#new rant tag cuz this shit’s just gonna keep coming

[unsaidace]

Y’know what, we’re going full swing for the unhinged BoBs today, I don’t give a shit anymore. I’m seeing people trying to spin Ryan’s latest interview again, and I’m actually sick of it. They pushed me away from a ship I loved because of their incessant ramblings about “comphet” and “couch theory”, I’m fucking done.

Ryan has told y’all multiple times now that Eddie is a straight man. Oliver has told you that they’re not doing the “queer man in love with his straight best friend” angle. Tim has told you that Bucktommy is “a romcom for Buck”. JLH has told y’all to let it go, and she was the OG captain of this ship. That should tell you something, but no. You lot have to keep banging on about “oh, they’re just throwing out red herrings, it’s coming, I can feel it!” and “Bucktommy bones!”. You’ve been feeling it for six seasons now. It still hasn’t happened. Give it a fucking rest.

You’re taking BTS pictures of the cast hanging out on set, literally not even in character, and spinning stories about “oh, Tommy isn’t even interested in Buck, look how far apart they are” and “Buck and Eddie touching shoulders again — Buddie canon S8”. I don’t know how many times y’all need to be fucking told before it sinks in, but I swear to God, if you don’t open your ears and listen for once instead of only hearing what you wanna hear? I’m gonna start throwing shit directly at your faces.

Bucktommys are just trying to enjoy our CANON ship, and some of you lot are consistently trying to ruin it for us with your FANON one. You don’t like Tommy, fine, nobody said you had to. Literally fucking nobody. But that doesn’t mean you get to use your ship to trample all over ours because you’re so deluded that you really think you’re going to get Buddie in season 8 when, from all signs so far, Tommy will still be Buck’s love interest/possibly official boyfriend, and Eddie will still be two-timing Marisol with Kim. I hate to burst your bubble, but here’s a newsflash for you all — you’re not getting Buddie next season. Ship it in fanon all you want, but for the sake of literally everyone else’s sanity, stop trying to influence the fucking show with it.

[lastoneout]

I'm about to tell on myself so fucking hard but you know what I wish was a feature on A03?

So...nhentai gives every comic posted to it a number, right? And you can take just that number, nothing else, and type it into the site's search box and it will take you DIRECTLY to that comic. So when people on reddit or whatever want to post the source/talk about a comic they don't HAVE to post a whole ass link, they can just give you the number. Which is cool because links can be sketchy(there are a lot of fake nhentai sites that are just loaded with viruses and shit) and like, there are lots of other reasons people don't like clicking on random links/sharing them is hard(length for one). Just posting the comics barcode? I guess? saves all of that.

Plus something I have noticed is it's pretty fucking hard to find a specific fic if you don't have the link. Cuz just the title isn't gonna do you much good on A03 given how many fics all have the same/similar titles, and if you lost the author's name too you basically just have to dive headfirst into the fandom/ship tag and pray you find what you're looking for which SUCKS with big fandoms/ships that have like 100k + works. Which is actually part of why I think I've seen some people posting "I'm looking for this fic help" stuff as fics on A03.

(Edit: also with the common practice of orphaning and posting as anonymous on A03 sometimes the authors name doesn't do you any good either.)

So if each fic had/has a unique ID number it would be a lot easier to share them around so you'd be less likely to lose them, and you wouldn't have to worry about a broken link ect. cuz as long as you have those numbers you can find the fic again instantly.

And like A03 kinda has that in the sense that like, look, here's a link to one of my fics

It HAS those numbers at the end so theoretically if I knew a fics numbers I could just type in archiveofourown.org/works/(the number) and find the fic, but you can't actually use those numbers to search

So I don't see people like, normalizing sharing the numbers along with links cuz it's just a little too complicated.

But I mean just think, you find an old masterpost with hyperlinks to fics but the site has gone weird or the links broke or op deleted the post and the versions that still exist are all fucked up now something, and you're bummed cuz sure maybe they put the titles and fandoms and authors but for all you know the fics were set to anonymous or orphaned and either way that's a lot of searching, wouldn't it be nice if each listing also just had those numbers hanging out? And that way as long as you have so much as a picture of the post you can still find those fics. You don't have to save the post and hope it doesn't get deleted or go cram the stuff into "marked for later" right then and there, you can just hold on to those numbers. That sounds pretty nice to me!!

I dunno, maybe there is something I'm missing, but I was thinking about this bcs I have a bunch of new followers on Instagram who like this ship I make content for and I WANT to tell them I wrote a fic, but it's Instagram, you gotta post pics and doing a little info graphic feels kinda tacky? So I'm drawing something based on the fic to post, but then I guess I just have to put the link to the fic in the description or something, and I keep thinking GOD it would be so much easier if I could just post the numbers 38480276 and have that be enough for all of them to find the fic without scaring away people who don't want to click on random links/the awkwardness of just posting a link in general.

But yeah, that's my rant about the porn website doing it better bcs tbh sometimes they do and I think this being a feature or coming into common usage would be nice.

[void-selfships-archive]

Ok I just FINALLY finished bojack horseman after taking a very long break from it cuz it was not good for my depression BUT!!! I was strong enough to finish it and I’ve followed this blog for years and I know you self ship with bojack but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a post explaining how you fit into that world?? Like, what’s your role, how did you and bojack meet, how does your story grow along with the others? AND!! Woooo, “the view from halfway down” episode was. Wow. How would you/your s/i (idk which one you use) react to all that? Are YOU maybe the one bojack calls instead of Diane? Do you/your s/i have their own “view from halfway down” episode? Sorry if this is a lot but I’m back into this show now and I’d love to know your role in the whole thing. :)

SOBBING CRYING SHAKING RN HOLY SHIT YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HOW EXCITED I GOT SEEING THIS FJEJCJEJXJS

Also i get having to take breaks with this show bc if you aren't doing well it will NOT be good for you fjekwjcje I'm on my 4th (5th?) Rewatch rn after like a year (it's a comfort show) [ALSO VIEW FROM HALFWAY DOWN POG??? <- (my top favorite episode)]

BUT ALSO IM. SO GLAD YOU ASKED BC I HAVE SO MUCH LORE FOR THIS MFCKER AND IM TOO NERVOUS TO TALK ABT IT WITHOUT BEING PROMTED !!!

I'm gonna put everything under the cut for SPOILER REASONS but also PLEASE read the tags just in case!!! We're talking abt the mfckin CANON timeline I have for my self insert shits depressing as hell (also I hope I generally explained everything fjejcjdh bad at doing that smtimes)

I'm almost glad I'm not talking abt the Childhood friends au bc its SO softcore like wheres the angst bestie? But also damn. Why all the angst in the canon tl? Chill OUT /lh

Generally the canon tl follows the show pretty accurately, aside from the fact that IM there and a few things r obviously different

I met him in a bar during the 90s! It was one of those "Oh we're both actors! Pog." And we basically drank together and trauma-bonded. They quickly become good friends (It was funny, considering the first thing we said to eachother was "oh you look familiar" and "YOU'RE THAT GUY FROM THAT SHOW I WATCH!" Truly the start of a wonderful friendship.)

And, I basically stayed around him. The Whole Time- through Herb getting fired and both of our shows ending and various depressive episodes (on both ends), parent funerals and hallowern parties and benders and awful horrible shows that definitely should never be mentioned nor have been put on air.

And weird one night stands with eachother that never get brought up the next day (or at all for that matter) just to keep things from being weird.

So I've known him for awhile, and I've stuck around for awhile, basically a ride or die friend (with a tiny little crush that I'm not acknowledging) that's my role, the Yearning Best Friend- so cringe but it works out in the end.

I think, major event wise, everything still happened the same. It's right until S4 when things are, a little different? (Not by much though)

When he heads to his old family summer home he invites me to come with (I also didn't think itd be smart to leave him alone) and through that entire trip he told me about Horsin Around and his family and at a point a drunken rant abt New Mexico that neither of us remembered in the morning. (It was a bonding trip, definitely the start of Feelings too) we start dating in the middle of that season (specifically when we all got trapped underground, you confess a lot when you think you're going to die)

So naturally, S5 is different too, he's not dating Gina in that season, but everything still happens the same otherwise. (Of course I knew something was off the whole time, you don't stay friends with someone for several years and NOT notice when something's off, motherfucker wouldnt *talk* to me though, and when he did it was to tell me someone was trying to sabotage the show and of course you cant have two paranoid mfers under the same roof, they just end up fueling eachother until it's too late and something horrible happens)

And something horrible happened, and Diane told me about what she thought happened in New Mexico, and I'm thinking "I feel like I've heard this story before." And then Bojack tells me what happened in New Mexico and then he choked his co-star and hes going to rehab and everything is obviously too much and I tell him I can't visit of course, because theres a lot of information i need to process, but I'll still write and I'll still text and watch over the house while he's gone since I practically live there at this point but I cant see him rn.

And I didn't! Until he got out of rehab, of course and it was back to "Bojack and Jackson against the world!" And "Let's move! Go somewhere different get a change of scenery!" And we did. He got that job at the university and I! Stayed with him, ever the loyal boyfriend. (Until in getting calls from a reporter and suddenly we're trying to figure out what shitty thing he did before the reporter calls and Oh. It's about Sarah Lynn and Oh!! Thus is certainly new information I wasn't told about! Fuck.)

After the interview- the second one- it was...complicated. I didn't want to leave but i also recognized that i needed to. For now, to let him deal with the aftermath of his mistakes because if he came to me- and he did- he'd be looking for reassurances I couldn't give him. We got into a really bad argument, it was moreso implied that we weren't dating anymore, neither of us said it but we both walked away and that was the last time we spoke.

It's so funny that you asked abt The View From Halfway Down because I was literally just thinking about that episode the other day and if he would've called me and not Diane and honestly! Yea. He did! Tho he called me. Twice that day, once before, after he left Angela's house, and again before he got back in the pool- I picked up the first time but he was pretty much incomprehensible and I couldn't pick up the second time so when I called back and he didn't answer I was. Quick to panic. (I was right for being worried too, all things considered)

And then he went to jail. And we didn't see eachother again until PC's wedding (bonded a lot with her, during that break up period. It was hard y'know? But she got it. Also I was Helping Babysit with Todd, she was rlly making me rethink my opinion on adopting a kid)

We didn't start dating right away tho, but we did start hanging out again? So that was a bonus!

[frogboyandzombieface]

okay tough guy, you think you can get me every time? bet. 1-30 for the asks <33 >:3

YOOOUUU!!!!! BENNIEEEE 😭😭😭😭💖💘💕💞💘💓💘💞💕💘🥰i love u so much i aDORE you 

1. what song makes you feel better?

hmmm uhh probably lemon demon songs cuz like they are so fun and nonsensical and it sorta startles me into feeling happier JHKFDJKHF like mask of my own face i LOVE IT. or deep swim by windows 96 its a very chill song good to help come down from dissociation or panic attacks

2. what’s your feel-good movie?

coraline all the way LMAO i just love it. or tbh the IT movies cuz i just love the little kids!!!!

3. what’s your favourite candle scent?

IDK i love like nearly all the scents theyre so good but ujhmm uuhhh pears 😳😳i actually do adore french pears, i have a lot of stuff to make candles and every time i make candles i cant resist using french pear as a scent lolol

4. what flower would you like to be given?

as i told u before i Luv bottlebrushes and waratahs like 😳😳omfg but i actually do love lilies too or crane flowers !! they look like birds !! i fucking love crane flowers fhjjhfjkhfg

5. who do you feel most you around?

you <3333 BUT for ppl irl definitely my best friend who ive known since i was a baby and my cousin we’ve been a trio for ages i love em fjhkgjkhg theyre the only friends that ever stuck with me lol. anywWAYS ima stop myself from oversharing lol

6. say three nice things about yourself (three physical and three non-physical).

GAH u sneaky little bugger... okay i will try

1. i rly like my eyes hfdjhkfdjkh

2. i actually dont mind my legs that much i like em! 

3. i rly like my eyebrows fjhkgfhjgf

4. uuuhh i like my puzzle skills (like puzzle games and jigsaws etc) 

5. fuck the non physical is so hard uh,MM?? its scaring me that its so hard lol but i like the way im willing to make friends with all different ppl

6. i like my passion for plants and animals ig hfhhg

7. what colour brings you peace?

GREEEN !!!!1 i fucking LO V  E green at the moment like my favs change sometimes for colours but i love green its such a nice calming colour and plants are green so :))))

8. tag someone (or multiple people) who make you feel good.

OHHH i wonder WHO to tag wow this is SO hard i have absolutely no idea who to tag for this................................................  @cinnachee (duh) BUT ALSO !!! @yearning-and-arson @autistic-ace-bee @lifewasawillowtv @zombiewheeler @iinkycat and literally ALL my mutuals and followers ily all <33333

9. what calms you down?

ummm music, podcasts, having a fan running (usually in summer tho) someone telling me a random story for distraction, playing maybe a game of sudoku (i luv sudoku i actually play it a lot) i guess are some things fjkhgkjhg

10. what’s something you’re excited for?

UHH my work is opening up a new store closer to my house that im gonna be working at in april and im excited !! because the new people who own the one im currently working at are FUCKED they keep fucking everyone over with shifts and they are such tightasses we have like mice upstairs and downstairs and water flooding from air conditioners and other shit but im not gonna go on a rant about my work lol.. already annoy the shit out of my friends enough with it HAHA BUT IM excited to get out of this shithole and go to the better one !!! AND OF COURSE SEASON 4 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BYLER !!!!!!!!!!!!! MAY 27TH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA 

11. what’s your ideal date?

