severe, yes. Also, prolonged emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. Because DID usually begins in childhood, most cases involve parental neglect. A child is rarely able to cope with any sort of abuse on their own, so without a parental protector, the mind copes with that abuse anyway it can.”

“From what Elliot’s sister told me, neglect only begins to describe what their mother did to them.”

“Y/N. You can’t fix everyone who needs fixing.”

“You sound like Franco.”

Jill sighed, a smirk turning up the corners of her lips.

“I just want you to be careful. You absolutely cannot handle this on your own. Elliot needs professional help.”

“Can he—” I struggled to ask the one thing that scared me the most, the one thing never clearly answered in my research, “Can he ever get better?”

Jill frowned, “There’s no definitive answer. Some psychologists believe that if the alters can be integrated, a person with DID can live a normal life. But that doesn’t mean it’s a cure. A person with DID will always run the risk of dissociating. And if more trauma occurs, more alters may be created. It’s—complicated.”

“I never really knew there was anything wrong until Elliot was triggered. What if he’s not triggered anymore?”

“Well, that’s part of the most effective treatment. He needs to explore his triggers, learn his trauma, and heal. It’s years of therapy,” Jill said as she reached out and squeezed my arm.

“I love him.”

Jill finally smiled, “I know you do. And he loves you. I have no doubt about that, babe. But you have to realize there are no guarantees with this disorder. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“He’s worth the risk.”

I was already resigned to fight for Elliot. Every bit of our relationship was one step forward, two steps back, so it came as no surprise that with a leap forward, it was time to damn near fall back off a cliff.

* * * * *

Later that evening, close to 10, I used my key to let myself into Elliot’s apartment.

I was unsurprised to find it empty but surprised to find it in the same state of mess it had been over Memorial Day weekend: Dishes in the sink, unmade bed, clothes scattered, an ashtray near the window almost overflowing, and the trash full.

I took a step toward the garbage bin and realized that it was full of packaging materials and old computer parts.

Why the hell did he need to do a complete scrub?

I walked over to his computer desk and realized everything was new—tower, monitors, all of it had to have been purchased since the last time I had spent the night.

My mind again flashed to the hacks, and there was a gnawing in my stomach that I knew I couldn’t dismiss. Maybe Elliot wasn’t capable of such destruction and manipulation, but whoever he was when he wasn’t Elliot sure as hell might be.

With a sigh of mental exhaustion and because I had no idea how long I’d need to wait, I started fusspotting. I made Elliot’s bed, or at least I started to. As soon as I caught that sweet, citrusy scent of his shampoo mixed in with stale cigarette smoke, I spent the next few minutes sobbing into his pillow. He was broken and I was helpless to put him back together.

But I wasn’t helpless to pull myself together, so I sat up, scrubbed the tears off my cheeks and after a hearty sniff, I finished making his bed.

I glanced at his computer again, and felt a strong pull, like when high tide is coming in and the ocean’s waves are crashing and pulling with a ferocity. I could feel the water rushing past me, sucking me into the abyss.

I took another step toward his desk, my fingers twitching at my sides. I glanced at the door to his apartment before I slid my hand over the cool wood of the back of the chair.

My mind was at war.

Elliot hacked me.

Because he didn’t trust me yet.

He hacked my ex-boyfriends.

Because he didn’t trust himself.

He hurt me.

I withheld information about his own father.

Elliot loves me.

And I love him.

I backed away from the desk, swallowing thickly, my heart beating fast. I ran a shaky hand through my hair as I made my way into the kitchen and flung open the cupboard where Elliot kept his dish soap. I filled the sink with scalding water and concentrated on getting the few dishes in the sink commercial-clean.

I cleared the counter of the few take out containers that let me know he had at least eaten something this past week, and I stuffed them into the already full trash. I took the trash out to the dumpster alongside the building, and returned to the apartment, still empty.

I looked around for Elliot’s weed box and contemplated smoking up, but there was nothing inside. He was either too busy to refill or he was smoking that much now.

I scrolled through my phone, blindly reading a few work emails before I stopped and pulled up my messages. I stared at the screen, Elliot’s name already typed, a stupid black heart beside his name which felt achingly symbolic now. I had thought it was funny once—my dark little soul in his dark jeans with his dark hair.

I typed a message telling him I was waiting at his place but I deleted it, realizing that if I spooked him, I had no idea when I’d get another chance to talk to him.

Tossing my phone on his worn couch, I stood up and began pacing. After several laps, I pulled a book off the shelf and settled on Elliot’s mattress to read, my nervous energy slowly giving way to tiredness as the night wore into morning.

My head snapped up when I heard the keys in the lock; it was 2:30 in the morning when he finally came home, backpack on, hood up, my little black heart finally in front of me for the first time in a week.

He started to shrug out of his backpack as he walked further into the room, but he noticed me as I shifted on his bed, my feet sliding off the mattress to ground myself on the floor.

He froze.

His eyes were wide, staring at me like this was the first time he had ever seen me. Then they started to dart all around his apartment. I could see the panic settle across his features, and I tossed the book off my lap as I stood.

“Where the hell have you been?” I said with an anger that startled us both.

Elliot’s eyes washed over my face in a wave of apprehension, but he remained silent, his eyes moving away from my gaze to focus on the book I had dropped on the bed.

The longer he was silent, the more agitated I got. I knew what was going on wasn’t his fault, but it wasn’t fair he got a pass for walking out on me, consciously or not, I really didn’t care at the moment.

“I lied for you, Elliot. First Ali, then HR. I told them your mother died because you’ve been gone for a fucking week.”

His head snapped up and he fixed his eyes on me for a few seconds before reverting them to the floor. He shrugged the rest of the way out of his backpack, tossing it beside the kitchen table. He glanced up again, his gaze traveling slowly up my face to look at me once more, his eyes a stormy hue as they peered at me from beneath his hood.

Still, he said nothing.

“Well? Where have you been?”

He took a deep breath, his mouth hanging open just a bit as he pulled his hood down and subconsciously fixed his hair.

I froze, my own face twisting into confusion.

There was something different about his movements.

