#my dash is so empty

[shep-ard]

how do the kids go about finding people to follow these days?

[m-eowdy]

Trying to find new people to follow that are outside of my mutual circle is like being in the trenches I think. But I have to do it. I have to find new posts to enrich the ecosystem.

[deandoesthingstome]

You guys. Where is everyone?

[will-ruadh]

where is everyone

[nsfwitchy2]

S l o w l y finding my mutuals and my fave blogs again <3

[thundersummonr]

had 2 sketches laying around for like 2-3 months now ... figured itd be a good time to finally get em done

[hitwiththetmnt]

¡BOOP!~ •○☆♡

and with the breaking of a new day the boops-they leave us

thank you for giving me a boop for me to find after the event!

[pinkished]

hey! i accidentally deleted the blog i've had for years; went to delete a side one, didn't pay enough attention and deleted my main 🥲

pinning this, i promise it's me and not a bot lmao, i'm going to try and find everyone i was following before!!

if you recognize me and wonder why i'm not following you anymore this is why; p l e a s e message me or follow me again so i can do the same, i miss yall 💔

[songofsaraneth]

did tumblr take away the usernames/icons mid-post to let u kno who has added different additions or is my dashboard just glitching

[jcdiism]

❛  he  is  modest,  centered,  and  𝙖𝙡𝙬𝙖𝙮𝙨  𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙙.  greatness  was  never  his  ambition.  he  is  the  ULTIMATE  JEDI.  it  is  characteristic  of  obi-wan  that  he  is  𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐮𝐧𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬.  ❜  ⦅  quotes  from  rots  novelization  ⦆

              —  an  exploration  of  𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐬,  𝐠𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟,  𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞,  and  remembering  kindness  above  all,  in  SPITE  of  these  things:  OBI-WAN KENOBI.  established  2019,  recently  returned  &&  revamped.  lovingly,  penned  by  quinn.

[saltpepperbeard]

I can’t even imagine how painful it must have been for Stede to come home and see that life had easily continued on without him. He left the world of piracy because he felt that he didn’t belong, that he had ruined all the parts of it he had touched, and that he had hurt his loved ones.

So he goes home to what’s familiar, to where he thinks he might have some sort of belonging…only to find that everything happily went on without him. That his portrait was painted over. That his son had forgotten him.

Like, in that moment, he has nothing. No crew, no love, no family, no belonging. The last little bit of familiarity he had is now foreign to him. What he knows doesn’t even know him anymore.

[imwritesometimes]

anyway, a couple weeks ago I realized, 'hey my car is my car and I can decorate it with silly shit I like' and I just spent like half an hour putting teeny tiny kitty & stars & sparkles decals and stickers in cute little places all over the dash and gear shift and window buttons 🥰 what did you do for fun today?

[lulu2992]

1,000 followers?!

Wow, this feels like a huge milestone! I don’t really know what to do except say...

THANK YOU!

1,000 followers is a big number, especially since I don’t follow anyone and therefore don’t have mutuals, and I still have a hard time daring to interact with people sometimes... Yet, there are 1,000 humans here who enjoy what I post, so thank you all for your support and appreciation; that means a lot to me ♥

[demadogs]

in the least chronically online sounding way possible, having your tumblr randomly terminated is genuinely devastating. its like someone took all your journals that youve worked on for years and burned them. wouldnt wish it on anyone.

[florbelles]

WIP WEDNESDAY.

tagged by @fourlittleseedlings, @henbased & @unholymilf (and many others over the past month, tysm <3), ty beloveds!! sending no-pressure tags to @adelaidedrubman, @corvosattano, @jackiesarch, @shellibisshe, @shallow-gravy, @indorilnerevarine, @jendoe, @phillipsgraves, @leviiackrman, @loriane-elmuerto, @arklay, @morvaris, @risingsh0t, @nightbloodraelle, @gwynbleidd, @noonfaerie, @shadowglens, @roofgeese, @nuclearstorms, @denerims, @afarcry5fromstraight, @strafethesesinners, @blissfulalchemist, @confidentandgood, @chuckhansen, @queennymeria, @poetikat, @strangefable, @purplehairsecretlair, @nokstella, @galeboettichergf & anyone else can @ me xx

have a Fairly Lengthy bit of fortune’s fool aka the isabela prequel aka family tree to compensate for the fact that i have been promising it for like a year and also have not posted anything for months :))

“A cafe.”

Isabela only nods once and lips the cup to her lips, takes a scalding, bitter sip.

“Which cafe.”

Does it matter, Isabela will want to ask, but will not. It matters for no other reason but this: that Elena does not believe her.

It would, perhaps, be better to leave it that way. A lie cannot harm you.

Shame, however, most certainly can.

She will understand later that the shame of a moment and the shame of a lifetime are two entirely different things. This is the moment when she might have chosen the former. Instead she chooses the latter, and says simply, “You would not know it. I went to Rome.”

This is enough to shut Elena’s mouth, an audible click of her teeth.

She will not question Isabela’s presence in Rome; she has not done so in years, when their paths first crossed, through the downstairs neighbor of the time (moved now, a divorce, or the want of divorce, or the inability to divorce, or the necessity of divorce, it all was the same in the end), with Stefan. An American, come here with his American notions about them and their country and their city and their God. A true Catholic, the way Isabela had never been, the kind that she had only ever understood existed in theory; the kind of Catholic that went to church religiously, who went to see God, not to be seen when ceremony demanded it.