LITERALLY ANYTHING except like a fancy restaurant i dont like that shit... i want fun stuff yknow or just where we CAN have fun yknow? like we could straight up just go to a 7-11 and get a slurpee but as long as we have fun while doing it and get to spend time together then i think its a good date :)) like thats what i think it should be abt like spending quality time wirh ur partner (though i wont say no to like dessert dates like going to get ice cream or crepes etc .... i love the idea of dessert dates :’) ) 

12. how are you?

umm idk i could be better lol. on my period so i feel like shit and i also got my booster shot so i feel doubly shit lol and i havent done a single bit of drawing or writing today its just... ug h. like i really want to but every time i opened it up to try my brain said NO lie down on the couch and just do nothing productive... fucking  khjjkhjkhhjkfghjkfghjk but hopefully ill feel better tmrw 

13. what’s your comfort food?

ASIAN FOOD FJHFGJK like omg rice paper rolls or japanese food or like beef and blackbean noodles... literally God. though a nice good bowl of curry too GOD i love curry but alsO CHOCOLATE AAA esp like a nice choccy cake... BUT ALSO I LOVE FRIED RICE DISHES ??? or PAELLA? is also comfort.. im just as bad as choosing a fav food as u bennie HJKFDSKJHFDKSJ 

14. favourite feel-good show?

stranger thinGSSSS OF COURSE FJKHFJHK i watch it daily.. but also the office is nice too :)) i actually realised recently tho i dont watch tv shows all tHat much?? i watch more movies than shows,, like i can think of maybe 5 tv shows ive ever watched LMAO idk why ive never really watched many tv shows..

15. for every emoji you get, tag someone and describe them in one word.

???? i literally dont understand this.. for every emoji i ‘get?” like every emoji i have in my recent or are ppl sposed to send me emojis ?? or do i choose one for someone? i dont understand this im sorry bennie my brain has never been smaller...

16. compliment the person who sent you this number.

YOU ARE PERFECT AND SPECIAL AND AMAZING IN EVERY FUCKING WAY !!!!! YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND I LOVE YOU SO MUCH !!!!! I LOVE YOUR MUSIC YOUR WRITING YOUR FACE YOUR GLASSES YOUR HAIR YOUR FASHION SENSE YOUR SMILE YOUR EYES YOUR SENSE OF HUMOUR YOUR - i am stopping myself before this becomes an I Love Bennie essay

17. fairy lights or LED lights?

hmmm LED lights i think r my style im Edgier but fairy lights fuck tooooo!!!!

18. do you still love stuffed animals?

YEAH DUH???@?? who DOESNT? stuffed animals are so amazing and cute ands they slap sm... i still have nearly all my stuffed toys from when i was a kid i treasure them

19. most important thing in your life?

ummm i dont really know?? like.. i guess having a good time yknow? like doing what i love and spending quality time with friends and fam when i can but also spending quality time with myself too, and not letting other peoples opinions influence that unless i want it as well.. i guess love is at the core of it lol . and that means all types of love, platonic and familial and self love as well as romantic because they are just as important !! though you dont have to love your blood family if they dont treat you good found families are just as valid !! 

20. what do you want most in the world right now?

to see u 😭😭💞💖💗💝💕💓 KJDHFHJK but also to like. be normal i guess like no mental illness cuz it would mean SO many things in life would be so much easier but ik thats a futile dream so like !! yeah BUT LIKE BENNIE U HAVE NO IDEA HOW BADLY I WANNA MEET U KFHJKFGKH LIKE HOLY SDHIT I GENUINELY LIKE WANNA SAVE UP FOR PLANE TICKIES TO CANADA FHJKGFJLG 

21. if you could tell your past self one thing, what would it be?

umm enjoy life as much as you can i guess .. enjoy your youth even if your childhood was fucked up by that thing , dont let it stop you from being a kid still. and also you are going to become emo . ended on a lighthearted note lol 

22. what would you say to your future self?

idk honestly i just hope shit is going well for you and got to do what you wanted, or at least youre happy lol 

23. favourite piece of clothing?

my chokers !!! i love them !!! but ALSO i have these fishnets with butterfly patterns on one side of the leg and ITS AH FDJKHFDKGJHGKHJD I LOVE IT its so pretty :’) 

24. what’s something you do to de-stress?

420 blaze it 🤑🤑🤑🤑🤪🤪🤪🥴😵🤯😩😧😩😨😨😞😱🤕but also playing this game called unpacking is sos sosososo good i love it , and listening to music in the dark too is nice 

25. what’s the best personal gift someone could give you (playlist, homemade card, etc.)

ANYTHING !!!!!! LITERALLY ANYTHING PPL M A D E FOR ME OR GOT FOR ME WITH ME IN MIND/z??234uiorudsfhjkdfjk LITERALLY FUCKING AMAZING FDJEJGHKKJHJKH HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA like PL E A S !!!!!!! just anything l;ike that and i am MELTING 

26. what movie would you want to live in?

uummm honestly beetlejuice. its so fun you get to haunt ppl when you die and its so fun and whimsical and id probably just start crazy shit and be Chaotic

27. which character would you want to be?

is this one related to the previous question? cuz if so BEETLEJUICE DUH FJGJHK you can do all this weird ass shit and you live in a coffin HELL YEAH 

28. hugs or hand-holding?

UM im not deciding thanks both of them 

29. morning, afternoon or night?

NIGHT BABBYYYY always nighttime im a nocturnal little shit

30. what reminds you of home (doesn’t have to mean house… just things that remind you of the feeling of home)?

you honestly cuz like i wake up to ur msgs a lot or come home from work to em like i look forward to it so much throughout the day <333 BUT also like .. listening to kurtis conner’s podcast too definitely and homemade mugs and stuff you see in shop windows and getting like eggs and bacon etc on toast at a cafe too.. definitely some things that feel like home <3 BUT also the beatles too.. listening to their music just like unlocks some deep part of my soul hjfhjkjhkG ive been missing them lately but i do nOT want to go back to the fandom atm..

[i-think-i-luv-ya]

Gunshot - KARD M/V Review Rant

I’m at it again with another so called review, when in reality its just a whole essay on my thoughts of my favorite artist’s comebacks, aka a rant lol. If you haven’t seen Gunshot, GO WATCH IT! I promise it’s amazing and this is one of their best songs/videos/comebacks etc. I have attached the video so no excuses! Also this is a lot of spoilers so don’t read this first it will ruin the shock and awe that is this video. And putting the “keep reading” to contain said spoilers and so ya’ll who don’t wanna read this don’t have to scroll endlessly to reach the end of my rambling.

Hi! Hello! Thank you for continuing reading! Lolol my Taemin 2KIDZ review actually got notes which was surprising, so hope you guys like this. I have a lot to say so here we go...

So first I wanna start on the meaning of the song. On his VLIVE BM said the song is about verbal abuse and how detrimental it can be to your mental health. Considering many pop songs, especially kpop, are all very cheery and upbeat I applaud them for covering such a serious topic in a way that’s not sad and slow. PLUS BM is creating new merch called healers where everything will be donated to an organization that fights against bullying (including homophobia and racism) which is incredible so be sure to check that out when it’s dropped. 

So on that note I wanna get into the song itself. Let’s start with lyrics. The song starts with the words “LOVE damn 4 letters” like what a perfect way to start a song. Also the way they blend a lot more English into this song is something I love as a non-Korean speaker. Plus the parts in English are so powerful? Well so are the Korean lyrics. Like KARD you guys just went hard with this whole song. The chorus is literally “You words are like a gunshot, I’m bleeding love”. Just wow. That definitely describes verbal abuse perfectly, especially coming from those you love because it’s those cruel words from loved ones that hurt the most. I mean “the words you spit out kill me like bullets”, how else is there to describe that pain because it fucking sucks. Other lyrics that just show the words are coming from the one you love: “As long as you love me, the good or the ugly, everything is okay” as well as “I won’t surrender my darling”.  And this relationship is obviously toxic with words like “Selfish I will never be enough even when I pour out all of myself” and “It’s like you control me, without you I’m lonely” and “So far you’ve concealed the true color” and “Without you dying slowly”. And they clearly have had enough with this abuse with lyrics like “Need to drag myself out of there, remove you from my life, take off the tag you” and “They hit me like a gunshot, I’ve bled enough”. 

Now into the sound of the song. It has all the classic KARD elements: it has a powerful sound with the instrumentals, it’s faced paced, it’s something you can dance to, and it has that chorus that slows down then just picks up again. But this song just sounds very different than anything they’ve released before? Not in a bad way, since this is probably one of their best songs. Between the lyrics, the vocals, and the overall sound where the music just doesn’t completely take over like in some of their other songs. Don’t get me wrong I love songs like BOMB BOMB, but it was very loud and a lot happening in the song at once. Which isn’t a bad thing, cuz that’s like the perfect club song. But with this song (and the whole album really) it shows them refining their sound. Also they had a lot more involvement with this song, especially BM who did everything from lyrics to producing which probably has a lot to do with it. The music itself just goes perfectly with the vocals. Just the flow is really nice, and the beat is fun, and them gun shots really just add to it. And can we talk about that breakdown when BM is like “1 shot, 2 shot, 3 shot, 4″? Like what??!! Those sirens and everything just ramps up just before it ends, like yaasssss. 

Now the music video! It starts with Jiwoo zipping up a body bag...which just sets the tone for the video cuz it’s like ok this is how it starts lets see how tf we got here. Then you find out at the end it Jiwoo zipping up the body bag of...well Jiwoo lol like WHAT THE FUCK?! (I’ll get into this here in a sec). Anyway in terms of the video it also has some classic KARD elements like the choreography that’s very intense and dramatic, the bright colors, the flashes and lasers, some crazy stuff happening, and some really cool props and visuals (not just the members lol). Other common stuff is the piles of technology surrounding them, especially J.seph. Like in Red Moon, there’s cameras and old televisions around them. This time the video starts with them being surrounded by cameras and J.seph has a pile of old computer monitors. There may be some meaning with this, but I don’t get it but think it’s an interesting theme. Perhaps its an analogy for them being constantly watched and put on every screen, like showing a darker side of being a celebrity (also will get into this in a minute when I talk about interesting interpretations and theories). 

Also this video gave me suicide squad vibes. Like Jiwoo with them pony tails and the way her makeup was done resembled Harley Quinn. And idk BM gave me Joker vibes (may be due to the coloring of his teeth), BUT he also gave me Harley vibes with the blue and pink coloring of his blonde hair (which is just an amazing look for him). Then BM was just covering everything in black, Jiwoo is just fucking shit up, Somin is ready to cut a bitch, and J.seph is burning shit up as usual (just like BOMB BOMB, so another parallel). Everyone looked good in this video...like they are all such great visuals. Somin looked like a queen as always with the jewelry and everything (they always do that and she looks stunning). Jiwoo pulls of that outfit with those threads everywhere, like that would drive me crazy yet she looks amazing. Blonde BM is truly a look. And J.seph? I think this was the best he’s looked in any video...maybe its the dark hair and clothes paired with those light contacts that just make his eyes stand out. Idk but looks good, all of them! Even with all those slashes to their faces! Also this video is a lot less sexualized, especially with the girls but that’s a whole other topic for another day.

So we know this song is about verbal abuse. I talked about how it could be from someone you love. Obviously the cuts on their faces are caused by the words and pain inflicted on them, until eventually its more than just lashes but a full on gunshot killing them completely. An interesting theory I read is this is a song to their fans, or really people just leaving hate comments. Again you can draw from the cameras and screens how their whole life is recorded, and how they are trying their best pouring their heart and soul into their music when they get all this hate and criticism. So these “shots” hurt the most when it comes from their fans. Also going with this concept, Jiwoo shooting herself could be killing who she is to be who they want her to be. Although there’s so many interpretations, especially to the ending. Like it could be her killing the weaker and darker part of herself (like the part of herself willing to put up with the abuse out of love), so by killing that part of her she is free. BUT, could this “winner” be that dark part of herself killing who she used to be? This could also be killing that pain, but by embracing it and letting it morph you into something darker like a person embracing that evil and using it to make themselves stronger and protect themselves. OR she is causing this pain on herself, it’s her own words are the insecurities and lack of love to herself that is affecting her until she ends up just killing herself (not literally but figuratively). Idk so many ideas and interpretations to the ending alone. Plus we have them all just spreading this darkness and anger (like BM literally painting everything black, which is symbolic into spreading darkness). But ya this video was amazing, the visuals were stunning and the song is just great.

The rest of the album (all 2 songs...hope they release more) was just as incredible. Hold On is a farewell to J.seph who will be enlisting soon, and omg that made me cry. So J.seph you better keep your promise and return soon because we’ll be holding on and waiting for you babe! This song was also really slow (at least for a KARD song) which just shows you they can be diverse in their music. Plus just the contrast of the verses (which are just super powerful) with the chorus (which is very melodic) was great. And with AH EE YAH, like that was so nice to listen to and its a cool mix between old music with that beat it starts with, to newer music especially with the way they rap. So, shows they have a lot of influences and it also shows a different side to KARD. 

Overall I think it’s a great comeback (idk what else they have planned but hoping for some new stuff because I’ve missed them so much). Please go show support and stream Gunshot and listen to the mini album! They are so talented and deserve so much more recognition. They have such hope with this comeback, but yet they still are like “we’re never gonna be number 1″ and that just breaks my heart. So show your support, hopefully they can get a win this year or just something big happen for them because they deserve it!! So that is the end of my rant...back to watching this video for the 100th time we go!! 