This Elliot was slower, more deliberate, as if he were carrying on a conversation inside of his head before he decided to do anything, even blink.

“You know what—fine,” I said quietly, my mind swirling with a confused anger that I was now using to build a barrier between us. “You win. Everything is always on your terms. Fuck you, Elliot.”

His eyes snapped to mine as I took a few bold steps forward, determined to brush past him and get the fuck out of his apartment.

But he closed the distance between us, moving more swiftly than he had since he walked in the door. He grabbed my shoulders and stilled me. My eyes were burning into his as his searched my face, as he looked at me as if maybe he’d never seen me clearly before.

“How could you do this to us?” I asked, my voice a choked whisper, my eyes bouncing between his as I prayed to whatever god that was listening that he would finally answer me.

“Us?” he questioned in a gruff voice, his brows drawn and his eyes still the dark grey of a sky before a storm, still searching.

“Us,” I repeated, my voice barely audible.

His eyes bore into mine, contemplating, struggling to understand, then suddenly he closed what distance was left between us and kissed me.

When my lips parted with a soft oh of surprise, he pushed his tongue into my mouth as his fingers dug into my shoulders, steadying me.

My mind raced.

Elliot didn’t kiss like this.

Elliot didn’t move like this.

Elliot didn’t burn like this.

I pushed him back and stared at him, wondering if he was the same as he’d been in my apartment, but there was no iciness in his gaze, no boldness: only an unabashed want, a need. He seemed . . . more Elliot than not.

And I missed him.

I stepped closer to him, my hands shaky as they reached up to cradle the back of his head and the side of his face.

“Is this—is this okay?” he asked, his voice thick with lack of use, as one of his hands circled my waist and flattened against the small of my back while the other moved to tangle in my hair.

“I’ve missed you,” I said in answer, leaning in to kiss him, to get lost in this not-quite-Elliot.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t stop myself. Looking back, I should have known in that moment that if I was too weak to resist him, I was going to be powerless when he needed me to stop him—when he needed me to protect him from this part of himself, a part that would prove far more dangerous than his protector.

His hands were roaming over my body, grasping and kneading as we made quick work of each other’s clothes. He walked me back toward the bed, and I expected him to comment on the fact I made it, but he didn’t.

This Elliot didn’t care.

His hands found my shoulders and pushed me down, my breasts bouncing as they hit the mattress, but he was on top of me before my heart could even hammer out its next beat.

He stopped attacking my mouth long enough to pull back as he dragged his fingers over my body, pressing into my soft flesh and leaving little red lines that seemed to fascinate him until he bent to lick along wherever he left a trail.

His want was palpable, as if he had gone without human contact for far too long.

I tried to push him off so I could settle on top of him and slow things down, but he pushed back, clearly craving control.

His body was heavy on top of mine, pressing into me as he slid his hand between my legs, his fingers becoming slick with my arousal, especially once he pushed two of them inside of me, pumping once … twice, before he replaced his fingers with his cock.

I groaned as I yielded to him, my eyes slipping shut for a moment as I shuddered when he bottomed out.

His eyes were shut tight as he began to move in me, so I reached up and squeezed his shoulders before sliding my hands around the base of his neck, squeezing at his throat until his eyes shot open, his mouth parting in a long sigh of satisfaction.

I couldn’t read him at all as he looked at me, his eyes now making a solid argument for dark blue.

His eyes stayed locked on mine as he bucked his hips into me.

I moved my hands down to his chest, grasping at his pecs before he grabbed one of my wrists and squeezed, shifting as he pinned it above my head. He did the same to my other hand and I clutched onto the edge of the mattress since he didn’t have a headboard.

He stretched out over me, holding my hands in place as he fucked me.

“Control? Is that what you need?” I breathed out.

He said nothing, but he released my wrists and moved onto his haunches, pulling me with him.

Elliot did not have sex like this.

He grasped me around my rib cage as he pushed into me, fucking me slowly until his fingers crawled to the flesh of my breasts. He kneaded them, tweaking my hard nipples before he grasped onto the sides, pushing them together as he started to pound into me.

His fingers dug into the flesh of my tits as he picked up his pace and pounded into me, and I knew there would be tiny bruises in the morning. Air was escaping his mouth in breathy little pants, and still, he didn’t speak.

My fingers clenched around the edge of the mattress as I braced myself against him, wanting to take it all, wishing I could give it back—I wanted to consume his anger and his hurt, but I also wanted to feed him mine.

He pulled out of me with a hiss and scrambled to stand beside the bed. He held his hand out for me and when he yanked me to the edge of the mattress, he reached down and gathered a handful of my hair. He held me still as he pressed his cock against my lips, silently commanding me to open for him.

He was so quiet as he slid past my lips and onto my tongue; the only noises he emitted were sighs and low moans. He didn’t ask permission to come in my mouth and I added that to the list of reasons this was not-Elliot.

Not-Elliot, who watched with fascination as I swallowed every bitter drop he left in my mouth.

I barely had time to take a breath before I found myself pushed back on the mattress with his face between my legs. His lips immediately wrapped around my clit and sucked with fervor, demanding my orgasm instead of coaxing it. I tried to squirm away, the feeling too much, too soon, and when I firmly told him to stop, he did.

He looked up, his lips still glossy with my arousal, his face a twisted combination of confusion and frustration. It was clear a very strong part of him did not want to obey my request.

“Ease up. Please.”

He lowered his gaze slowly before he dipped his face back between my legs; this time, his tongue worked my clit and the little noises that escaped from his mouth made me impossibly wet.

I felt my orgasm building, my body desperate to clench around something, but he was either denying me intentionally or denying me because he didn’t know my body like Elliot did.

I had to settle for thrusting my hand into his hair and grinding up against his face as I came; he took it, burying his face against my heat as if he couldn’t get enough.

For only a moment, a hummingbird heartbeat, I relaxed into the mattress as my senses returned.

But before I even opened my eyes, he maneuvered my body onto all fours and was sliding into me with a long, low moan.

Elliot and I had a solid, satisfying sexual connection, but tonight, this part of himself was unleashed, like he had been caging some form of an animal-self.

