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Where's the shoe? I can hear it getting ready to drop, and it's gonna drop hard.
I've been really enjoying Harlan fucking around with the audio production and POV shifts this season. It makes the story stronger and more interesting.
Arthur, my dude, you need to stop offering yourself up to powerful beings beyond your comprehension. I know you didn't have much of a choice, but you are going to get yourself into A Situation. Well, more Situations.
I'm glad that we're getting some resolution on some of Arthur's external relationships. He is a man who deserves more second chances than he's gotten, and I nearly collapsed in relief when he and Daniel reconciled.
(The conversation in "The Father" was absolutely brutal. Did those things need to be said? Absolutely, but nobody enjoys watching somebody get kicked in the stomach repeatedly, y'know? And that makes the bit where Arthur finally gets Daniel to look through the mask so much more powerful.)
People were helpful, suspiciously so. I kept waiting for somebody to prove false, but they didn't! Doesn't mean it's not going to happen later, but I really expected it this episode! The show does run on fairy tale logic (cf the Dreamlands), but idk if that applies everywhere.
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tuesday again 5/9/22
death to all callery pears but especially the one right outside my home office window
listening a pair of wistful little things about the passage of time, bc i am pre-grieving the evil lair and will probably take a week off the tuesdayposts the last week of the month and if i do not have fifty-two songs in the playlist at the end of the year my brain gets displeased
mr wriggle by cosmo sheldrake (mr jukes edit). now if you held a gun to my head and asked me to describe this song, this is somewhere between droll and whimsical. like instead of early aughts whimsigoth it’s whimsi-cottagecore? a rare instance of liking the remix better than the original- mr jukes had a very light hand here by getting rid of a vocal i find irritating. it sounds brighter? hope that helps. “put some pickles on/play the mellotron” YES mr sheldrake you’ve rhymed a silly pairing of words you’ve done it again!!! this sounds perhaps condescending but i do think he is a rare example of a lyricist who really loves playing with words and mouthfeel. how did i find this: poking through back catalogues while in the video game data mines, i think @maverick-ornithography originally turned me onto mr sheldrake
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also, castle in the clouds by cut worms, off an "acid western” playlist from tiktok that is full of goddamn bangers. ideal uptempo but non-distracting work music. upsetting how quickly tiktok has dialed into my interests.
anyway this song was released in 2020 and borrows from the late sixties country sound with a fascinating inexplicable reference to the song house of blue lights (here is my favorite cover by ella mae morse)??? one of the youtube commenters described the vocalist as george harrison-esque and that’s not Wrong, but it’s a little more mellow. the music video has charmed me beyond belief with a collage of late fifties/early sixties footage of america telling stories about itself (I KNOW. I KNOW. OKAY. I AM A WEAK AND PREDICTABLE WOMAN).
i really really love the way the phrase “castle in the clouds” comes in on the chorus, almost as an aside? this is a song made for any number of blorbos
And when you look to see what’s inside Oh no it’s true I can’t believe Oh no it’s you Haven’t I seen you before
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reading chainsaw man, a shonen...horror? workplace comedy? bureaucratic malevolence? manga. occasionally i get the urge to read something that’s gross but not necessarily scary. vampirella comes to mind. hellboy and spinoffs do a very good prickling dread but aren’t necessarily scary either. read through All of hellboy but not all of the brpd in the summer of 2019 when i was stuck in the worst internship ever, probably due for a reread.
this is teens being gross the manga, a lot of it makes me suck air through my teeth but it got me to care about several characters Real quick. like look at this girl. this loud rowdy girl in a suit who is So bad at lying. i want to see her grow up big and strong
how did i find it: don’t worry about it
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watching hey did you see the new us chemical safety board video
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playing breath of the wild! i would say that this lava section of the map can go straight to hell but it (and i) are already there.
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making acquired this Object out of a free pile (same one as the brass lamp several weeks ago) and have been trying to figure out a use for it, bc i do like my containers to contain something, and fuck it idk onion holder now. everything is permitted
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Home for the Holidays
Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays ♫ ‘Cause no matter how far away you roam ♫ When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze ♫ For the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home! ♫
Dick Grayson listens to the familiar, slow-flame drawl of Perry Como emitting from the sidewalk speakers inexpertly hidden along the salt-stippled avenue of shops. He drops from the curb without a hop to his step and shoves one of his gloveless hands into the front pocket of his jeans. It isn’t cold enough for him to see the huff of his breath on the air, but it is early enough in the morning that he wouldn’t be out here if not for the giant travel mug of coffee resolutely grasped in his other hand.
The Blüdhaven strip mall is safe and dead at this hour on a Tuesday, which lends a qualifying moroseness to the airing age-old Christmas melody. He hears the refrain chase him, tinnily, all the way to his car, and he fingers the cell phone in his pocket. He wonders about calling Babs, but even though she isn’t strictly out on the streets with them, she’s just as much in on the nightlife too, and it’d be a sin to wake her this early only for a maudlin earful.