[jchall110]

So ordinarily I would put something like this on my Twitter, as that’s kind of turned into my personal vent/diary platform as of recent, but this is going to be much longer than Twitter can allow, and I need to write this all out without losing my train of thought. It’s gonna go behind a Read More, and I’d like to request that you only read it if we’ve been mutuals for a while, and only if you really want to. I’m not expecting any response, hell I don’t want any responses, I just need to put my thoughts down somewhere, and if I put it in a Google doc or something I’m gonna come back to it later and dwell on it, but if I just put it somewhere and immediately delete it, I’m not going to be able to talk to my therapist about it on Monday. Anyway, content warnings abound, as I’m gonna be talking about depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide, covid-19, stalking, emotional abuse, and a pretty negative experience I had in a partial hospitalization program at a local mental institute. You’ve been warned. (Also for those of you who are new here, “ignore me” is my personal rant/vent tag, feel free to blacklist it to avoid seeing future posts like this)

So. Here’s a brief recap of the past year and a half in my life. Back in October of 2018, my best friend went through a very bad breakup with her emotionally abusive ex, while another of my friends was struggling very much with his mental health and attempted suicide. I was miserable working at Target and was gearing up to return to school in the Spring. I had also had feelings for the friend who went through the breakup, and she sort of had feelings for me, but she also had feelings for the other friend, and I had some vague kind-of feelings for the other friend as well, so in December we all decided “fuck it, let’s all date.” I won’t recap the full details of the relationship but it was a goddamn shitshow. His mental heath continued to deteriorate and he wasn’t seeking treatment for any of it, her mental health was extremely poor as well as a result of two years of emotional abuse and extreme codependency issues, and my mental health suffered greatly because of the expectations placed on me, as well as his frequent mood shifts where he would go from wanting to spend the rest of our lives together to, at one point, telling me things in an effort to get me to hurt or kill myself. Not a good situation by any measure. School was good, though, and the two classes I took last Spring were excellent, and I was ready to go back to school full-time in the Fall. Flash forward to September of 2019. My mental health is terrible, though my academics are very strong. I decide, after a few specific incidents, that I can’t be in the relationship with the both of them anymore and break up with him. A lot of bad things happened. She ended up leaving him as well. Then, about a month later, she left me as well and moved out of the state with someone she had met on OKCupid only a few weeks prior. At this point I need to take a medical leave of absence from school and move back in with my parents because I’m so depressed and traumatized that I can barely function. You see, since breaking up with him, he had been harassing me, even after I had attempted to get the police involved. He would call me, text me, make new Facebook accounts to send me message requests, anything to try to get in touch with me. So with all of this happening, and with me basically unable to do anything, I decide to look into a partial hospitalization program at a mental institution not far from where I live. Insurance covered most of it, my parents said they’d pay for the rest, so I started the program in early November. Ordinarily it’s only a three or four week program. I was there for at least 5. It was essentially a day program, so I would be there from 9 to 3 every day Monday to Friday. It was a really great program, except for a few things. Firstly, because it was a program both for mental health and addiction, a lot of the programming wasn’t really applicable to me, as the only thing that I’m addicted to is sugar, and I have no plans to break that habit. There’s a history of temporary psychosis caused by mind-altering substances in my family, and I don’t want to even find out if it applies to me as well. I barely even drink. So anyway, I was one of maybe three people who was there exclusively for mental health, so my options for programming were a bit limited, until a bunch of us complained about the repetitiveness of that aspect of the program and they switched things up a bit. Unfortunately it was at the tail end of my time in the program, so I didn’t exactly get much benefit from that. Secondly, and more importantly, close to the end of my time in the program, one of the mental health workers, a pre-doctoral intern who was running most of the “classes” that I was in, said a few things to me that were really frustrating and upsetting. Firstly she said that “ADHD doesn’t exist, it’s just a reaction to trauma. Too many kids are getting diagnosed with it when they just have regular attention issues, and in adults a diagnosis is almost always accompanied with trauma. And of course people are going to perform better when they’re on a stimulant.” Which. Is wrong on so many accounts. First of all, it’s overdiagnosed in the wrong people and massively underdiagnosed in the people who actually have it, especially young girls. And secondly, of course it’s paired with trauma when adults are diagnosed with it. They’ve had to deal with it for their entire lives up until then without knowing why they couldn’t do things the same way as everyone else, and there’s also a lot of trauma in general that comes with having ADHD considering how many people say “Oh, you’re just not trying hard enough” or “You’re just making excuses,” not to mention the self esteem issues that come with it. And thirdly, yeah people will perform better when on stimulants, but does taking a stimulant make everyone else tired? Cuz it does for me because it lets me slow down my brain enough to actually sleep. So yeah, that was fucked up. But the second thing she said was probably worse, and it didn’t actually occur to me how much this impacted me until earlier today when I realized something, but I’ll get to that realization soon. So it’s my second-to-last day in the program. I had gotten almost no sleep the previous night because I had a massive panic attack right before bed because my asswipe ex messaged me some really fucked up stuff. So I’m way out of it, and my ability to concentrate is pretty shit. I’m doing my best, though, and I’m paying attention to the discussion. We were talking about the parts of the brain and how they’re impacted by trauma. There were a few times during that day where I had forgotten words but still knew what I was talking about, and at least one of them had happened in front of this woman. So she asks “Does anybody know what the part of the brain is that connects the two hemispheres?” I say “Oh, I do” cuz I do know what it is, but for the life of me I can’t remember what the name is. (It’s the corpus callosum.) So she looks at me and says, out loud, in front of the entire group, “You know, it’s okay if we don’t know everything.” So I get all flustered and embarrassed and mad at myself because, in my ADHD people-pleaser brain, the teacher just failed me in front of the whole class and now they all hate me. So I don’t say a goddamn word for the rest of the day, and the next day I leave without saying goodbye to that one woman, after leaving a glowing review in the exit survey. So the thing about this that’s really fucked up is that like two days before, I sat down with her and told her how I have a lot of specific trauma around rejection and failure, especially relating to my dad and how he constantly asserts that I don’t try hard enough or that I need to do better, shit like that. Like, that was a major theme with me the whole time I was in the program. It was like, getting over the intense rejection of my best friend/girlfriend running away with a guy she just met, and my relationship with my dad. That was it. (Of the two, the one there that’s still a major thing in my life is my relationship with my dad. At this point, she can fuck off with whoever she wants. I’m more pissed at her than anything else now.) So for her to turn around and embarrass me in front of the entire group like that, when there was solid evidence that a) I did know what I was talking about and b) I was having a very off day was really messed up. In thinking about it, there was quite a few messed up things that she did in the last week or so that I was there. Probably more during the rest of my time there but I don’t actually remember most of it because working on your trauma can be traumatizing itself, go figure. Anyway, I had almost completely forgotten about that until earlier today when I was thinking about how I was getting much more sensitive to rejection and perceived failure recently than I was before all this had happened. Part of it is probably my increased estrogen dose fucking with my mood, but the majority of it, I think, stems from that one incident of her pretty much violating my trust and invalidating me in front of like twelve people that I really trusted and felt close with. Fucked me up, yo. Anyway, so I leave the program and start working for my dad at his machine shop. Things are going super well, I’m making a fair bit of money, keeping in touch with my friends as best I can, and doing my best to avoid my ex harassing me further. About midway through December I change my phone number so that he’ll stop calling me (he had several ways to get around me blocking his number), and in the middle of February I change my name on Facebook so he won’t be able to find me and send me more message requests, cuz there’s no way to stop that from happening either, and the police were useless because “I wasn’t in any physical danger.” At this point he had moved away from my town, presumably back with his parents but I don’t really know, and I really don’t care. So he messages my siblings on Facebook trying to get my phone number, and then somehow finds my Facebook again and sends me a picture of him cutting his wrist. So I get fed up, go to a local domestic violence prevention nonprofit, talk with one of their advocates, and file a restraining order against him. It gets approved, and the messages stop. A court date is set for us both to meet with a judge to discuss everything and see if it needs to stay in place or not or whatever, and for about 2 weeks everything is great. Then covid-19 starts hitting. I get what was probably just the flu or a cold or whatever a few days before the court date. Then the state that I live in announces that most court hearings are postponed until mid-April. I check on the website and find that stalking and domestic violence, among a few others, are exempt from this and will be going on as scheduled. Because I was recently sick, I call the courts the day before and ask if I can appear over the phone. They say yes, it’s all good, great. So the next morning I call in and things get moving. It turns out that my ex didn’t show up to the hearing, even though he definitely knew about it. So I talk with the judge for a few minutes and we decide that I don’t need the restraining order anymore because he’s not likely to start harassing me again, and if he does I can always get a new one or get the police involved. And so far I haven’t heard a peep from him so I’m assuming that chapter of my life is closed for good, which is excellent. But then more things start to close down, and my dad basically tells me that he doesn’t really need me at work and it’s best if I stay home. So since then I’ve been staying at home. It’s been 15 days total that I’ve been home, with only minimal trips to work for an hour here and there. And I really don’t do well with isolation. It’s not all bad, because I live with my parents, so I have some social contact, but as was mentioned above I don’t exactly get along with my dad, I don’t have a lot in common with my stepmom, and my grandmother is a grumpy old lady who isn’t very good for conversations about much else than knitting and Jeopardy. I’ve been doing my best to stay in touch with folks online, and it’s been decent, but it’s still pretty rough. And when Animal Crossing came out and all of my friends started playing it, I started feeling even worse because I’m poor as shit and don’t even have a Switch, and they’re fucking $400, which is a whole student loan payment for me. So I’ve been pretty miserable the past two weeks. To top it all off, I have to register for Fall classes next week, and I don’t think I can even imagine that far into the future right now. The world is supremely fucked, and there’s almost no way that I’ll even be able to afford to go back to school. I’ll probably have to drop out entirely. For at least a few years. And I’m really not ready to give up on school right now. Like I said above, I’m really sensitive to failure, and this is the third time I’ve tried, and failed, at college. And I’m getting real frustrated about it. The first time it was my ADHD, which at the time was undiagnosed. The second time it was mental health and my asshole ex harassing me. Now, when I finally have my ducks in a row, it’s money. The one thing that no amount of treatment or medication or court hearings will change. Plus there’s all the political bullshit going on still, and the impending collapse of society as we know it, and any number of other global crises (yes, that is the proper plural of crisis) going on. Oh, did I mention I’m an empath and the moods and emotions of the people around me, and of the world in general, pretty heavily impact me? I’ve been able to tell when some massive tragedy occurred even before the news story breaks. So yeah, all in all I’m doing about the worst I’ve been doing since high school before I was on antidepressants, and it’s really hard to see any end to this tunnel. I know I’m one in several hundred million people who are struggling right now, and I’m lucky that I’m at least moderately healthy with a steady place to stay and things to eat, but goddamn if things aren’t shit for me right now. Like I said, I’m not looking for any kind of response, and if you even read all of this I’m legitimately surprised. I just needed to put this all down somewhere because keeping it in is getting to be almost too much.

Don’t worry, friends. I promise you I’m safe. I’m just scared, lonely, and really lost right now.

I love you all.

[lokaneiscanon]

Mighty Thor in Thor: Love and Thunder rant

Seeing Natalie Portman returning to reprise her role as Jane Foster, nevertheless wielding Mjolnir, finally getting the treatment this character deserves, was surreal to say the least. I had just started reading Lords of Midgard, the 8th issue of Mighty Thor (2015 - 2018), and had fallen in love already. But I didn't suspect at all that Taika Waititi would pull this card in Thor: Love and Thunder, considering Jane was barely mentioned in Ragnarok. The news about my favorite actress portraying one of my favorite characters coming out of the blue - you can imagine the excitement. Alas, I quickly remembered what the fandom thought of that comic (at least on tumblr) and imagined it now growing tenfold, cuz not everyone in the MCU fandom reads comics but pretty much everyone wants to watch another Thor movie. And yes, many fans weren't ready for this step, still recovering from Sam Wilson getting the shield in Endgame. Which is completely fine. We're not obligated to like everything Marvel throws in our faces, we're allowed to criticize and express our opinion on the internet or wherever. What is not okay is mindlessly hating, and even worse - using false facts to support said opinion.

I have seen some people using the argument that it is one of Marvel's worst selling comics. Which has already been proven wrong by multiple sites, including Comichron, just Google it, as I did myself. I read multiple posts, ones saying how good Jane is doing as Thor in sales, others disproving this, so I checked for myself the numbers at the site mentioned above month by month to be sure. The comic truly had its downfalls as the story progressed but in my opinion it's normal for the 1st issue to have more sales than the 21st. If we compare it to Unworthy Thor, which started running a bit later and followed the now unworthy Odinson, the data shows the latter had more sales. But then again, while Might Thor was at its 17th issue, Unworthy Thor was at its 2nd. Also, they later crossed paths, shared comic issues, it's fair to say they go hand in hand and Jason Aaron, the author, probably doesn't want us to compare them, as they complete and compliment each other's stories. Still I decided to check the comic that made Thor unworthy in the first place - Thor: God of Thunder (2012 - 2014), which seemed to me more "comparable" to Might Thor (2015 - 2018). *I keep putting the years it was being released so as to not be confused with previous Mighty Thor issues, whole Odinson was still Thor, please bear with me* So yes, the numbers were pretty close, but from what I saw, Mighty Thor had the upper hand if we compare first issue to first issue and so on. (In defense of Odinson, we have to take into account that this data is only from the US and does not include digital sales. Also, he's been around since the 50s. We could argue Jane was a breath of fresh air that some Marvel fans were indeed ready for. As a non-American, and also a person without a hint of knowledge in economics I cannot take into account inflation and whatever else has prevented or enabled Americans to get their hands on the comics or has affected prizes through the years. Bear that in mind.) Moreover, from what I saw on Comichron, both comics had much competition - God of thunder was released along with Avengers vs the X-men, the Uncanny X-men, pretty popular at the time, and the Goddess of Thunder faced Civil War 2 and DC Universe Rebirth (yes, DC is in the game too), also dominating with tremendous sales for the longest time. Yet I stick with my original statement - both Thors are valid and shouldn't be put against one another regardless of profit. Because at the end of the day what will matter the most is the story. And boy, what a story it is.