We fucked for well over another hour and by the time he came again, this time while buried deep inside me, we were both spent, sweaty, bruised and scratched.

By the time I came out of the bathroom, he was asleep, passed out on his back, the sheet barely covering his body despite the chill that had crept into the apartment. I laid down and pulled the comforter up over both of us, keeping to myself on one side of his bed and wondering what the fuck just happened.

I didn’t want to fall asleep because I needed to be at work in a few hours, but I must have dozed off because I woke up to Elliot’s fingers ghosting over his handywork on my chest. When I opened my eyes, I startled him, his hand freezing along with his face.

With one long look into his eyes, I knew; whoever he was last night, was gone.

“If you want to keep your job, you’re going to have to come back to work on Monday.”

I knew he was listening, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the fingerprint bruises on my breasts. He swallowed thickly as his fingers brushed across a red scratch on my arm.

“You were a little rough last night.”

“I hurt you.”

“I let you.”

Elliot’s eyes filled with tears and he began to move away from me, his hand lifting off of my skin like it was poison.

“Do you remember last night? Or the past few days?”

He looked at me, helpless and hopeless, as a tear crested and slid down his face.

“You have to see someone, El. I can’t handle this on my own.”

He swiped at his eyes and at his cheek before he nodded in agreement.

“Come here,” I said softly, opening my arms so he could settle onto my chest.

I held him tightly, refusing to let him put anymore distance between us, and eventually, I felt his body shift and his arms circle around me.

“I—” he croaked and then tightened his grip.

“I’ll go. I’ll do whatever you want because I can’t lose you.”

“That’s the problem, El. You have to want to get better. Not because I want you to—but because you want to.”

“I want to be normal,” he said, his voice a desperate ache.

“At least I finally understand what that means,” I said with a dark, soft chuckle. “I fought you on it, but you’ve been right all along. You hurt so deeply. Until you stop hurting, you’re never going to feel normal.”

“Don’t—please don’t leave me.”

“I don’t want to leave you. But if you can’t stop hurting, you’re not going to stop hurting me. I can’t—I’m not a saint, Elliot. I get angry, depressed, and when you hurt me, it’s the scariest, most empty feeling I’ve ever had.”

I felt his tears start to spill onto my chest, hot and wet, and my own eyes welled up in response.

“I’m so sorry,” he rasped, his voice thick with tears.

“Oh, El,” I breathed, burying my face in his hair. “I love you.”

“I’ll go. I want to go,” he said with a determined desperation, his voice breaking its characteristic monotone.

“Okay,” I whispered into his hair, not bothering to hide the relief I felt.

* * * * *

Glassy-eyed and in yesterday’s clothes, I texted my secretary to let her know I was running late. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into my bed, my exhaustion a malignance, settled deep, all the way to my bones.

But I had Elliot, my Elliot, back.

And more importantly, he knew he had a problem that was beyond his control and he was finally willing to face it. If we could just get through this next stage, I knew there wouldn’t be anything left that our relationship couldn’t weather.

I snagged a seat on the train and I leaned back, my body gently lurching from side to side as the train sped toward my apartment.

The clatter of the train and the quiet of the early-morning car permitted my mind to drift back to the Fourth of July, and I was assaulted by a deep sense of happiness, by a longing for a real future with Elliot.

I saw him, my little niece sitting on his lap, but slowly, Molly’s hair darkened and instead, there was a little boy, the spitting image of his beautiful father, sitting in Elliot’s lap. The little boy’s face was filled with awe as he watched the fireworks explode overhead.

This imagined Elliot turned to me and smiled with a picture-perfect grin of contentment.

Yes, I thought, my mind flirting with the edges of sleep, falling into a dreamy, dangerous state of half-consciousness, dangerous because my mind was too awake to ever forget the image I had just created.

Yes, I thought. It’s possible.

#Elliot Alderson #elliot alderson x reader #female reader #rami malek #mr robot #mr robot fanfiction #Elliot x reader #rami malek character

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miloscat · 3 years

Text

[Review] X-Men: The Official Game (DS)

Working my way down the versions, let’s compare the dual-screen tie-in game for the third X-Men film.

Developed by Amaze Entertainment, this doesn’t try to replicate the experience of the console game. It’s pretty much a middle ground between the former and the GBA version by WayForward. Amaze was also responsible for Spyro: Shadow Legacy and the first two Legend of Spyro games on DS, and this is quite similar to their version of A New Beginning, in that you fight through short action stages from a vaguely isometric perspective.

As a DS game, X:TOG makes novel use of the touchscreen for the characters’ powers. This time around, the playable characters include Nightcrawler (always solo), as well as Wolverine, Iceman, and uniquely for this version, Magneto (most levels feature a combination of these guys). You move fairly slowly with the D-pad, swap characters with L, and tap to attack baddies. For Kurt and Logan this means automatic melee swipes when they’re in range, and Bobby fires ice blasts at range (with some enemies being immune to either, hence swapping around). Erik has the unique ability to move things around by dragging them with the stylus, which must have been the big idea behind his inclusion and the control scheme itself.

You also have a powered up mode, activated (often accidentally) by tapping your character. You’d think Kurt could shift around by tapping elsewhere, but no I guess that would break the level design. Instead he enters the demon realm or whatever they call it, which stops enemies and the timer. Logan heals, Bobby has more powerful shots, and Erik can move bigger things. For the most part it’s just a way to get past a blockage or to balance health recovery, and isn’t too exciting.

The main problem is it mostly feels sluggish and janky. They try to vary up the enemy types and environments a bit but it just doesn’t feel great to play. In between levels you sometimes get a very brief motion comic-style cutscene, but there’s no voices anywhere, and most of the exposition is delivered by text dialogue before and after levels.

This is actually the one strength of the game (beyond Magneto’s technically novel controls): the frequent dialogue lets them explore the setting of this interquel story a bit deeper. You get Xavier directing the different teams remotely, discussion of Silver Samurai’s motives and character, and the banter between characters is especially fun with the begrudging allies. There’s also a greater focus on themes that come up in these mutant stories like human-mutant relations, the public image of mutants and the dichotomy of extremism and striving for tolerance, as well as the Sentinels’ social role in the conflict.