Four days ago, he’d gotten into another fight with Bruce. Four days later, he can’t let it go. Because he – Dick Grayson – went and picked a fight with Bruce Wayne two weeks before actual Christmas just so that Bruce wouldn’t because Bruce always did. Dick has worn Batman’s cowl and Dick has filled Batman’s boots, but never before has he so badly misstepped into his father’s shoes.
Ever since his juvenile abdication from all things Bruce Wayne, and even though Bruce and he are more or less civil with each other now, the holidays have a way of stirring Dick’s mercurial temper to a melancholy cocktail of nostalgia and the bitter aftertaste of knowing he’d lost those formative years – those family traditions – completely independent of Bruce’s crimes of passion. There’s irony somewhere in that, he guesses, and a double-dose of it, but Dick is nothing if not sentimental. He has the tendency to chalk up the past to self-blame, whether or not it actually was Bruce who had fanned the fitful flames of Dick’s anger. Still, it had always been Robin’s duty to counterbalance the Batman, to be the yin to his yang and negate Batman’s darkness for him with a simpering buoyancy. So every time he’s stormed out just because of Bruce being Bruce, the fault lay indisputably with Dick. It has to.
By the time he arrives back at his apartment, Dick’s travel mug is empty and his mood is half-full. He disentangles himself from his scarf with quick tugs of his hand. The tightness around his throat does not yield.
“Sweet Jesus, Dickless,” he hears Jason say, “you have failed me for the last time.”
“What did I do now?” Dick asks very amiably, shoving away all pensive introspection as he enters his kitchen to find all three of his little brothers glued to their cell phones. There is still a prevailing stress in his eyes, a dejected slouch in the incline of his shoulders where they lean so he can peer over Jason’s head. Nothing is more important to him than his family, but lately he’s realizing more and more that his family isn’t all he wants; he wants for his family to want him right back. He looks past his brother’s large, scarred fingers that are frantically tapping away at Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
“You have no pears in your Market Box. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Stalin– don’t you know that pears are the hardest to come by?”
“Sorry, Jaybird. I don’t play much anymore.” Dick tosses his jacket over the straight back of Jason’s – his – chair. “I’m tapped out; my loan is up to one hundred and fifty thousand Bells,” and, even as he says this, Dick pulls his phone from his pocket, logs into the game, and presses at the screen a few times. “I have seven pears. There you go. I put them up for twenty Bells, just for you.”
“–Acquired,” interjects Damian, with spectacular self-satisfaction, at the same time Jason goes, “–One hundred and fifty thousand Bells? How the hell– Dami, you fruit-thieving little shit,” he growls, in the same breath, “–did you get yourself in so steep?”
“I’m on, like, the fifth loan, I think. And it’s for one hundred and fifty thousand.”
“You mean you actually pay them off? What is wrong with you?”
“It’s a game about debt,” Tim peaceably inserts, without looking up. His fingers flit across his phone screen as deftly as they do his remote hacking device. “Paying off your loans is virtually the only thing you’re supposed to do, Jason.”
“No, it’s a game about making a freaking killer-sweet pad, with all the things. Did you get it, Dicky?”
“Those pears will be the building blocks of my empire, Todd.” Damian, again. Smugly, again.
“Fuck your empire. Apollo wants his pears. I will never get that zipper shirt,” mourns Jason, not quite sincerely enough to muster tears.
“Yeah, I got it,” Dick answers when he is finally allowed the chance to. He holds up the gift card. “But I’m still not sure why you see fit to get Bruce a Starbucks gift card for Christmas. Doesn’t it seem a little… I dunno… bourgeois?”
“Spoken like a true trust fund baby. Shut up,” Jason adds, shutting down the argument toward which he’s riling Dick. “And anyway, Batman is by the people, for the people.”
“I’m just saying. I-am-vengeance grappling to an LED marquee and paying for a Venti Mocha Frapp, with a gift card?”
“You don’t know Batman the way I do.” Well, that was true. Each of the Robins knew Batman differently from the others. “He loves that shit. Ask Alfred. They’re opening a Starbucks by the precinct and Bruce will flip his wig when he finds out.”
Dick shrugs neutrally, noncommittally, and allows Jason to steamroll over his shameful flare of jealousy. There is ice in his chest, scaling his clavicles, and he ignores the nagging familiarity of it just like he ignores the familiarity by which Jason speaks of Bruce. “Little D, the lady at Suncoast says that you can design your own PopSocket for Al. Through the website.”
“Hand me your laptop, Grayson,” demands Damian, without more than a second’s thought. “I will investigate.”
“Okay, but,” he warns, “if you need to use your own editor, I haven’t got Photoshop on here.”