Now, I haven't read the Thor: God of Thunder, but as I was doing research I found one very well written summary and explanation of Thor's arc and his becoming unworthy and I will post a link below, because I honestly feel I wouldn't be doing this comic a favor by describing it without having read it. Which I plan to do in the future, tbh. It's a fantastic prelude to the Mighty Thor (2015 - 2018) that I've come to love. First, I'd like to ask you all to stop hating on the comic without having read it first. It doesn't make any sense and being petty for the sake of being petty won't benefit neither you, nor anyone, really. Now, about the comic itself - the art is magnificent. It's just gorgeous. Mighty Thor isn't , thank all the gods, sexualized, she is pretty buffed and generally looks like a warrior. As it is with the other characters, I dare say. The background truly captures the essence of every world Jane finds herself on. Action scenes are just the right amount and balanced with dialogue well. On a side note, it's pretty funny to read/listen to in your head the Shakespearean English cursive in which Jane talks as Thor. The plot line branches beyond this comic, starting from Thor: God of Thunder and leading to the War of Realms. And it is elaborately built in every issue. You don't know what to expect, yet it makes sense when it happens. Which leads me to the characterizations. My God, what a treat Loki is in this. Clearly, my opinion is kinda biased, since he's my favorite character, but you never know which side he's on. What his motivations are. And it just feels so... Loki. His writing is brilliant. Almost makes me forget what the MCU did to him. Also, he gets some daddy time with Laufey (not as kinky as I make it sound). Frigga/Freyja is just as awesome as in the MCU, even more, at least in the comics she calls Odin out on his shit, who btw is I guess an asshole in every version and universe. Malekith, the main villain, is unbearably despicable, I want to tear every page he is on. He really was mishandled in the Dark World, if you want some true action with the dark elves, you are welcome to enjoy. I saved the best for the end - Jane Foster/ Might Thor. Now, if you think Dr. Foster spends her time boasting about her worthiness and how Odinson is just called Thor, but she is Mighty Thor, you are horribly wrong. She just... does her job. Because the hammer chose her. Because there's no one else to do so. That's it. If you think there's some feminism involved, yes, there sure is, but it certainly isn't the reason Jane became Thor in the first place. It was not the creators going SJW because it's trendy, as such a mindset is honestly offensive to any descent creator with any self respect, but a well thought out story arc, which, I repeat, you have to read the comic to understand. Jane is not at all whiny about the hate she gets in-universe, not only from foes like Odin and who-not, but from Shield and generally people whose asses she's saving. Her having cancer is not something they pulled to provoke sympathy and make her look like a victim - on the contrary, she is a damn hero and a victor. I don't want to give out spoilers, but her being Thor is actually a giant sacrifice that no one really appreciates (both in-universe and in the fandom). She is not Thor to prove she can be, or just to prove "women can be heroes" - she doesn't have to. She is simply needed by the realms and so she does her job, even though she is called a thief, persecuted and generally hated. All that matters is that the hammer finds her worthy - the beauty and simplicity of that fact you will find out, for the last time, if you read the comic.

I'm not making you read the comic or watch Thor: Love and Thunder. I myself don't know what to make of this film yet because there's barely any information about it. I only know it will be based on the comic so that's a reason for my hopes to be up already. On the other hand, since I didn't like Loki's characterization in Ragnarok, I'm not sure what to expect from Taika. There are valid reasons to not like the idea of Jane returning to the MCU as Thor, which you are entitled to. However, reasons such as "why does everything have to be political these days" are not. Because if I had to make a list of everything politically related in the MCU, it would take forever. Steve Rogers kills nazis is the most blatant example. Make of it what you want. But I think we're far enough into the 21st century to realize art and real life are not that separable. It's undeniable that art affects people and that is to say, people everywhere. And they all have different opinions and aren't gonna like everything media is offering to them. And I wish I could simply tell you not to watch the movie but I'm a Marvel fan too and I understand that I can't just take away Thor from you because I want Mighty Thor as well. But none of us can stop Marvel from producing it. So, to quote an image I saw recently, I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. Let the rest of the fandom enjoy what they want to enjoy. Yes, ik I can play around with the tags and avoid posts that unnerve me but, for example, I'm looking up Mighty Thor fanart, which obviously isn't anti-Mighty Thor, yet I get attacked in the comics for anticipating a movie that doesn't even have a full cast yet. Ik I'm not asking for too much when I wish to get the same internet experience (not only tumblr, but also insta, YouTube, Twitter, any site) as the Thor Odison fans, for example. I'm aware I cannot stop all the toxic fans and the trolls but I hope this post has inspired those of you who simply can't envision Jane as Thor, or don't like Natalie Portman in the role, or whatever eles personal preference that doesn't involve political issues and isn't harmful to the community, not to attack every post on your dash with hate. The movie is called LOVE and Thunder, for God's sake. (on a side note, is a franchise that is too afraid to show LGBT characters for more than 1 minute so as to not lose profit from China, THAT politically correct)

Anyway, that was a veeeery long rant, sorry to whoever reads this but, like, please, I put effort into this, hoping this time around I won't be the only positive reviewer of a movie, like I was with Solo: a Star Wars story (yes, I'm still bitter about this), which was boycotted for no apparent reason but was a decent film in reality, and I'm only bringing it up because it has a similar experience to Love and Thunder for getting hate before even being released. I'm not defending a billion dollar company that flopped in box office once, I'm defending the viewer's right to media they are interested in. If you don't like the character, remember - that's your opinion, not a fact that the character sucks. Kudos.

Not very easy to navigate, I advice you to do the research month by month individually for comics you'd like to compare. Also, if you happen to find more reliable data, pls say so in the comments.

Here you have the summary and explanation of the greatness of Thor: God of Thunder, Jesus, I'll go bankrupt if I buy this one too.

Yes, I want to end the sales dispute once and for all, I'm tired of seeing it on my dash. This guy probably explains it better than I did.

@awesomejenlawrence you said you'd like to read this and I delivered

[linelpisffxiv]

5.5 Spoilers Rant

Sorry, I just really really need to get this out somewhere and I keep my twitter safe for two weeks because I’m bad at properly tagging there.

I watched Sorrow of Werlyt’s stuff. I didn’t want to after 5.2′s stuff where it made it clear this wasn’t gonna properly call out Gaius’s demons, but 5.3 came around, making Crystal Tower mandatory, so now I’m suspicious that anything that’s considered side content can become mandatory, so I better pay attention. One day I’ll do Mhach, Warring Triad, and the Auspices properly in NG+, but not today.

Also, especially after this ending, I would not be surprised if it becomes mandatory at some point in 6.x

I’m not shy that I hated the reveal Gaius lived in 4.3/4.5. Especially given what he said in 4.4 about Black Rose being on the same line.

More specifically, I hate the people in charge of writing him, because they don’t seem to understand what it takes for someone to try and atone or be redeemed. “He’s against the empire” okay, and? Why is he against them? Spoilers, it’s cuz an ascian slighted him in particular and he wanted revenge there, and somewhere along the way found out they had their fingers in Garlemald too somehow. This isn’t atonement or redemption, it’s revenge. He hasn’t tried to change anything, and clearly is fond of Garlemald and conquering, given how he keeps saying “What good is a dead land to rule? You need savages to brainwash to your side for cannon fodder.”

The characters introduced in the story were flat, and not in good ways. Like, I had hope that maybe the big dark secret the Au Ra kids were hiding from Gaius and didn’t want him getting involved was that while they were serving Garlemald willingly, they weren’t willing to be in the weapon project. Nope. They liked the weapon project, they served willingly. They just didn’t want Gaius near their commanding officer because he had a beef with Gaius.

None of them had any personality between being pro-military and pro-Gaius. Valens is fucking cardboard cutout designed just to make Gaius look better because whoever wrote this thought Gaius was perfect as is.

They did the fucking “Sad middle-aged guy in rain” trope. They did the “Creation turned against the creator and did an implied gory death (with terrible sound effects)” trope. And worse, they did the “Neurodivergent person is a burden on the caregiver” trope mixed with “Neurodivergent person gets magically cured and made “whole”” trope. And yes, that’s what those scenes were. At best she’s dealing with PTSD/Grief, but given the way they have Allie walk and “Speak,” it’s delving into really ableist “All neurodivergent people are high-support and behave like this” stuff.

I went into the finale expecting disappointing. I admit I was hopeful that maybe maybe Gaius would come out having learned something. But nope. He gets three new kids and he had the gall to say  "My conquests came at a terrible cost.” Like, no fucking shit. The fact he said it exactly like that pissed me the fuck off even more than the treatment of Allie not just as a token female survivor, but temporarily a bad stereotype of neurodivergent people used to mock (And then made fucking better)

I just... I can’t. They managed to fucking get an industrial drill to go under my low bar because not only did they want to keep doing that, they wanted to truly show how low they could go.

I’m not joking when I keep saying “I want to know who fucking wrote this mess, and more the people who signed off these scenes in particular during the *writing* phase”

And of course Gaius gets rewarded with three kids and the mayorship of Werlyt like he fucking deserves all the awards.

This is a story that is written like a DM who thinks their job is to be the Antagonist, not play the antagonist.

I’m not joking. Like, the only way I can buy this is as some kind of Rebellion DnD homebrew game where the au ra kids are the PCs, and then whenever the weapon stuff happens, the DM makes the other PCs play the WoL and others, saying if they don’t, then they’ll make the executive decision they lost.

Seriously, that’s the best I got for this fucking story.

Usually, I will put shit down when I get this enraged, but as I said, FFXIV has shown they’re willing to make any sidecontent required or at least VERY STRONGLY RECOMMENDED PLEASE DO THIS OR YOU HAVE NO CONTEXT, so I had to go through it. Keep watching even as every further scene enraged me more and more.

While part of me hopes Ishikawa had as little part in this mess as possible, I know she probably had at least a hand in signing off, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if this had deeper handiwork.

[phandomsecretvalentines]

(darling don't be afraid) i will love you

Happy late-vday-early-bday @ryn-exe (can’t tag?)!!! Hope u enjoy, soz if it’s not good but i’m not so amazing(phil)

This is 2.1k words. There’s a bit of dream-violence (not in detail) and a lot of anxiety and fear so if u don’t like that stuff!! Tell me!!!! And i’ll write something else for you, i don’t mind. (You didn’t say anything i wasn’t supposed to write but idk). I’d describe this as hurt/comfort i think lmaooo

Basic summery i wrote fo myself: Dan and Phil, and how they deal with each other’s 3am fears (2009 vs 2018, now)

From a pitch-hitter 💓💓

——

[Saturday; 10.26.09; 03:37]

——

Dan<33 (03:37): phil? :[

Phil (03:45): Yrha

Phil (03:47): Sorry!! Yeah**

Phil (03:47): Why are you up so early/late?? I barely woke up

Dan<33 (03:49): sorry i woke you :/

Dan<33 (03:50): my parents went away for a bit and i’m home alone and i cant turn off the lights cuz im too scared

Dan<33 (03:51): and i can’t sleep so bad even hugging pillow cant help mee :[[

Dan<33 (03:52): so im sitting in the hallway with every light im the house on alone in just my pants

Dan<33 (03:52): and i was a idiot and missed you so i woke you up at so late and now ur gonna hate me crap

Dan<33 (03:52): sorry

Phil (03:53): I’ll never ever hate you dan!!! <<33333333333333

Phil (03:53): I’m sorry ur so scared :[[ I wish I was there to be strong and protect u again

Dan<33 (03:54): i wish you were here too

Phil (03:54): :[ <3

Dan<33 (03:58): CDAP PHIL I THINK I HESRF A GHOST

Dan<33 (03:58): IR MONSTER

Dan<33 (03:58): FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

Phil (03:59): Dan oh my gosh are you okay??

Dan<33 (04:00): yeah i think but

Dan<33 (04:00): i heard something phil

Dan<33 (04:01): im scared

Dan<33 (04:02): i can’t believe im 18 and i’m actually sobbing out of fear alone and naked in a hallway over a fucking noise

Dan<33 (04:02): to my boyfriend

Dan<33 (04:02): on skype

Dan<33 (04:03): fuck

Phil (04:03): Dan :[[ i’m so sorry

Dan<33 (04:04): it’s not your fault

Phil (04:04): Want me to call you??? (If u want)

Dan<33 (04:05): can we skype instead?

Dan<33 (04:05): i want to see your face plz <3

Dan<33 (04:05): if thats okay

Phil (04:06): That’s fine! One sec plz :]

——

[Phil would like to add Dan<33 to a call (02:33)]

[Accept] [Decline]

[Accepted]

——

When Dan answered the call, his face was red and puffed and wet. Even through the crap-pixel screen quality, Phil could see that.

“Hey,” Dan’s voice broke.

“Hi,”

Dan was shaking slightly.

His face suddenly flushed, “Oh shit, I forgot – I’m, uh, in only pants. In front of you. Crap.”

“It’s fine, I’ve seen you shirtless before.” Phil smiled what he hoped was reassuringly, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah — I mean, I am now. I guess.”

“Are you cold?”

“Kinda.” Dan admitted.

“Want to go to bed?”

“My room is too dark –”

“Well, I’ll be there, wont I? And I’ll protect you from everything bad in the dark.”

“You’re not really here.”

“Only ever a few hours away. And if worst comes to worst, I have the police line and the monster-killer line. So you’ll be super safe.”

Dan muffled a giggle, “Yeah, okay.”

He shuffled up off the floor, and made his way into his bedroom, clutching the laptop tightly.

“I dunno if I’m getting any sleep tonight, honestly.”

“You will! You can cuddle your pillow and I’ll tell you stories until the demons go away and you can sleep.”

“I’m not five, Phil.” There was no malice in his reply.

“You don’t need to be five for any of that to be true.” Phil said, serious tone.

“Okay,”

Minutes later, Dan was snuggled under his covers; hugging a pillow tightly as he listened to Phil go on about some guy at the market.