As for the plot, it’s truncated from the console version but differently to the GBA version’s choices. Sentinels are introduced in the opening cutscene as a current threat to mutantkind, with Kitty momentarily seen escaping one. Alkali Lake and both Strykers are skipped entirely, with Silver Samurai and Hydra positioned more prominently as antagonists. Logan starts the game in Japan pursuing Deathstrike, and then as with the console game the action moves to Hong Kong to infiltrate the Master Mould, while Kurt deals with side problems of Hydra stirring up anti-mutant sentiments and violence with terrorist acts in the US. There’s no other characters on either side, which does make the world feel smaller but on the other hand it’s more focused, I suppose.

With 40 short stages it doesn’t take too long to beat the game. The extra modes of survival (play through stages back-to-back with one life) and boss rush aren’t worth it, but score attack will let you replay a level without dialogue. Each stage has a strict score goal, judged on time, enemies defeated, and point pickups found, and if you clear that you earn a permanent slight boost to either health or mutant energy, which can help as the game progresses. My advice: don’t try for 100% if you prefer your hair not torn out.

#xmen #xmen the official game #amaze entertainment #ds #review

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spaceorphan18 · 4 years

Note

What are all the projects you’re working on?

All the Projects, Nonny, lol

Okay, well since you asked...

The Fic Writing:

There are two that I’m primarily focused on...

1. 99 Perspectives on a Single Love Story -- which I’ve decided to parcel out a little at a time. It’s a big project, that I could easily burn out on.

2. Chasing Pavements - which is almost coming up on a year. I need to buckle down and just finish it. I have all the chapters outline, it’s just a matter of focus. I also feel really bad I haven’t updated in a while, especially since it’s currently on a cliffhanger.

There’s one I’m writing writing as well as these two, but am not posting until it’s finished. However, since it’s just in my head, I’ve been kinda picking away at it, too. It’s called Head Over Feet, and it’s a reunion fic set in the future when Klaine are in their mid-30s. And it might be my favorite thing I’ve ever been writing.

There are also a few projects I’d like to get back to when these are done -- One being The Spaces In-Between, which is Kurt’s story in canon and two, the fic based on my Final Season sketch that I wrote a few years ago. I wrote the first couple of chapters, and really like it -- I think I’ll wait until that’s finished before posting as well.

And, I have numerous one-shots and smaller ideas written down just in case I ever feel like writing those. We’ll see!

The Fic Blog:

The Author Spotlights are still going on - on TDBfic, and those take some time to put together.

Plus, I’m trying to figure out ways to help keep it active, as well as getting ready to set up a Summer Exchange for people to participate in (and am hoping to get some help in running that).

Meta:

You guys ask a lot of questions, which I love! But I don’t always get to. Some of them take some time to answer, I have a few very old ones that I haven’t replied to yet, just because I know they’re going to take some time. I also have to set up my queue, which sometimes means digging into old posts and seeking things out to fill the space. And, there are things in my likes that need responses, and I’m always behind on that -- like, posts that I want to make replies to, or memes people have tagged me in.

Meanwhile... There are the Rankings 2.0. I know I sometimes pause for days on end, and I’ve been griping a lot, but I’m not kidding when I say watching the show this way has been incredibly fascinating. I now have a real understanding of things that bug me about the show. In about ten episodes, we’ll be getting to episodes I like more than I don’t, and the tenor of discussion will change. I’m looking forward to being positive about it again, lol

There are also two projects that I haven’t posted about, but I’m working on...

1. The Grey Project - which is a deeper analysis of ATOG’s sequel Grey. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, and it’s a follow up to the analysis we did on the TDB Podcast. (As an aside -- I think I want to visit the older fics on my master fic rec list, because I haven’t read any of that in years.)

2. Glee Music Retrospective -- where I look at all the music in the show. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, too, so I’m finally doing it.

The Book Blog and Marvel Movie Night:

Most of this is non-Glee related stuff.

The Book Blog is just a way for me to keep track of things I’m reading, and share with you guys new recommendations for published works. I’m also rereading all of the Agatha Christie novels (because I love them) and working through X-Men comics (which I’ve been wanting to do, and tried starting a handful of times). All of this is a labor of love.

And then there’s the Marvel Movie Nights -- where I watch a Marvel movie... all of them... including non-MCU ones. I kind of wanted to see everything, even the terrible ones, just because. I’m about half way through the list, and just getting into the MCU, which of course is my favorite.

Other (mostly boring adult stuff):

Of course, real life things are a constant. There’s work (and now that I’m a manager(ish) I have more obligations there; cleaning my house - a never ending project; prepping meals; making sure I’m working out; doing needed errands, etc, all that fun stuff that takes up time. As well as making sure I’m doing some kind of socialization and doing things just for fun -- like watching TV shows or playing video games.

And of course, there’s my dearly beloved, neglected child - my original novel. It’s called The Legend of Melaynia; it’s a fantasy, and I’ve been working on the world building for twenty years. I am no Tolkien, but it’s been my love, and at some point, I would like to actually focus on it.

Because I love organizing, I bought a white board that helps me keep everything straight -- and today, I think I came up with a schedule that will help me not feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff I’m working on.

#thanks nonny for asking!#now you know :)#Anonymous #my brain is also way more active at night for reasons i don't fully understand

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iridescentides · 4 years

Note

🔥 + any hot takes/thoughts/unpopular opinions about Glee, A:tLA, and Umbrella Academy bc you reblog a lot of them and I love those shows

AH thank you so so much for sending this! i will try to limit myself bc i have a lot of opinions okay

Glee

i could go on and on about glee bc there are 12 billion things to say (and the show is super long). but i think my most controversial opinions are:

i dont ship finchel or klaine. at all.