A school friend of the downstairs son-in-law’s, a former colleague, now a priest.

A waste, Elena had shrugged upon learning; not lascivious in tone, but the implication clear.

No matter. He was not Elena’s. He never was. He was hers, all hers. Hers and God’s; secretly, then, she is foolish enough to harbor the belief of that order.

“Everything I am,” she will tell Stefan one day, “I am because of you.”

He will laugh at this. “Not me, Isa. No one could ever change you.”

Ah, Stefan. The clairvoyance of God does not reach beyond the altar, it seems.

“You and your fucking Americans,” Elena mutters now, and she means Stefan, she means the other man, the new man, the man they are now discussing.

“Are we lost?”

“No.”

“Do you live here?”

“No.”

“Yes.” Isa slowly sets her coffee down, the faint tremble of her hand only betrayed by the sloshing of the dark liquid. “Me and my fucking Americans.”

“Mama will be furious,” Elena says blithely, and Isabela’s hand shoots out, her nails digging into her sister’s skin, and Elena makes a sound of protest.

“Mama,” Isa hisses, “is not going to hear of it.”

Elena’s eyebrows arch slightly, but she slowly nods her head.

“I did not mean your gentleman friend,” Elena says a moment later.

Isabela’s eyes cut across the table.

No. She will not have meant the gentleman friend.

“My aunt,” she had blurted to him, then, the words springing to her lips without thought, without her consent. “My aunt lives here.”

She had not remembered until that moment, until she was caught out, here, so far from home, so far from Rome, a stranger across from her, perhaps who had been following her, perhaps whom she had followed, but had indisputably landed her in this place, in this position.

“You’re visiting your aunt?” he repeated, his smile slow, amused.

“Yes.” She lifted her chin, defiant. “I am.”

She did not know what possessed her, perhaps that look in his eye, the same one that Elena will have when she asks, which cafe?, which prompted her to ask, “Would you like to meet her?”

It was a ridiculous question. There was no reason this tourist should want to meet her aunt. It was still unclear if he particularly wanted to meet herself.

“Okay,” he agreed instead, nodding. “Sounds great. Lead the way.”

She had no choice, then. She ground her teeth.

[hephaestuscrew]

Assorted Thoughts about the Greater Boston Season 4 finale

I'd assumed that Leon would 'move on' at the end of Season 5, the end of the podcast as a whole. But now we're going to have a whole season of the podcast without him. It's strange to imagine. There's never been a Greater Boston podcast without Leon Stamatis. There's never been a city of Red Line without Leon Stamatis. We began Season 1 confronting the gap that Leon left behind. We learned that he wasn't quite as gone as we might have thought, but there was still the loss, the grief, the consequences of his death. In an interesting narrative symmetry, at the beginning of Season 5 we'll have to confront him being more fully, completely gone. But I think we'll continue to see the ways in which his life and afterlife have rippled outwards.

~~

Immediately after Nica said Leon had brought people together "like a family", Louisa exclaimed that she needed to call Michael. I can't help wondering if it was Nica's comment that triggered that thought for Louisa. I'm emotional about Michael being family for Leon, Michael being family for Louisa, Michael being someone who was brought into Louisa's life by Leon…

~~

There were two moments of Nica and Dimitri sitting with Gemma in the middle of them holding the crystal ball. First, in the back of Lucia's car, when Nica reached out to touch the ball and Dimitri took her hand instead. Second, on the Ferris wheel as they prepared to say goodbye to Leon. Leon was in the middle between his two siblings - he is what divides them and he is what unites them. They held hands over him, finding awkward togetherness in the presence of their loss, stopping each from succumbing to that loss. Leon was in the middle between his two siblings, but he also wasn't; it was Gemma occupying that space for him.

On a related note, I can't help but wonder whether the Stamatis siblings had habitual positions when they'd sit in the back of a car together as children. I think that's a fairly common sibling thing, and it seems likely that it would appeal to the order-loving Leon. I can't decide if it makes me more emotional to imagine that they usually sat with Leon in the middle like that, or to imagine how they sat on that ferris wheel wasn't their typical childhood order.

~~

The lack of narration and the high number of monologues from a range of characters this episode meant that sometimes I wasn't initially sure whether a scene was an interview snippet from a real person or a monologue from a character. I think there's something significant in that blurring of reality and fiction, in real stories of loss mixed with the fictional. Those interviewees are a part of this story, or this story is a part of our world too.

~~

I loved Michael's mantra being spoken by the group, with each person taking one word. For Michael, that sequence of numbers was a way of asserting his own agency in spite of circumstances and his ideas about his nature. It was a way of saying 'my choices matter, even if I can't change the outcome'. And this moment showed how that idea can be upheld within through community and togetherness.

Michael spoke the word "Eight". And perhaps he wanted other people to take over, trusting that the people around him would complete his mantra, believing that they'd understand what he needed in that moment. Or perhaps he was intending to speak the mantra by himself until Louisa interrupted to support him. Either way there's a uniquely powerful kind of choice made against an indifferent world - the choice for people to stand against that world together. It's a contrast with Michael's often self-isolating tendencies for that mantra to become a shared thing.