“Then, he pulled a hot dog out of his left pocket. Who keeps a single —”

“Phil?” Dan interrupted, his voice was dripping with sleep.

“Mm?”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“No.” Phil answered simply.

“I mean – for being so scared of such dumb stuff. Seven-year-olds are braver than me.”

“It’s okay to have fears, Dan. I bet you’re not the only adult with those fears either,”

“I’m scared of the dark. And ghosts and monsters and moths and demons and –”

“– and that’s fine. I don’t mind.”

“And it’s not annoying to deal with? I’m not?”

“You will never be annoying to ‘deal with’; I promise.”

Phil meant it.

——

[Monday; 12.07.09; 02:59]

——

Phil :]]]<333333 (02:59): Dan?

Dan (03:00): yeah??? <3

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:03): I’m scared

Dan (03:04): of what :[[

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:04): I dunno it’s just creaky downstairs and I’m alone for the night I guess

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:04): Nvm

Dan (03:05): no tell me i want to help u

Dan (03:05): plz

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:07): Well it’s just that

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:08): It’s really dark and windy

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:08): And there was a tree snapping against my window I thought our house might’ve blown down

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:09): And I thought i heard thunder which usually isn'tn too bad but right now its scaring me a bit

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:10): I don’t wanna be alone rn is all

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:10): But i am brave! So it’ll be okay i think

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:10): Don’t worry about me <33

Dan (03:11): i want to worry :[

Dan (03:11): you don’t always have to be brave <333 ily and i would give you the biggest hug if i were there

Dan (03:12): and tell the trees and thnder to fuck off and let you sleep

Dan (03:12): and then we would sleep all cuddled up togerher like we do sometimes and it would be warm and nice

Dan (03:14): i wish i were there with you

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:15): You will be someday so it’s okay now too :]

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:15): But plz tell the trees and thunder to fuck off it’s very loud :’[[[

Dan (03:16): if u call me i will????

Phil :]]]<333333 (03:17): Lol okay :p

——

[Incoming call from Dan]

[Accepted]

——

“Hi!” Dan really should be quieter; last time he called Phil at three in the morning his dad had yelled at him.

“Hi,” Phil’s sleep-laced voice answered.

A booming crack of thunder, and a whimper.

“Don’t worry – it… won’t hurt you.” Despite everything, Dan was sometimes still quite new to the role of 'comfort’ in their relationship.

“I know, just loud.”

Dan wished he was like Phil. He wished he could just pull out an intresting story, a funny idea.

“Sorry.”

He wasn’t like Phil, though.

“Want to play a game?”

“What game could we possibly play through a phone call?” Dan could practically hear Phil rolling his eyes.

Dan wracked his brain for quick ideas.

“Eye-Spy?”

“We’re… not in the same room Dan.”

“Yeah, true.”

Dan’s room suddenly felt rather empty and uninteresting.

Dan felt empty and uninteresting.

“What do you want me to do?” He finally muttered.

He held his breath.

“I just like hearing your voice, it calms me down. I like when you rant about things you love.”

Let it out.

“Oh. Well – want to hear my never-ending thoughts on WALL-E then?”

“Definitely.”

——

[Sunday; 02.04.18; 04:12]

——

“Phil?”

“Mhm?” He rolled over and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, “What’re you doing up?”

“There was a moth.”

“A moth?”

“Yes!” Dan looked around the room nervously, rolling on his heels, “It’s in the lounge somewhere and I can’t sleep knowing it’s out there — lurking.”

Phil groaned.

“Fucking kill it! Or set it free, I dunno. I just need it gone.”

“You are truly the perfect mix of 'needy child’ and 'angry businessman’, Danny.”

“Fuck off.”

“Mm, lemme get a cup then.”

Phil shoved on his glasses and stumbled out of bed into the kitchen, Dan following closely behind.

“Where was it again?” He asked, grabbing a wine glass from the cupboard.

They hadn’t really drank much alcohol these past few years– since Dan had gone on antidepressents— but they still always kept the glasses, to drink Ribena and seem fancy.

“No! You’ll need a bigger cup, it’s huge.” He whined.

“Okay,” he grabbed another glass, “where is it?”

“In the lounge last I saw.”

“I’ll go look, you get a piece of paper.”

Genuine terror painted over Dan’s face, “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Christ’s sake Dan, it’s a moth, not an armed burglar. I think you’ll live.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. Now, just go a minute.”

He then ventured into the lounge, still half-drowned by sleep, when he heard a shriek.

“Dan?”

“Phil! Fucking help!”

Anyone else might’ve thought Dan was being held at gunpoint from the panicked way he was yelling.

“Coming!”

He went into the hall; Dan was standing there, paralysed with fear, as a giant moth flew circles around him. He had tears threatening to fall.

“Oh dear,”

Phil went over to the closet and grabbed a broom, spent a few go’s waving it around– and almost hitting Dan in the process— before smacking it head on.

“Aw, now I feel bad for killing it,” He whispered.

Dan was on the floor now, shaking, tears stained down his cheeks. He was in only pants.

And Phil was there.

“Well, the moth’s gone now isn’t it?” He crouched down next to Dan, putting his hands gently on his shoulders.

“Mmm,” Dan had his head tucked in his knees.

“Are you okay?”

Silence.

“That’s fine. Want me to make you some tea?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

A few minutes later, in the kitchen, with dried cheeks; “I can’t believe how much of a wimp I am.”

The kettle rang, and Phil took it off the stove carefully.

“No —”

“I know, I know, my therapist told me. 'It’s never weak to have fears’. But I cried over a fucking moth. In our hallway. It’s late and –”

“– and that’s okay.”

“It’s not okay Phil!”

“It’s fine in the moment, that’s what I mean.”

He grabbed a NASA mug, and poured the boiling water in a teapot.

“I must be exhausting.”

Phil dropped in a teabag.

He still remembered. It was a promise made at 4am; a promise over Skype to a more-than-slightly-terrified eighteen year old.

A promise made to a bunch of pixel’s with a name and a face and fear.

A promise his Dan probably didn’t even remember, honestly.

“No, I promised that much.”

“Mhm,”

He poured the tea.

“So, two sugars or three?”

“Two.”

——

[Friday; 02.16.18; 05:12]

——

Dan was on the sofa; snuggled up in blankets and watching the winter Olympics through his small Iphone screen. His eyes were heavy, he yawned.

Their bedroom door squeaked opened.

“Hey,” Phil spoke quietly.

“Up so late?”

“You’re up too.”

“Well — I’m watching the Olympics. You know it’s on late in the UK.”

“Alright.” Phil shuffled into the kitchen, grabbing a glass and leaving the cupboard door wide open.

“Why are you awake?”

“Just another nightmare, s'fine.”

“Then why did you come out here?”

His voice might’ve been read as upset – he was just tired. Half the time Dan honestly didn’t mean to come off so rude.

“Dunno,”

“What was it about?”

“Uh — I think my family was trapped, you included, and I was the only person who could save them. But I had to do something… I think, I had to open a lock to somewhere? But I was too nervous. I saw everyone die; I knew it was my fault. I saw – you know, blood. Not too much. But it’s fine.”

As he spoke, he went over to the sink and got a glass of water, adding iced-cubes; his tone was unnaturally cool and casual.

“But I heard your skull shatter –”

“What the fuck —”

“Sorry! You asked though.”

“No – I mean, that’s horrible. Jesus christ, are you okay?”

Phil shrugged, “It happens, it’s okay though. Just a dream.”

It was only at that moment Dan noticed Phil’s eyes were a little too redded, his words a little bit shaky.

Phil started back to their room.

“Are you going back to sleep?”

“Probably.” His reply was tired.

“Oh – uh, well, why don’t you stay with me and watch the Olympics? I know you’ve never really cared, not your thing, but still I think that —”

“Sure! I’ll stay, yeah.” Phil quickly answered.

“Okay.”

Phil put his glass of water back down on the counter, and walked over to the sofa. Dan opened up his blanket fort and invited Phil in.

“These are the men’s single runs.”

“Mhm,” Phil nuzzled his head into Dan’s neck, which usually would’ve bothered him, but he didn’t mind so much.

A few minutes pass, “So what’s that guy supposed to be doing? I need your commentary; you know.”

I just like hearing your voice, it calms me down.

“Well, that’s the Japanese lead skater, which means —”

[ronandreams]

tagged by @bellameblake, @wcndamaximoff, and @nymqhdora, thank you bbs!

Rules: you must answer these 83 statements and tag 20 people

Last… 1. drink? coffee 2. phone call? big sister kayla 3. text message? a message to my friend chris, i was ranting. or you mean the last one i got? it was “mmh no problem” after i thanked him for telling me to have sweet dreams 4. song you listened to? pillow talking - lil dicky 5. time you cried? a couple hours ago haha

Have you ever… 6. dated someone twice? nope 7. kissed someone and regretted it? yeah haha 8. been cheated on? not technically 9. lost someone special? yes 10. been depressed? yes 11. gotten drunk and thrown up? nope, i can get drunk and never throw up its great lol Favourite colors: 12. red 13. purple 14. green..or greenish blue..or blue sorry i like too many colors In the last year, have you… 15. made new friends? a little  16. fallen out of love? kind of? yes 17. laughed until you cried? yeah 18. found out someone was talking about you? yes 19. met someone who changed you? yes 20. found out who your friends are? yes 21. kissed somone on your facebook list? yes my now current ex lol  22. how many of your facebook friends do you know in real life? most of them are from high school, or from my current city so, about 150. with a few internet friends in there 23. do you have any pets? kitty and a dog 24. do you want to change your name? i mean i wont do it but i do wish i had a more normal name so i didn’t have to constantly have people mispronounce it  25. what did you do for your last birthday? i dont really remember, nothing special  26. what time did you wake up? late af 27. what were you doing at midnight last night? talking to a cutie named michael and probably watching friends 28. name something you can’t wait for: live action mulan? i guess. and death 29. when was the last time you saw your mom? 17 hours ish 30. what are you listening to right now? im not listening to anything 31. have you ever talked to a person named Tom? definitely 32. something that is getting on your nerves? PEOPLE that keep breaking my heart  33. most visited website? tumblr, and youtube 34. hair colour? brown 35. long or short hair? long 36. do you have a crush on someone? i dooo but i aint getting my hopes us cuz they live in a different state 37. what do you like about yourself? my willingness to see the good in everyone, which i’m starting to think might be a flaw and not a good thing 38. piercings: just in my ears but i haven’t worn earrings in forever 39. blood type: A+ 40. nickname: chance

41. relationship status: single 42. zodiac: cancer 43. pronouns: she/her 44. favourite tv show: the 100, teen wolf 45. tattoos:i want one 46. right or left handed: left 47. surgery: nope 48. sport: what is sport? ha jk but no 49. vacation: yea right 50. pair of trainers: what even is that? shoes? 51. eating: nada 52. drinking: coffee 53. im about to: clean shit. or scroll tumblr 54. waiting for?: i think i answered this, but. when tf is taylor swift gonna put out a new album? also i swear i’ve been waiting for the fallen movie to come out, based off the book series by lauren kate 55. want?: some hugs. i never have hugs :( 56. get married?: if that day ever comes yes. but tbh when i think about actually getting married and walking down the aisle, it gives me major anxiety. so idk i might just do a courthouse wedding 57. career?: yea right... idk 58. hugs or kisses?: hugs 59. lips or eyes?: eyes 60. shorter or taller?: taller 61. older or younger?: older 62. nice arms or nice stomach?: nice arms 63. hook up or relationship?: relationship 64. troublemaker or hesitant?: hesitant but i have my moments for sure 65. kissed a stranger: i mean. i kissed a friend of a friend after only knowing them for a couple hours. but not an actual stranger 66. drank hard liquor: yeah 67. lost glasses/contact lenses: dont need em 68. turned someone down: yeah 69. sex on the first date: it happened. but normally no 70. broken someones heart: not really. ive turned people down but usually before i start dating them.  71. had your heart broken: YES  72. been arrested: no 73. cried when someone died: yeah 74. fallen for a friend: yeah Do you believe in… magic 75. yourself? haha no 76. miracles? maybe 77. love at first sight? no 78. santa claus? no 79. kiss on the first date? it depends  80. angels? yesss 81. current best friend’s name? what’s a best friend? wish i knew 82. eye colour: brown 83. favourite movie: comet 2014, emmy rossum and justin long at their best

i am going to tag: @rowofstars, @sebbys, @rihardgansey, @lupins, @purgatoan, @novampiresbutyou, @slayerstark, @elizabetbenneth, @chaol-westfall, @opheliawaits, @marthajoness, @reysjedi, @lydias-martin, @lenitass, @hestiajonees, @isabellenightwood, @isabellaswanns, @bellascooby24, @ronankavinskys, @peteir, @queens-clarke.

[storiesbybrian]

The Barber of Ludlow Street (June, 2000)

MK had been in the guitar business for 20 years. When he saw desperate marketers whine about the fickle nature of youthful passion, he scoffed. “A myth!” he said, squirreling away the commissions his boss let him keep until he made enough money to open up his own shop in the nearest epicenter of wildness that he knew, New York City’s Lower East Side. But his time worn formula for getting money out of crazy kids and indulgent parents bought him his independence about three years too late. To MK’s dismay the slow weeks piled up, held together by a thick mortar of bills, until he finally learned that kids today prefer Hip-Hop to Rock ‘n Roll. The Lit Fuse Guitar Shop, the culmination of 20 years of sacrifice, dedicated to serving the dreams of a new generation of Rock ‘n Rollers, opened to an indifferent public.