i can explain. i have a love/hate (but mostly hate) relationship with rachel as a character. sometimes i feel bad for her bc its clear shes struggling and insecure and shes a flawed female character which we need to appreciate. BUT she is just so unbearably annoying, selfish, and awful to everyone around her, and season 5 was the point where i finally made a decision. i dont like her. similarly, i hate finn bc he is overglorified by the other characters on the show, without any actions supporting it. they all say that finn is their leader, that hes the nicest guy ever, and praise him like a hero when in reality, he calls people slurs, outs them in the hallway, cheats on his girlfriends, and just overall acts like a douche towards anyone he doesnt immediately understand or relate to or wanna fuck. they all SAY hes amazing, but his actions just do not support that at all, and thats bad writing imo. i think because those characters are awful, their relationship is a colossal mess, and i think if i had to choose a definitive least favorite point for them, it would be when finn beat brody up for dating rachel. like what did the show want us to appreciate about that??? thats not romantic at all!!! thats disgusting and a sign that finn needs help. physically threatening people who date your exes? who does that??? and we’re supposed to think its cute bc he says “my future wife.” mhm. sure.

i hate klaine bc while i love kurt, i think blaine is awful to him. blaine relies heavily on having a sense of power over kurt, and this is even openly explored in one of the later episodes, but not resolved well imo. from the moment they met and got together, blaine was using his power and standing as head of the warblers to subtly make kurt feel lesser. he liked feeling like he held some sort of power in the relationship. then, when he goes to new york and gains weight and thinks of himself as less attractive, he gets angry and jealous of kurt bc he wants to be the “hot” one in the relationship, and always considered himself as such. if you are comparing yourself to your partner in that way, please break up with them and learn how to feel complete by yourself. blaines insecurities repeatedly fucked up their relationship, and i never have and never will ship them. the fact that they last minute decided to get married, ignoring their glaring issues with living together and teamwork in general, due to social pressure to crash brittanas wedding was absolutely ridiculous and a bullshit wrap up to their story.

A:TLA

okay so i know everyone is having fun rn joking about how “zukka nation has risen” but i honestly dont see it and never will. i dont get where the fandom has just decided this year to prioritize a ship that gets no real exposure, no buildup, and basically a two episode arc in terms of trust and teamwork. i recently saw a post talking about how theres not much fan content for mai/ty lee, who have an actual solid friendship (and ty lee literally risked her life to save mai), but theres tons of fans pushing zukka and acting like its THE ship we should all be shipping, showing the general bias fandoms have for mlm over wlw. something to think about. ive been zutara trash since i was 11 years old, so needless to say, i would pick them over zukka any day.

piggybacking off of the weird superiority complex people have for shipping zukka, i have always been annoyed by sokka stans in general? just to be clear, i love sokka, and i dont think there is anything wrong with loving him! but i HATE how people who consider sokka their favorite character act like theyre special for that? people are always crying that hes “underappreciated” and that hes so much smarter and more capable than anyone else. and i personally have not seen a single person criticize sokka, when ive seen at least small bits of hate thrown at each character. my point here is, loving sokka is a super popular opinion to have, and literally everyone loves sokka! so when people act like theyre the only one who truly appreciates sokka it really bugs me bc like. it truly doesnt make you special. everyone has a different favorite atla character but i pretty much only see sokka stans with this odd superiority complex, acting like theyre so rare for loving a super loveable character.

TUA

idk if this is an unpopular opinion or not, but the show would be unwatchable without klaus. hes pretty much everyones favorite character, we all see ourselves in him and we root for him and we laugh at him, and while i agree with the sentiment that he gets a disproportionate amount of attention for how ultimately irrelevant he is to the plot, i literally would not care about tua at all without him.

on the flipside of that, i want to love allison so badly, but she gets no time or attention or development at all. her main traits are inc*st and missing her child. she gets nothing beyond that, and we dont know as much about her as the rest of the siblings. it hurts my heart to see the only woman of color in the family being treated so obviously like a side character in an ensemble cast. im really hoping we see more of her in s2.

thank you so much for sending these!!! i obviously love these shows a lot, im just picky about these things.

Send Me a 🔥+ a Topic, and I’ll Tell You My Honest Opinion About It!

#what a great ask wow #i honestly hate how much i love glee for how many bad things there are about glee #why am i like this #anons #answered asks #Anonymous

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imagesofthegreatgull · 4 years

Text

Hybrid Rainbow

Joy has always been a rare and precious commodity. I would argue, though, that in the developed world (Wherever, exactly, that is), it has become somewhat less rare in recent times, as standards of living and education continue to go up. That’s an absurdly privileged thing to say, I realize, but I’m trying to start this thing as evenhandedly as I can. I understand about suffering and poverty; I’m reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn right now, even! Okay, saying we’re closer now than ever to utopia is going to smack of ignorance no matter how you phrase it, but it also strikes me as undeniably true, in the grand scheme of things. I think most people--aside from the fascists--would refuse a one-way trip in a time machine to any previous era, or at the very least, would recognize that it wouldn’t improve much of anything for them. As unruly as our age is, it’s still probably the best one we’ve gotten thus far, and as the boot-heel of oppression starts to ever so slowly ease up its pressure on the necks of the long-suffering masses, the question has begun to enter into the collective consciousness: what is to be done with joy when it begins to fall, unbidden, into your life with something like abundance? What is to be done if moments of joy no longer must be pried with great effort and sacrifice from the rockface of life, but lie strewn liberally throughout our days, needing only the will and lack of embarrassment to seize them?

Thus far, the latter-day generations have faced up to this problem with decidedly mixed success. The idea that expecting anything other than the very worst leaves one vulnerable to the universe’s cruel whims has been stamped upon the human brain for centuries, and has left many sadly unable to recognize their own privilege (Which, by the way, is a big part of why a whole lotta white folks refuse to admit they have it better than anyone else and continue to dig their heels in against progress because to them it looks like cutting in line). It is still widely accepted that constantly finding joy and peace and purpose in one’s own life is the purview of children and children alone, that it is a naivete to be grown out of. We have the impulse always within us to be hard, to be warlike, to show the world that we’re not weak and frivolous but monsters to be feared, without emotions to be appealed to or ideals to be fallen short of.

Remedying this problem has turned out to be one of the primary functions of counterculture. If it is often unhelpful to simply look at the entire value system of one’s parents and say “Fuck that”, as it tends to foster a rather negative self-definition, still, if part of that value system is a deeply entrenched distrust of happiness, “Fuck that” may be exactly the response called for. The beauty of “Fuck that” is that it leaps past the slow loss of faith in something and arrives immediately at a flat rejection of it, and since much of the history of civilization has been bound up with blind faith in arbitrary and harmful things, the ability and the courage to flatly reject something, to give it no credit for however widely accepted it is but to dismiss it as bullshit from the ground up, is a step forward in human consciousness tantamount to the reinvention of the wheel.

The great irony of the end of the sixties is that all the hippies were miserable for no reason: they won. Rock n’ roll did change the world, it just didn’t immediately transform it on every level into an unrecognizable nirvana. For all the apparent emptiness of its utopian dreams, the basic thrust of the thing worked out just fine: that particular cat will never be put back into its bag, and those ideas are now out in the ether forever, always waiting for someone to find them and be inspired to change their own life and the lives of those around them for the better. The same goes for the punk rock revolution a few years later: they may not have brought the bastards down, but they did successfully bring personal liberation to a lot of people, and poured exactly as much gas on the fires of populism as they intended to. Culture, and in particular art and in particular music, cannot, unassisted, change the world, but it can change your world, and has been changing small worlds all over the frigging place at least since those mop-topped Brits set foot on American shores and probably since Johnny B. Goode learned to play guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell.

The thread can get lost, however. Culture is always a reflection of the people, and the people still spend a lot of their time bored, frustrated, and terrified of letting on that they have feelings about stuff. Young people especially, formerly the eternal pirate crew waving high the flags of “Liberty” and “Up Yours”, in recent times have often capitulated and resigned themselves to no more than a few stray moments of fun pilfered from the fortresses of the almighty Money Man-Kings, usually in the form of drugs, sex, and reckless self-endangerment. The cost of the hippies and the punks giving up their battles is that the counterculture lost its intellectual leadership, at least until the resurgence in political literacy in the 2010s. In the wasteland following the 70s, there were no John Lennons or Joe Strummers to look to for guidance; even the people who were elected to speak for their generation seemed adamant that there was fuck-all they could really say. Yeah, it’s nice to know that someone else feels stupid and contagious, but that’s not really a direction, is it? The generation-defining message Kurt Cobain and his peers sent out was “We’re all way too fucked up to do anything about anything”, and that introspective moodiness pervaded American underground rock music from the invention of hardcore at least all the way up to the moment Craig Finn watched The Last Waltz with Tad Kubler and said “Why aren’t there bands like this anymore?” and set out with rest of the Steadies in tow to remind everyone that music can save your immortal soul and that hey, that Springsteen guy was really onto something, headband and all, and together they all successfully ushered in the New Uncool and now we’ve got Patrick Stickles wailing that “If the weather’s as bad as the weatherman says, we’re in for a real mean storm!” and Brian Fallon admitting “I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis” and everything’s great, except it’s not, everything’s fucked, but rock n’ roll is here to stay, come inside now it’s okay, and I’ll shake you, ooo-ooo-ooo.

The point of all this is my belief that even with the responsibility rock music has to provide cathartic outlets for dissatisfaction, is has an equal or greater responsibility to provide heroes. I think it’s time we all got over pretending that we’re better than the need for heroes, because we all insist on having them anyway, imperfect roses by any other name, and we’d do a hell of a lot better selecting them if we just admitted what we were after. We don’t just want particularly talented comrades, we want King Arthur, Robin Hood, Superman, Malcolm Reynolds. Damn it all, they don’t need to be perfect, they don’t even need to be all that great really, and yeah, Arthur dies, and Robin never gets Prince John, and Superman can’t save everyone, and the war’s over, we’re all just folk now, and John Lennon beat women and Van Morrison is a grumpy old fart and John Lydon’s a disgrace, but it’s the faith that counts. The faith that there’s something greater than ourselves that some people are more keyed into than others, and that whatever they can relay from that other side is what’ll see us through. All the best prophets are madmen, and madmen aren’t always romantic fools; sometimes they hurt people, or fail at crucial moments due to a compulsion they can’t control. Let he who is without sin etcetera, right? Why not cast aside realism and sincerely believe in something or someone, huh?

I believe in the Pillows. I don’t know hardly anything about them; my expertise of Japanese culture and history extends to the anime I’ve seen and that “History of Japan” YouTube video that made the rounds a while back. I can’t locate them within the Japanese music scene; all their western influences seem obvious to me, and the rest I know nothing about. They’re the only rock band from their country I’ve listened to any great amount of, I don’t speak the language they mostly sing in, I don’t even know their career very well. The particulars of any experiences they might have had that motivated them to make the art they make are not ones I could possibly share in, so, saying that I “Relate” to their work sounds a little preposterous. They ought to be a novelty to me, a band that clearly likes a lot of the same bands I do despite hailing from a foreign shore, marrying that shared music taste with a cultural identity I have nothing to do with, a small, nice upswing of globalism pleasing to my sense of universalism but not having any kind of quantifiable impact on me.

Yet I, like a good many other westerners, believe in the Pillows. I’m a little buster, and my eyes just watered as I wrote that. In fact, it’s likely because of the barriers of language and culture that exist between us that my belief in the Pillows is so strong. Pete Townshend, someone else I believe in, once opened a show by saying “You are very far away...but we will fucking reach you”, and though the Pillows are both geographically (At the moment) and culturally miles away from me, Lord strike me down if they don’t fucking reach me. They reach me in a way many of their American college rock peers, many of their biggest influences in fact, never have. Dinosaur Jr, Bob Mould, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Nirvana--all these artists speak directly to the American adolescent experience, but though they have all moved me to one degree or another, none of them have produced a body of work I can so readily see myself in as that of the Pillows. Maybe it is the novelty of it, maybe I’m fooling myself and it is just my sense of universalism carrying me away, but there’s something I hear in the Pillows that I don’t hear in those bands, and though the obvious candidate for that thing would be the foreign tongue the majority of the lyrics are written in, when it comes down to it, I think that thing is joy.