But MK wouldn’t give up. Conducting his own marketing survey, he noticed a lot of Asian kids strolling around the neighborhood, the yokes of their purchases cutting wide swaths in the sidewalk. MK remembered a piece he had seen on 60 Minutes about the Japanese Hip Hop craze and he snapped his fingers in revelation. He recalled wealthy Japanese kids tanning themselves and having their flat black hair professionally damaged into spongy manes of dreadlocks. So, with the help of RS, his one, slow-witted employee, MK changed his outdated Rock ‘n Roll shop into a one-stop, negrofying boutique that he hoped would keep the Fuse lit for as long as the wind blew black. He needed his customers to trust the with-itness of his taste though in his heart he knew it was only a matter of time before rock stars recaptured the imaginations of alienated children. But until the day when the wail of his guitars could swallow up the beats of his newly stocked dance records, he was gonna wring every dollar he could out of this rap fad. Behind the shop, he poured concrete, installed an old-fashioned barber’s chair, hung a mirror from a hook, draped a mylar canopy over the whole thing and invited kids to let the Rude Boy Salon tend to their fashionable grooming needs. And a haircut got you a 10% discount on a guitar.  

 Morning at the Sunshine Hotel is met with toothless grumbles of resentment.  Morning carries a price tag of $10. Those without monthly benefactors shoot out the door south, south west, west, north west and north like crooked spokes from the Sunshine’s Bowery horizon looking for the means to reserve the pleasure of the Sunshine’s accommodations for yet another evening by the 7 o’clock curfew. But PJ hooked around the corner and went east, to Ludlow Street. He was 54 years old.

           Everybody knew PJ- the police, the neighbors, the mailmen, the supers, the bartenders and owners, the children, the garbagemen. Everybody. He was an inevitability on Ludlow Street with his boisterous gibberish, big bang cloud of cologne and his broom. “I’m fine as wine! You a frien’ o’mine! Anytime you need a rhyme! I see you, cuz!”  

His dire financial straits, his alcoholism, his age- none of it meant a damn thing to PJ. It took a strong being to crumble the way he did and keep his sweaty black resilience about him. He swept and mopped for his pocket money and told stories about busting the spine of the man he caught with his second wife or about his position of authority when he worked for the sanitation department. He had also been a cook, a gardener and a barber, as anyone within 20 feet of his rantings could attest.  

When CN, the owner of a local bar called Barratoba, had t-shirts made with pictures of PJ on the front, his cult status in the neighborhood was lifetime guaranteed. MK, still a new kid by block standards, immediately cultivated a friendship with PJ, thinking it was his ticket to fitting in in the neighborhood.  

One day in August, MK was outside smoking a cigarette and scanning the block for professional music enthusiasts. His sales for the month were still off and the haircut gimmick had no one abuzz. He had hired a barber from a local salon. But too many customers were demanding refunds, disappointed with the authenticity of their new dos. MK was left wondering whether he needed somebody who knew more about hairstyling or less. PJ was taking out the recycling from CN’s bar across the street.  

MK called out to him, “PJ, my friend! How are you today?”

“Yo, cuz! Gimme dolla!”

MK reached into his pocket and PJ crossed the street towards him hand first.  

“PJ, my main man!” MK said, slapping PJ five, “How would you like another job?”

PJ blinked at him seriously for a moment and then burst out laughing.

“No, really. How would you like to cut hair for me?”

“I was a barber for seven years in Nokalyna!”

“That’s what I hear. So how ‘bout it? I pay you ten bucks a head and anytime you want a bottle of anything, you just let me know. Deal?”

PJ shook MK’s hand and told him, “I be back after I get the flo’ mats at Quinine.  They pay me extra to do them. Good music over there. You ever wanna go, you jus’ let me know. But ssshhh. Don’t tell anybody, a’ight? You a good guy. I get you in at Quinine, ‘k? Den I go get Barratoba’s and Guiseppe’s. They nice, too.”

“OK, PJ, I’ll see you later. Thank you.”

And MK had his barber. PJ took off to wherever he went when he had money and MK dropped his cigarette and went inside. Within weeks, PJ’s distinctive style became MK’s greatest source of revenue.

 Any grandparents who came up through Manhattan’s Lower East Side, be they Jews from the first half of the last century or Spanish from the second, would be shocked to learn that one block of Ludlow Street now has seven fancy designer clothing shops and almost no drug trade. Girls who never would have set foot on Ludlow Street five years ago are now running the Community Board.  

The newest proprietress of a clothing shop was called EW. EW had quit her investment banking job to open Glo, an astronomically upscale accessory shop. She had a German shepherd named Tamburlaine who did not get along with PJ.  

A few days before Glo’s grand opening in late August, EW was supervising the finishing touches on her window display- a thick pyramid of handbags that were custom stitched from maple leaf shaped patches of leather and suede in front of a poster of an orange lagoon. Tamburlaine began to growl from inside the window and EW turned to see PJ lugging enormous bags of trash and plopping them down on the sidewalk in front of her new store.

“Excuse me sir, but you can’t put that garbage here,” she said politely to PJ.

“Huh? Naw, dey comin’ for it in two hour.  I use to work for sanitation. Two hour,” PJ said EW.

“I don’t really care. You can’t put that garbage in front of my store.”

“Who you? Ask anybody on the block. They know me! They my friend! Ask cuz over at barbershop.”

PJ dropped his bags and went back inside, returning seconds later with another load of garbage.

“Sir. You’re not listening to me. That’s somebody else’s trash. Put it in front of their building.”

“No!” PJ yelled. His right knee began to pop involuntarily out of joint, an ancient baseball injury that flared up in times of stress. “This the same garbage from the same building I been puttin’ in the same place for 20 year!”

Sensing his mistress was in trouble, Tamburlaine bounded outside and began barking at PJ. PJ said, “You better get that muthafuckin’ clown away from me!”

“Or what?”

“Don’ you worry none. You just get that thing inside. I don’t like him!” PJ said, his trick knee hopping and forcing his hips to grind back and forth.  

At this EW stepped quickly back and pulled out her cell phone and called the police. “Yes, I’m calling from Ludlow Street between Houston and Stanton,” she said. “Yes, a street man is leaving rubbish in front of my store and threatening my dog and myself- what? Right, garbage… Yes. Thank you.”

PJ clucked his mouth exasperatedly, knowing that when the cops learned that the alleged source of trouble was he, they’d laugh the whole thing off and explain PJ’s prestigious status on the block to newcomer EW. He wiped the sweat from his brow and then clutched his leg, trying to get it to stop twitching so violently.

Inside of five minutes, a squad car pulled up next to PJ’s plump row of garbage.  

“Yo!” PJ greeted the pair of officers. “Tell this blonde woman leave me alone!”

One officer got out of the car while the other sat behind the wheel with a pen and summons pad spread across her lap. Tamburlaine continued to bark viciously.

“What’s up PJ?”

“A’right!”

“Hold on a second, PJ. Alright, miss, are you the one who filed the complaint?”

“Yes and thank you for coming so quickly,” said EW, raising her voice to be heard over her dog’s racket. “This person is harassing me and dumping this trash in front of my building.”

“Who, him?”

“Yes. Him.”

The dog continued to bark and flinch everytime PJ’s knee jumped.

“Alright sir,” said the cop with his hands on his hips. “Where is this trash from?”

“Man, you know where this trash from. ‘S from Guiseppe next do’ but I ain’t gon’ put it in front of no goddamn fire hydrant!”

“Well, what about over there?” asked the cop, pointing to space in front of a nightclub that wouldn’t be open until much later.

“Man, I don’t get paid to be draggin’ this shit all up and down the block!”

“There’s no need to yell at the police, you know.”

“Miss, we’ll handle this.”  

“Well, look at how he’s acting. It’s like he’s gonna attack me.”

The cop noticed PJ’s jumpiness and stepped back and began fingering his nightstick. “Sir. Move the garbage and stop bothering the lady or we’ll have to arrest you.”

Drained from the officer’s face was any trace of recognition of PJ. His partner in the car stared down at her lap. With a vicious grunt, PJ snatched up the garbage bags and began dragging them the 10 feet to where the cop had designated. EW and the officers stood over him until he had finished hauling the entire pile of bags and continued to eye him until he left, which he did, cussing and twitching the whole way. PJ needed a drink.

 Meanwhile CT and FL were sitting at Kennedy Airport, waiting to pick up their friend, BD. BD’s flight was arriving from Tokyo via San Francisco. The girls could not stop giggling. They hadn’t seen BD in several years but they kept in touch regularly and now they could finally show their dear friend all of the wonders and marvels of New York in person.  

During the years that CT and FL had been building a life for themselves in New York City, BD had been building a reputation as a world class interior designer. His arrival in the States was greatly anticipated by the design community who found him so fascinating. Throughout their time apart, CT and FL fully cooperated in BD’s plan to cultivate an air of mystery which his arrival would solve with what all three friends hoped would be sensational panache.

When the plane taxied up to the gate, CT and FL clapped their hands excitedly. BD burst from the tunnel and all three old friends met in a fierce collision of joyful reunion. Each of them began speaking rapidly at once which led to uproarious laughter.  The girls had so much to tell BD and to ask him, and he them. CT and FL each clasped one of BD’s hands and led him down to baggage claim where his limousine driver had already collected his gear. BD told them a funny story about customs in San Francisco as he handed his carry-on luggage to the driver as well.

In the back seat of the limo on the way into Manhattan, the girls asked BD what he would like to do first.  

“Well,” BD said with much relish. “The first thing I want to do is visit Rude Boy for a haircut.” And he showed them a small article torn from a Japanese magazine. The article featured a picture of a famous Japanese record producer. The producer’s mangled head looked like a lopsided Rastafarian who had changed his mind about enlisting in the Marines at an extremely inopportune moment.  

“Ahh,” said the girls collectively. “PJ.”

             The article BD held pointed out that MK didn’t allow customers into his barbershop unless they brought at least two friends to hold them down in the old chair. Insurance purposes. It also offered Rude Boy customers a 10% discount on all guitars in the Lit Fuse. So, CT and FL instructed the limousine to drop them off in front of the Lit Fuse and then take their bags to their own shop, which was just one block away on Orchard Street.

The girls led BD into the Rock ‘n Roll/Hip Hop shop where MK greeted them warmly and asked if they’d like to see anything in particular. BD handed MK the cut-out, which flattered MK tremendously. His adaptation to the changing of the times had garnered international notoriety. A glow rushed about MK’s face and his mouth flapped back into the biggest smile that he’d worn in years.  

MK shook hands with CT and FL while BD was looking through the store’s album collection. After a moment, BD returned to MK at the counter with a very high stack of records. CT and FL asked MK if they could leave these records on the counter and cash them out after BD’s superfly haircut. Mentally adding up the value of BD’s purchase, MK wagged his head like a puppy. Then he led the three of them back to the barbershop under the tinselly outdoor shine of the canopy.  

           BD sat down in the chair, flanked by CT and FL. MK gave the chair a good spin round, determined to delight BD to the pits of his soul and surpass every dream that BD had ever had about American Hip Hop culture. BD smiled and closed his eyes, ready to be transformed in appearance to what he already felt in his heart.  

           “Be right back…” sang MK and ran back into the store to summon PJ.  

           Befitting the grand entry of his star attraction, MK had taken a page from the NBA and engineered a garish bit of fanfare to let PJ, and the whole neighborhood, know that he had a customer. With the push of one button, a series of cherrytop police car lights began swirling in the Lit Fuse’s windows. Sirens and ice cream truck songs howled to a techno rhythm, punctuated by blasts from a lifeguard whistle. And then an announcer’s voice blared through the circus jungle beats:

 “THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS! HE STILL AIN’T CROAKED! ANOTHER HEAD FROM A FARAWAY LAND LOOKS TO BE CURED BY THE THUNDERBIRD HAND OF THE MAN OF THE HOUR, MAN OF THE DAY! LET’S HEAR IT HO’S AND G’S FOR HIS TRAVESTY, P-J!”

             The first few times that this explosion of bells and whistles rocked Ludlow Street, a few of PJ’s many friends and empathizers applauded as he burst from wherever to go careening through the Lit Fuse, hellbent on revising the possibilities of a hairdo. But after PJ’s work began to attract a larger number of customers, the frequent cranking of his theme song became a hardcore nuisance. MK received enough complaints that he began to sneak off the premises as soon as he turned on PJ’s noisy invitation. He would wander through the back way to sit and have tea down the street, leaving the store in RS’s incompetent care rather than field complaints from the neighbors.

           So, as BD waited in the chair, the clanging and screeching BOOM BOOM BOOMed to summon PJ. PJ was down in Barratoba’s swilling gin, trying to recover from the shameful outrage of the policeman making him kowtow to that new blonde lady. PJ remembered when that cop was eight years old and shot an old man in the shoulder with his beebee gun. PJ tried to suck the liquor out of the tilted bottle faster than it could pour and it splashed out of his full mouth and ran down his chin in silver trickles. When the bottle was empty, PJ cast it aside and jerked his sleeve across his mouth. Then he charged out of the bar towards the noise that was calling him to sculpt someone’s head like an African banzai tree.

           PJ whirled out into the bright light of the street, his dirty limbs gangling like giant pinwheels. Cars slammed on their breaks to avoid this stumbling dervish that seemed part liberated bull, part agitated rodent. Pretty young women shopping up and down the block reared back in horror to allow PJ to swarm his way past the pounding speakers and blaring lights and into the Lit Fuse.  

           BD was waiting for PJ in the back with an outstretched hand. Something about the scene seemed vaguely familiar to PJ and for a split second he wondered if he had ever fought overseas. He found his hand being tugged vigorously, worshipfully by the young Japanese man with the flat black hair. The mylar glinted above him and his muddy eyes took on a look of understanding.  

           BD mistook PJ’s newfound orientation of his whereabouts for an acknowledgement of their spiritual kinship. He smiled at the older man and lay back in the chair, waving off CT and FL. The two girls went back inside the shop. BD beamed ecstatically from his chair, overjoyed to be face to face with his kindred enigma, PJ. He handed his remaker, his redeemer another picture of the haircut he wanted. This picture was taken from the same magazine but the article was about police brutality in New York City, of which the young man in the picture was a victim.  