Joy, to me, is the possibility glimpsed by rock n’ roll. Not hedonistic pleasure, not a sadistic glee over the outrage of authority figures, but real, true, open-hearted, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken/Tochter aus Elysium”--type joy. Buddy Holly had joy. The Beatles, The Who, the pre-fall Rod Stewart, they had joy. Springsteen’s got joy to spare. Those people have such profound love for their art and their audience that just the continual recognition of the fact that they have a guitar in their hands and they’re being allowed to play it is enough to make them ecstatic, and whenever they want to actually express something serious they have to get themselves under control to do it. Yet, whether it’s the unfashionability of those utopian dreams, or the simple fact that rock music has become accepted by mainstream culture and is now a commonplace, unremarkable thing, but half the people who have picked up an electric guitar for the past few decades don’t seem all that excited about it. From Kim Gordon snarling about how people go down to the store to buy some more and more and more and more, to Thom Yorke moaning about how he’s let down and hanging around, crushed like a bug in the ground, even up to Courtney Barnett asking how’s that for first impressions, this place seems depressing, it’s not really a given anymore, if it ever was, that people who make rock music are very joyful in what they do.

Of course, I’m not demanding that our artists be empty-headed fluff-factories; far from it. The Pillows write sad songs and angry songs same as everybody else. But the important thing is this: every song the Pillows play is played with an exuberance and abandon that is immediately striking, regardless of the emotional content of each song. Channelling that kind of revelry into rock music is both to my mind the initial purpose of the genre in the first place and something which has become so rare as to be remarkable. A veneer of detached cool, a howling ferocity, a whimpering woundedness--these have become the hallmarks of American rock music, and they are nowhere to be found in the Pillows.

At the same time, the Pillows are the very antithesis of artlessness. Joy of the caliber they deal in is more commonly found in folky rave-ups, a lack of musicianship giving way to trancelike festivity. But the Pillows are skilled song craftsmen like few others; their sound has evolved throughout the years, but they tend to settle in the neighborhood of power-pop, abounding in glorious hooks and surprising structures. A hundred unnecessary, perfect touches seem to exist in every song; a pause, a solo, a bassline, all deftly elevating the song into a perfect expression of something sublime, something that always--always--takes ahold of the musicians themselves and imbues their performances with power and purpose the likes of which most little busters can only dream of feeling. It should be testament enough to their brilliance that upon first listen to a song I never know what most of the lyrics mean, but whenever I look up a translation, they always turn out to be exactly what I felt they must be; their songs are so musically communicative that they all but lack the need for lyrics.

This dual nature is why I believe in the Pillows: by so utterly failing to neglect both the highest possibilities of musical composition as an unparalleled tool for capturing emotional nuance and the unrestrained id-like rush that is the province of rock n’ roll, they successfully attain the lofty realm that is--or ought to be--the goal of music in the first place. Never once is there a hint of straying into the realm of primitivism nor into overthought seriousness, and instead they locate themselves somehow exactly center on the scale between punk and prog, lacking the weaknesses and gaining the strengths of both. They make rock whole again by finally disproving the tenet initially laid out by their heroes, your heroes, and mine, The Beatles: the notion that growing up means having less fun. The viscerally exciting early work of The Beatles lacks any of the depth and vision displayed by their later records, but those records are so carefully and expertly crafted that they tend to lose spontaneity, and constantly second-guess themselves where the juvenilia they followed forged unselfconsciously ahead. That legendary career path has laid out a false dichotomy that every proceeding generation of kids with guitars has chosen between, save for the few who could see past it, the ones who heard the wildness in “Revolution” and the wisdom in “Twist and Shout” and realized that they were of a piece, were one and the same, not to be chosen between but embraced fully. Pete Townshend. Bruce Springsteen. Joe Strummer. David Byrne. Paul Westerberg. The Pillows. The real heroes are not those who champion one side or another but fight all their lives for peace between them, knowing that we have not yet begun to imagine what could be accomplished if that were made possible.

Just as they bypass the divide between what Patrick Stickles termed the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies of rock (I prefer to think of the usual battle as being between the Dionysians and the Athenians, with the true devotees of Apollo being most of those heroes I keep referring to, except Dylan, who might be a Hermesian), so too do the Pillows bypass the Pacific frigging ocean. And the Atlantic, to boot. Their music quotes the Pixies and The Beatles directly, and obviously owes much to Nirvana and all their college rock predecessors who spent the entire 80s desperately stacking themselves until the doomed power trio could finally vault over the wall. Their first record is practically a tribute to XTC. They do speak a lot of English, too. I’m informed that much of western culture is seen as the epitome of coolness in Japan, which might explain their obsession with Baseball, and apparently sprinkling a bit of the Saxon tongue into the mix is far from uncommon in the music scene(s). Regardless, there is something ineffably touching to a distant fan in a foreign land about hearing Sawao Yamanaka spit “No surrender!” or exclaim “Just runner’s high!” It looks from here like a show of mutual effort to understand me as much as I’m trying to understand them. They’re generous enough to have already walked to the middle where they’re asking me to meet them, a middle where it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a suffix attached to my name or that they don’t wear shoes in houses. The invisible continent that all forward-thinking and sensitive people come to long for is where the Pillows are broadcasting from, because they’ve realized that its golden shores and spiraling cities are attainable. They’re attainable with joy, with the fundamentally rebellious act of refusing to let the fascists bring down even your globdamn day, because who the hell gave them that power other than us? I know enough about Japan and America to know that either one accusing the other of being imperialist and socially conservative to a fault is a fucking joke, and to know that we’ve done a lot more wrong to them than they’ll ever do to us and the presence of the Pillows amounts to a “We forgive you”, not an “I’m sorry”. Having watched a decent amount of anime, which is basically the result of Japan’s mind being blown by western media and then proceeding to show their love by often almost inadvertently surpassing their inspirations, I know that the only way to save our respective national souls and everybody else’s too is to put our knuckles down, have Jesus and Buddha shake hands like Kerouac tried to explain that they would anyway, and embrace each other’s dreams and passions and adopt them into our own.