           PJ tenderly fingered the ragged edge of the picture and briefly forgot that he was too drunk to stand up. He held out his hand to BD. BD handed him two $100 bills. PJ’s eyes lit up and something about the image that sat under the money in his strong hand clicked. He nodded his head and got to work.  

           BD closed his eyes. PJ shaved tiny stripes into the young man’s eyebrows. Then PJ took the scissors. He raised them straight up and assumed the exact pose of Lady Liberty lifting her lamp beside the golden door. With his other hand, he pressed his large palm to BD’s temple and took a snippet of hair between two of his fingers. Then the scissors began jawing rapidly and swooped down at BD’s head. BD became secretly terrified in PJ’s shaky hands. But the scissors plunged along the shape of his sleek head accurately, shearing off a shaggy wing of hair. It was exhilarating and BD relaxed a little, surrendering to the moment. PJ reared the scissors back like a tailor’s needle. His trick knee had subsided and hardly jerked at all. On this pass, the hand on BD’s forehead rolled towards the incoming razor bomb. With a horrible squinching sound, PJ snipped off BD’s ear.  

           “Oh Lo’d!” shouted PJ as the blood spurted all the way up to the silver ceiling. BD began to cry and chant the comforting words of some of his favorite songs.

           “Docta! We need a docta! He’p! He’p!” cried PJ, dancing around in BD’s blood. BD began convulsing in the chair. “Shee-it!”

           CT and FL were inside the shop listening to BD’s new records on headphones. RS was watching the records spin round and round. But a few other customers peaked into the back to see what the ruckus was about. When they saw PJ’s ghoulish dance under the canopy and the young Japanese man writhing in the chair murmuring “you gon’ make me lose me mind-up in here, up in here” in a thick accent, they immediately searched about the place for cameras, certain as they were that a music video was being filmed out back. It was so easy to accept the absurdity of the scene as some vaguely symbolic play on entertainment and modern medicine. But something about the lack of cameras and the amount of blood blasting out of the side of BD’s head seemed too lavish for a rehearsal. What was going on back here? “i am walrus, i am walrus, ki ko ki shoom,”? Almost apologetically, the gravity of the situation asserted itself and the two young guitar shoppers were forced to accept the irrevocability of what had happened. One of them had been shopping for a guitar, the other a bass. The guitarist swooned but the bass player kept his cool and dashed back into the store and behind the counter to call an ambulance for the mutilated Japanese boy in the chair.  

           Rather than sobering PJ up, the accident thrust him into an entirely different realm of intoxication. He still thought maybe he could keep this whole thing quiet and nobody would find out. So he placed BD’s ear on the counter next to the jar of blue disinfectant. Then he combed some of the blood out of BD’s hair and skillfully continued the abstract trimming he had begun a few moments earlier. BD passed out, certain that his plane to JFK hadn’t even landed yet.

             The ambulance arrived a few minutes later and rushed BD to the hospital. Police arrested PJ and pulled BD’s ear and $200 from his pocket. The ear was perfectly in tact, like an unbitten cookie, but it would never work again. Blood and hair had clogged BD’s auditory canal and damaged his eardrum during his convulsions and the entire left side of his face caught an infection from PJ’s rusty scissors. At CT and FL’s insistence, the ear was sewn back onto BD’s head for reasons purely cosmetic.  

           BD stayed in the hospital for a few days. His design and magazine contacts were notified and they all came to visit him. It was a great disappointment for all parties concerned that the mysterious BD should finally be revealed in a hospital cot with a useless ear freshly stitched onto such a blotched, ugly face, capped now by his astonishing haircut. Several established members of the industry in which BD starred were horrified to learn of the conditions of the Rude Boy Salon. None of them were opposed to underground fashion per se, but a homeless drunk using unsanitary blades seemed too extreme. This was not a haircut. It was assault and they demanded justice.

             Back on Ludlow Street, word spread. MK stood in front of his store smoking and furtively looking for anyone wearing one of CN’s PJ t-shirts, which he was prepared to buy for as much as $35 apiece. He needed to distance himself from the incident and keep his store open. As soon as the police had taken PJ away, he had taken down the canopy and the chair and dumped the remaining furniture in a different alley, in Queens. Then he had RS scrub BD’s blood off of the concrete behind the store. Rude Boy was finished, but he’d be damned before he’d lose the Lit Fuse. He considered offering to pay BD’s medical expenses, but then thought that such a gesture might suggest greater responsibility for the assault than he could afford to accept. PJ lived in a flophouse on skid row. He had no family, no money and, to MK’s way of thinking, a primitive, ill-developed grasp on reality. PJ could afford to take the whole rap.

           But how would a rap stick to a man as disenfranchised as PJ? With no driver’s license, no social security number, no fingerprints on file, no credit, no library card, no nothing except a nickname, he was a phantom, completely disentangled from the institutional marionette strings yanking most of us around.  

             PJ was being held at the 7th Precinct. Detective QV had been called in to help discern PJ’s identity. PJ was little help. No matter what question they asked him, PJ said, “I cut that Chinese boy. I cut that boy.”  

           QV pulled PJ’s arresting officer aside.

           “What do you know about this guy?”

           “Officially, not much, detective. Everybody in the neighborhood knows him but nobody knows anything about him. Last name, where he’s from, nothing. The guy’s slicker than batshit. Most famous John Doe I ever met.”

           “The kid in the hospital pressing charges?”

           “That’s what proprietor of the guitar shop says.”

           “Lit Fuse?”

           “Yeah.”

           “Yeah, I know that guy. MK. He’s a real cocksucker. Wish we could arrest him instead.”

           “Nothing tying him to the incident, detective. The alley where the barber chair was ain’t even his property. And any business ties he had with homeboy in there were strictly off the books. Not a thing we can do about it.”

           “What about all that noisy shit in his window?”

           “He says it’s a gift from some Japanese kid whose friends request him to play it. So how long we gonna keep Mr. PJ in there?”

           “I dunno. Assault like that’s two to four. But we don’t really know who he is. No assets to lean on, no retribution for the kid’s ear. Just punishment for the old guy.”

           The phone rang and the officer went back to his desk to answer it. Detective QV paced back and forth, rubbing his head and smoking. He didn’t like any of it. He was worried that PJ would be remanded to the mental ward at Bellevue with the rest of the John Does if he didn’t cough up more details about himself. But PJ was too distraught to recount a personal history. People around the neighborhood repeated his stories about North Carolina and the sanitation department, the Sunshine Hotel stuck to its policy of non-cooperation, and civic records had nothing that matched his prints or general appearance. He didn’t like any of it.

           PJ’s groaning lament continued: “I cut that Chinese boy. I cut that boy. I cut that Chinese boy. I cut that boy.”

           Several months earlier, back when BD was still in Osaka, AO finally scraped together enough money to buy his guitar back from the Lit Fuse. But MK wanted more than double what AO had hocked it for, which was considerably less than AO had saved up. So, needing something to play on his upcoming tour of central Michigan, AO was forced to settle for an inferior guitar. He handed MK his hard earned cash and stared up at his own baby hanging on the wall, gleaming forlornly back at him. MK shrugged behind the register in mock empathy with AO.  AO was PJ’s cousin.

                       MK sat behind the counter at the Lit Fuse, sweaty and nervous. He hadn’t slept for days and the only thing he’d eaten in the last 24 hours was half a bottle of aspirin. Three times yesterday, he thought he heard PJ shouting in the street. He turned down to his pocket video game to distract himself from the strange paranoia that had afflicted him ever since he had visited the 7th Precinct to wriggle himself out of any occupation of the space between BD and his ear.

           A mist jammed his nostrils and yanked out a sneeze.  

           “God bless you.”

           MK looked up to see PJ towering over him in a cowboy hat.

           Two police officers in uniform entered the Lit Fuse and handcuffed MK and read him the Miranda warning. PJ pulled AO’s baby down from the wall and handed it to him.  

             Back at the hospital, BD was going through therapy to regain a sense of balance and adjust to his hearing loss. CT and FL informed him that PJ was out of jail and that the owner of the shop had been arrested instead. The owner of the alley behind the Lit Fuse had been summoned to prosecute MK for vandalism and conducting unlicensed surgery on private property. PJ had been bailed out by a relative.

           BD wanted to know what the relative had told the police about PJ.  

           “Not much,” FL said. “Just that he didn’t used to be so simple. He wouldn’t say what happened or how he dissipated so or anything.”

           “Is he in any more trouble?” BD asked.

           “That’s up to you,” CT told him.

             A few days later, BD checked out of the hospital and went downtown to see PJ. He wore a hunting hat with earflaps to cover his wound. BD was directed east to a small jazz club called Quinine where he stood outside, smoking cigarettes and waiting for PJ.

Sure enough, the older man emerged from the club lugging his garbage. He was much less exuberant than he had been the first time the two had met. PJ stopped for a rest and struck up a conversation with the young Japanese man in the hat.  

           “Yo cuz! Gimme cigarette.”

           “Here. Take two.”

           “Thank you. Thank you.”

           “Yes.”

           “I used to cut hair over Ludlow Street.”

           “Really?”

           “Yeah. But I hurt somebody. He a Chinese like you.”

           “Mmmm.”

           “He a nice young man, too. I felt bad.I used to be barber, before I work for sanitation department.”

           “Ah.”

           BD looked down at his cigarette.

           “See, you got to learn more English. This the USA, man! This ain’t China.  USA!”

           “I trying. Thank you.”

           “A’ight cuz. See you later, k?”

[primus-why]

Hit me up with them Bayverse Hot Rod predictions or what the heck you think is gonna happen. I'm disparate for the trash child

AIGHT, here’s a long-ass rant of what I think is gonna go down in Bayverse number 5:

I think, first and foremost, Unicron will be awakened. I think Unicron will have actually been around way back in the day (hence the King Arthur stuff?), and had Predicons under his command that became the myths and legends we humans interpret them as today (AKA “dragons”, “hydra”, “monsters”, etc.). Lockdown had been alluding to a big religious phenomenon while he was around in the last movie, and I don’t think it was just centered around Optimus. Remember how the Dinobots were on his ship? What if they were also minions to Unicron, originally? Basically Unicron employs big beasts to roam the planet, and I think Lockdown was using the humans to collect them– all under the guise of helping humanity, when in fact, I think he was going to release them upon the humans to take back the Earth and kick-start Unicron’s revival.

I think Unicron is gonna pull a Transformers Prime on us and possess some people, most notably, Optimus Prime. How, you may ask? Well, Optimus has become more and more flawed as the movies have gone on. If we think about Primus, a being associated with life-giving properties, Optimus does his best to ensure a certain quality of life for all those he meets. He would do what he could in the first film to uphold his religious teachings/obligations. “Do not harm humans” was a part of his Primely mantra for so long, but then what happened in the last two films? Optimus slays another Prime, another holy entity; Optimus kills humans out of rage and anguish. And let’s not forget, he has killed Decepticons. Sure, it’s in self defense, but what kind of Prime kills the people he is supposed to protect?

So, what I am getting at here is that Unicron will use this corrosion, this slight, way-less-than-other-Primes-but-still-there corruption of Optimus Prime as a means to enter his psyche. Thus, we get purple-eyed Optimus. And from here I’d like to believe that Megatron only get involved and tries to help our main heroes at some point because he’s under the impression that he can prove his resilience and strength to Unicron, who could then leave Optimus’ body and give him some ultimate power. BUT, right as Megatron is betraying our main group, making his case to Unicron/ Unicron-possessed Optimus, OUT STEPS MOTHERFUCKIN’ GALVATRON FROM THE BUSHES, and oh shit now it’s Megatron vs Galvatron!!!! Cuz Unicron is like “why would I take you, an obsolete original, when I already have the loyalty of your upgraded superior…? Finish him.”

Anywho, I’d also like to toss in some BS and say the Dinobot make a reappearance and are firmly on Team (good) Prime, er… I guess Team Bee at this point. Imma come up with something convoluted like, they imprinted with Optimus, or Optimus broke Unicron’s hold over them in the last movie when he beat them into submission, or whatever. I’d also hold some hope that the human characters might be the ones to give them speech– think about it. Team Bee is isolated from their usual leader, who is actually trying to kill them right now; we’ve got some rando, sort of silly French guy who’s really late to the party; Bumblebee, who might not be ready to lead just yet; and maybe if we’re lucky some bots/Wreckers from the last film. Maybe. Anyways the humans are frustrated because everyone is really lacking in the communication skills. Maybe then, one of the Dinobots walks up and curls around them, and a human companion offhandedly says something like “I wish you could talk, maybe you’d have some more information on Unicron…”

And then, BAM, Cade Yeager and his small friend (who I am gonna assume/hope again the odds is also a super smart engineer person) upgrade the Dinobots with a speech ability. This could explain why Grimlock and pals have limited speech– it was engineered by humans, which of course can only grasp so much of Cybertronian technology…

AN - Y - WAYS

To get to what you were asking about, originally– where is Rodimus Hot Rod gonna fit into all this? I think he’s going to be very similar to Bee in the first movies (I think Bee seems a little more serious now, but that could just be speculation). He and Bee are gonna be BEST BROS. I think he’s going to be fun-loving, a little goofy, and probably really trusting towards humans (after he gets over a phobia of organics, perhaps???) Like Bee will be like “These are humans, they’re our friends” but then Hot Rod and friends are gonna get cornered by the government and Hot Rod is gonna be all “It’s okay, friends! We’re just here doing this-and-that, blah blah illegal things!” and Cade is gonna be like “THOSE guys AREN’T our friends!” Giggles will be had from the audience, they’ll be captured, and heck, maybe some bot is gonna die. IDK.