It takes better people to inhabit that better world, and in case that sounds like fascist talk, I mean we’ve got to do better, not be better. It’s no physical imperfection that holds us back, nor a mental imperfection exactly, as we all have our own neuroses and if we expunge those then we’ll be kissing art and lot of other vital stuff goodbye. No, it’s our discomfort with ourselves, our world, our neighbors, our aliens, that keep us from seeing that crazy sunshine. If we can’t even acknowledge the greatness around us, that surplus of joy I mentioned a while back that we just seem to have no idea what to do with, then we have no hope of ever achieving further greatness, of ever quelling man’s inhumanity to man down to an inevitable fringe rather than the basic order of the world.

There was always more to do

Than just eat and work and screw

But now that there’s time at last to do those things, we’re still afraid to, afraid that we’ll come up empty, that the search for fulfillment leads only to disappointment, better to hang back and play it safe, better not to risk becoming one of those people I shake my head at and pity and will secretly envy until I die. It’s a new world, and we must learn to be new people. I believe in the Pillows because I believe they make excellent models for that new kind of person. The way they behave in the studio and on the stage is the way people behave when they’re truly free, and we’ve all been set free already or will be soon, so if we’re going to try and learn what the fuck is next from anyone, I think we might as well learn from the Pillows. At least, that’s one of the places we could get that insight. There’s a lot of art and a lot of philosophy and political theory to sift through to in order to put together a workable 21st century identity, and the Pillows are hardly the only people to have begun making the leap. But because of a silly thing like the size of the earth, the infinitesimal size of the earth even compared to the distance between us and the next rock we’re gonna try and get to, not everybody is getting their particular brand of free thought and action, and I happen to think that’s regrettable, and it’s my will as a free individual to rectify it as much as I can.

Writing about music really is worthless, isn’t it? I haven’t said jackshit about what the Pillows actually do other than to vaguely qualify their genre and temperament, and the only more useless thing I could do than not describing their songs would be to describe their songs. If you don’t hear the bracing weightlessness in “Blues Drive Monster”, or the aching nostalgia in “Patricia”, or the soul-bearing cry in “Hybrid Rainbow” then nothing I could write about those would be more effective than “Little Busters is a really good album.” The better primer might be Happy Bivouac, from a few years later; it has the melancholic rush of “Last Dinosaur”, the ascended teenybopper “Whoa, whoa, yeah” chorus in “Backseat Dog”, and the intro that should make it obvious immediately that you’re listening to one of the best songs ever recorded which opens “Funny Bunny”. Those two, Runners High, and Please, Mr. Lostman are the classic era, selections from the former three immortalized in their biggest claim to western fame, the FLCL soundtrack, a brilliant use of their music that could warrant an equally long piece. Before and after those four are periods of experimentation and discovery equally worth your time, not all of which I’m familiar with yet. See, now I’m just an incomplete Wikipedia article; it’d be equally worthless to expound upon the individual bandmates, on the pure yawp of Yamanaka’s vocals, on the passionate drumming of Yoshiaki Manabe and the supernaturally faultless lead guitar of Shinichiro Sato, or the contribution of founding bassist Kenji Ueda, which was so valued by the others that when he left he was never officially replaced (They’re so sweet). I’m not here to write an advertisement or a press-release, I don’t really even know why I’m here writing this, but I know that I believe in the Pillows, that they’re important, and that people should write about them. I’m being the change I want to see in the world, get it? That’s all we can be asked to do.

It occurs to me that people believed in Harvey Dent too, and that didn’t turn out so well. Hell, let’s leave the comic book pages behind, people believe in Donald Trump, they think he’s a hero, and that’s all going down in flames as I write this. Having heroes can be dangerous, but I still believe it’s not as dangerous as not having heroes. “Lesser of two evils” sounds an awful lot like one of those false dichotomies between fun and intelligence or between misery and foolishness I mentioned earlier, so, let’s call it a qualified good. I’m not much of a responsible world-citizen if my only effort towards bringing the planet together is spinning some sweet Japanese alt-rock tunes and bragging about how open-minded I am, but if I do ever end up doing anyone any good, then I’d consider it paying forward the good done to me by the Pillows, among others. They helped me form my identity as an artist (Read: functional human being) and they made my adolescence a lot easier. Actually, that’s a lie: my adolescence was (And continues to be) pretty easy already, and the Pillows reassured me that I wasn’t avoiding reality by feeling that. While American bands sang about the downsides of being a mallrat or a non-mallrat, the Pillows offered a vision of teenagedome much like my own, one that was grandly romantic, in which suffering wasn’t a cosmic stupidity but a trial with pathos and merit, and joy was not an occasional indulgence but a constant presence, whether it was lived in or lost and needing recovery.

That’s the old idea of youth, the youth of John Keats, the youth that makes the old miss it, makes it required that we explain to them that it’s still there, it never left, it’s a dream, a momentary affirmation, an attitude, a muttered curse word. So many of my peers, now no longer engaged in a constant race to stay out of the grave as their ancestors were, seemed intent on beating each other into their tombs, as if reaching walking death before their parents was the only way to outgrow them. There’s so much life just lying around and it’s just plain wasteful to let it lie in the sun and rust in the rain. There’s space enough to stretch, to not keep who you are awkwardly curled up inside yourself, to breathe the air and taste the wine and dig the brains of your fellow travelers in this loosely-defined circus. I found that space in the Pillows, having often suspected it was there, and while everyone is going to find that space in their own way--or not, still, tragically not--I have to think that experience was due in part to some innate and unique quality of the music itself, not just a complimentary sensibility contained within myself. The Pillows are free, and that makes them freeing, it’s easy as that. Their liberation is plain as day; it rings in every chord, every snare-hit, every harmony; it’s up to us ascertain what we can do in our own limited capacity to hoist ourselves up to their level and give some other folks a boost along the way and a hand to grab afterwards. It’s the gift that art gives us, and the Pillows just give it more freely than most is all, which is why I think the suggestion to listen to them is more than just a solid recommendation. Like the insistence on listening to The Beatles, or The Clash, or any of the others, it’s a plea to save your soul, to learn the language of tomorrow and drink the lifeblood of peace and love and piss and vinegar, or else you’ll be lost, lost, lost.

Can you feel? Can you feel that hybrid rainbow?

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