I think there’s gonna be some heart-to-heart scene while they are captured where Bee is like, being the stern one for once and is like “Take things more seriously!” but then it’s revealed that Hot Rod is always happy-go-lucky as a sort of front, as a way for him to deal with the awful shit he’s seen off-planet. And ANGST ANGST ANGST and PTSD. Like maybe if we look back after this reveal we’ll see signs that he really hates explosions or something– MAYBE when he arrives and he and Bee are being pals, a fight with an enemy group breaks out and it’s revealed that Hot Rod is actually super freaked out by explosions/battle or whatever. Freezes up. Hides. That sort of thing. Bee or other bots are like “What happened to the kick ass guy I used to train with?” and Hot Rod brushes it off with a joke. I wouldn’t put it past Bay since he seems like the kind of guy who would subscribe to the stereotype that French people are cowards.

Another thing Imma spin with: You know those pics of Cybertron crashing into Earth? Well, in Transformers Prime we’ve seen how Cybertron itself is Primus, while Earth is Unicron. Maybe these two planets so close together is what wakes up Unicron. Or maybe it’s the abominable experiments the humans made that have no spark (Galvatron)? Maybe it’s both lol. He could want to break free of his planetary form, and maybe only one Cybertronian god can release/destroy another, so he orchestrates the possession of Optimus Prime so as to use Primus’ own vessel to draw in Cybertron (Primus’ planetary form) until it destroys his planet form, then he would be free to wreak havoc across the universe. Or maybe he does it to destroy himself because he’s bitter and hate the humans crawling all over him. Or maybe it’s another thing that I will get to later.

AIGHT, so anyways I also want to take a moment to think about the title “The Last Knight”. I know Optimus is seen holding a sword, so maybe he’s gonna become a knight? I know that seems obvious, but hear me out on this. Armed with the knowledge that in other continuities, Hot Rod gains the Matrix and becomes Rodimus Prime, what if Optimus is slowly losing his connection to the Matrix? What if at some point Hot Rod does some daring do that then tunes the Matrix to him? Optimus may willingly die to be able to pass on the Matrix to someone else, someone better than his corrupt self. Remember “rethink your heroes”? What if that tag line is like a way to soften the blow of taking Optimus out of the Prime position (like instead of outright killing him in a shocking twist like in the G1 movie and then trying to replace him, they’re giving us a warning this time lol). HOWEVER, knowing Optimus’ life, he could get revived anyways (you know that OP floating in space clip), blessed once again by Primus for recognizing his faults, and instead of crowing two Primes, revives and anoints him to be a Knight of Cybertron. Then it becomes his duty to protect and be a mentor to the new Rodimus Prime. Rodimus gets to learn from one of the best, while forging his own path of Primacy. And his buddy Bee will be there all the way to support him too.

Final misc movie stuff: Cade’s daughter and her BF are never in this one. She’s in college or studying abroad or some BS. Young girl travelling with him NOW is/was a child prodigy of engineering. Bumblebee becomes a leader of his own small team, who peel off from Optimus’ main remaining ‘bots. Megatron and Galvatron’s battle takes them off a cliff, into the ocean where it’s up to the audience (or lol the next film) to find out who won who’s next you decide. Dinobots are turned loose after Grimlock proves to Optimus and Bee and Rodimus that he is a (pretty) intelligent, but capable leader for them, and agrees to keep in touch. aND THEN, OHHHH AND THEN–

I want it to be revealed at the end or implied throughout the film that the Quintessons have been orchestrating the whole thing, giving a set up for the next film. Maybe Quints are what gave Optimus the Unicron bug in the first place– perhaps he is doing some space meditation and feels this connection with a divine source, but he realizes too late that it is Unicron reaching into his mind. Maybe Primus and Unicron were just as much of a creation of theirs as the Cybertronians. Perhaps Cybertron/Primus was created as a factory for these Cybertronians, however it had developed an artificial intelligence which bled into and infected the things it created. Well, artificial/imperfect by their standards at least. So then they made Unicron, a polar opposite to Primus in every way to balance it out. Only something so large could be destroyed by an equal or greater entity, they reasoned. Unicron too developed an AI, but they anticipated this, and programmed him to only ever destroy. Perhaps Unicron becomes aware of this, and thus tries to kill himself and Primus to end his suffering. Or, perhaps the Quints programmed him to enforce a hard reset on their experiments– aka, programmed him with a self-destruct button. Anyways I want a looming threat of the Quints as the next film sets them up to formally “meet their makers” lol. (maybe they can kill one of them this film, and Bee can be like “what the hell was THAT” and Optimus can get all serious and be like “a quintesson”) also lol Primus/Unicron is dead after this flick, weeeee~

[canaryatlaw]

Okay, well today was better than yesterday, and I was in a significantly better mood for most of the day, although I'm back to being slightly irked now with no real logical reason (you know, other than the obvious). But yeah. Woke up, ate breakfast (fucking cocoa pebbles not nearly as good as cocoa krispies) and caught the bus to work. Tbh I don't remember that much of what I did for the morning because I kind of ended up napping for a full hour....more on that later, though. I think I was mostly just sourcing stuff and building the timeline for the TPR prep. See, the issue with the sleep thing is like, I can't just push through it. I can't control my eyes closing. And I also can't fucking type. Like it takes me twice as long to type something because every other letter is wrong. I did 30 minutes then tried to get back to work but it wasn't happening so I did another 30 and I can get away with this because I'm an intern and for the most part nobody cares what I do. I took a lunch too because fuck it, I don't care. The interesting assignment of the day came in the afternoon from my boss, she wanted me to watch a VSI (I know I defined that yesterday but I'll be nice and do it again, it's victim sensitive interview) because her computer wasn't sound equipped or whatever and mine was because of the prison calls, lol, so she wanted me to transcribe it verbatim for her. The thing was only 13 minutes long, but obviously took me substantially longer to get through because I can't type on a PC in real time conversation, lol, so I ended up pausing after each line to type it, then generally play it back to make sure I got it right. I ended up with like 13 pages of transcribed notes, so like one per minute of the video. A couple things here. One, I'd never actually watched one of these before, so I didn't really have a context for it. Two, I had no idea what the circumstances were going into this interview- if the girl had made an outcry or what had happened (I'm avoiding giving details for obvious reasons when discussing child sex abuse) but I finished it with the impression that there had been an incident. Then my boss comes back and explains she had read the detective's notes and he said there wasn't gonna be charges and it didn't seem like there was anything there, which of course was not at all what I got from it. Apparently going into it wasn't based on an outcry but a weird hotline call that the little girl had been saying sexually explicit things in school but they unfounded the report as just nothing. So I of course relayed all of this to my supervisor, and she said she'd have to watch it now haha but had my notes as well. So that took me about to the end of my day. I had a 6:30 PT appointment because it was the only one available, and after last week's fiasco I knew there was no way I would make it on time if I took the bus, so I ubered, figuring I should have just enough time to get home, change, and go right back out. Uber was in a price surge so I ended up paying like, double the normal rate (ugh) for it but whatever. I liked the driver a lot, he said I was actually his first customer because this was his first day driving for uber haha so I was like okay, hopefully this will go well! But we started talking and I went into the cases and the reforms that have been populating the news (the more recent child death case that supposedly prompted the DCFS director into reforms that I was ranting about the other day had been pretty widely reported so he brought that one up) and I told him about my case and the ridiculous can't make this shit up facts of it all. And of course we talked the random stuff. We took the street my street is off all the way up because it's pretty much a straight shot, like the bus I take to work and back, except that one goes a few blocks over then shoots down. It had a fair amount of traffic, but I had tried to allocate enough time to make sure it was okay and I arrived at my apartment just at 6:10 which was perfect, I ran in and got changed and did a few other things then came back out at 6:20 to walk over for my 6:30 appointment. While I'm almost there, I get a call from a Long Island number, so I'm like okay, I answer it and it's my psychiatrist that I've been playing phone tag with for two weeks now. Of all the shitty timing!! But I knew because of my mental state lately I did have to have this conversation now, so I ended up standing outside the therapy place on the phone for 15 minutes while motioning to them that I'd been in as soon as possible. It was a good conversation though, I'm glad we had it, and it was definitely necessary. Apparently the deal with the phone tag was the secretary or whoever would take down my message that I needed him to call back, but somehow in there my name got substituted for my mom's, so he ended up calling her repeatedly and trying to figure out what was going on before someone realized OH, it's the daughter who's in Chicago and not Long Island, lol. So that made me feel significantly better than my messages weren't being deliberately ignored. So I told him my exams were over and my anxiety was through the roof, with the Xanax not helping. Then he asked about my sleep, and suddenly the light bulb in my head clicked on and I went OHHHHHHHHHH, YOUR MID MORNING NAPS HAVE BEEN BECAUSE YOUVE BEEN INCREASING YOUR XANAX DOSAGE YOU FUCKING MORON and suddenly that made a lot more sense. He asked some questions about describing the mind racing thing and asked if it was like hyper, and of course I knew where he was going with that so I said it definitely wasn't manic (because it's not) but more just anxiety based. So we ended up swapping out one of my regular meds for what I believe is the generic version of Zoloft, and he said to do whatever with the Xanax since they weren't helping anyway, so I'm gonna cut down on them a lot lol cuz I can't live like this. I do think I was on Zoloft at one point in high school and it wasn't terribly helpful, just one in a long line of antidepressants tried that resulted in a "meh" result, but the circumstances here are fairly different now that I'm on several meds and I have the Wellbutrin to actually treat depression, the Zoloft can potentially help the anxiety, which was definitely not really present in high school or even when I started with my psychiatrist back in 2012 (thanks, law school). I mean, it had started before law school, but that's what's really exacerbated it of course. Hey, it got my brother an OCD diagnosis after 22 years of only ever having super small tics like re-walking out of a room every so often. So hopefully those meds will get things figured out and it'll be better. So I finally got off the phone at 6:40 and of course was now very frustrated because I hate being late, but we just jumped into it instead of doing warm ups so it was fine. I keep getting asked if I'm feeling an improvement in pain, but the answer continues to be about the same, and in fact after PT it almost definitely hurts. It was actually bugging me at work today too, which isn't typical. But we had a good session anyway. Afterwards I walked across the street to Walgreens just because I wanted to grab a type of melatonin I know works for me to use as a control test for the Xanax- to make sure that's the thing that's throwing it off, not being unsure if it's the melatonin. Come home, get some dinner together and start Arrow. I wasn't totally thrilled with the episode given the plot was pretty weak, but it was of course strengthened greatly by the presence of Katie Cassidy and Katrina Law (though I would've liked more than 30 seconds of Katrina). Can I just talk about Katie Cassidy's acting skills though? I'm amazed as to how she's adopted completely different personas to the point where you can tell "who" she's supposed to be just by looking at her- that Laurel, Black Siren, and particularly black siren pretending to be Laurel, but not resembling either in any significant way but an entirely new image. I'm just like damn girl, that's intense. So things are set up for the final battle now, which has to happen on Lian-Yu because everything fucking happens on Lian-Yu, and I'll admit it does seem like it'll be a pretty epic showdown given everyone they've brought in on both sides. Back to that non-existent plot though- like really Oliver? Really??? That had to be the worst plan in existence of plans. You just handed him over and what, expected him to just let everyone go and go skip off into the sunset? Like dude, come on. That was really fucking dumb. So then it's just Oliver and fucking Malcolm, who has somehow managed to stay alive for another season, much to my annoyance. The moment with Nyssa coming in was pretty epic though, but I really hope they told her that besides her sister they were also facing off with E2 Laurel because those two got pretty damn close in season 3 and that could definitely throw her for a loop. Also, why the fuck had they not told Quentin at this point??? Like that was really dumb because you left him super vulnerable to exactly what happened. So yeah, I suppose I'm looking forward to the season finale, mostly for my two homegirls, but hopefully the rest of it will be good too. A tweet on my timeline reminded me that designated survivor was about to come on just as I finished Arrow, so I turned that on to watch live since I knew it was the season finale. Can I just say damn, I love this show so much??! It's so freaking well done in an era of totally overdone dramas, and of course this had the potential to do some incredibly shark jumping being that they blew up the entire government as the premise of the start of the plot. They've handled it really well. I think most of the episode was good and full of action, though I was sad to see Jason is actually dead (I mean, I think we knew he was, it just wasn't formally confirmed). I loved the scene between Kirkman and the reporter, because you can just tell how much respect the reporter gets from him because of how he handled the meeting, and I'm just left thinking whoever handpicked Kirkman as the designated survivor obviously massively underestimated his ability to be an incredible leader of our country. Damn what I would do for him to be our real president right now.....sigh. The speech was great and super satisfying, but I'm also watching the clock because I KNOW they have to leave some sort of cliffhanger disaster to predicate season 2 on, and of course that happened with them basically being like "we're fucked, they're fucked, everyone's fucked" which sounds like a fairly good premise to me. After this I watched Brooklyn 99 which was of course fucking hilarious. After that I got ready for bed, but for some stupid reason when I'm you know on autopilot for my routine I took the morning pills left in my "Tuesday" box instead of the evening pills in the "Wednesday" box (because I refill every Tuesday night) and took the wrong meds, then said well fuck, but my best bet is probably taking the meds I should've taken right now (none that should really interfere with the first) and just skip my morning dosage. And then tomorrow afternoon I can pick up my prescription for my new med so my body is just gonna be a psychopharmacological mess for the next 24 hours but hopefully it won't have any really bad side effects (it really shouldn't) (I'm also very impressed that psychopharmacological is an actual word and I didn't have to just make it up like I normally do when I want to use a form of a word that doesn't exist). Andddd it's past 1 am. I get to arrive at 9:30 tomorrow since we're going straight to a visit, so that'll be nice, assuming I don't fall asleep on the bus again like I did last time 😑. Anyway. Goodnight my little loves. Hope you had the loveliest of hump days.