“Tt.”
“I can get you Photoshop, Dick.”
“Because you’re a pirate, Timmy,” scoffs Jason, “and Dick is a trust fund b–”
“Or maybe, Jason, I’m not a trust fund baby and that’s why I don’t own Adobe anything,” Dick shoots back, using his full name now. He’s nettled by the tone being used on him, for a topic that is so sore with him. The ice bracketing his heart suddenly thaws into a puddling sob of frustration, which goes angrily suppressed. He knows how flammable his own temper is, which colors him all the more upset, enough to turn away from Jason so that he is facing and simultaneously avoiding Tim’s stare.
Tim sees how Dick’s eyes are flashing dichotomously – an electric blue set in a face schooled of any outward expression – and intervenes before Jason can bring up the point of that ubiquitous knife pressed between them: that at least Dick had actually gotten to live to his age of majority. “Did you pick up gift tags?”
Dick throws out a sideways glance, barely the formality of miffed scrutiny in the stillness of tundra. “Yes, I got gift tags. Because we’re all so hopelessly impaired–”
“Drake, your camper is cliché.”
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And I’m trying to complete all of the Christmas Event Challenges.”
“That’s all that’s inside it; Christmas crap,” pipes in Jason, “except for– what is that?”
“It’s a slipper rack.”
“Okay. Damian, I’m gonna have to go with you’re wrong on this one. Tim’s camper is so Tim.”
“This is card stock. Why would they stick stickers on card stock?” Tim gripes from where he’s meticulously, conspicuously peeling something off of the backing of the gift card.
“…” And Dick takes the few long moments of sibling banter for what they are: a breathing spell. He collects himself, cards his unruly black hair into tufts, and compartmentalizes.
When dealing with Jason Todd, taking anything personally was taking tinder to kindle. Jason knew Dick, and Dick knew better; it’d never been about himself. Maybe when he was younger he’d thought so, but the eldest had long since come to learn that Jason’s best defense was his best offense; barreling heart-first into things, to disarm or to destroy, because he’d grab at anything if it belonged to him – and his brothers, Jason finally ascertained, were his brothers. On less malevolent days of the week, not unlike ordinary sibling rivalry, Jason’s possessiveness usually manifested itself by way of teasing just this side of too-fierce. In sharper, more extenuated circumstances, he cut to the quick, navigating the veritable minefield of responsiveness and gut feeling and leaps before looks. In a civilian, Jason’s behavior was the very antithesis of vigilanteism. In a younger brother, it was arrested development. Which makes sense, because he’d died a child, and every time Dick is reminded of that it is harrowing pain, and it is thankfulness, softening the edges all around the insults Jason’s whetted to the hilt, that his brother is alive.
After a self-possessed sniff – in farewell to his pride, he convinces himself – Dick rests his palm on Tim and gives his bedhead a good tousle. In a smoothly paved voice, he asks, “‘You still workin’ out? Rerack?’”
Damian Wayne barks a laugh, and immediately Jason jumps on the bandwagon. “‘How’s it going, brosephine?’”
“‘We don’t always have to talk about training, you know. There’s plenty of other stuff goin’ on!’” Dick, quoting from their favorite, the jock type animal. Who happens to also be a bird named Jay.
“‘Like…um… You know… How ‘bout that weather?’” supplies Jason.
Dick dissolves into laughter. Gasps, “‘Did you know that just talking about your muscles can make them bigger and stronger?’”
“I hate you both.”
“‘Sue me! Rerack!’”
Dami enters the fray. “‘How’s it going, Drake? Training like a madwoman?’”
Jason stops short. “Demonbird, you play as a female character?”
Damian colors. “The videogame is not gender-specific with its dialogue.”
“Isn’t it?” Dick considers, curiously.
“How would you know?” challenges Jason – who does play as a female character – as he squares his broad shoulders and tilts his chair onto its back two legs.
“Jason, how do you not know what Damian’s character looks like,” Tim asks. Don’t you see it wandering all over your world?”
“We’re not friends.”
“We are so, Todd!” And the beat where Damian’s accent lands is given an irregular emphasis.
“Fine. How in blazes would I know if we’re friends? I cannot even begin to fathom the nickname you chose for yourself. And I have a bazillion names on my friends list, ninety percent of which is in Kanji.”
“…Is it?” Dick, still stumped and not following the tangent of conversation at all.
“‘Macmoo,’” Tim offers, taking a sip from his empty coffee mug.
“Alright, kiddies. Giddyap,” Jason says, and really pronounces it that way. He stretches himself to his full height, and then some – easily six feet four on his toes for the assuaging pop! of his back. His arms arch up and he towers over the fridge. “Go get dressed, Cretin,” he orders lovingly and gives his littlest brother, who barely comes up to the bottom of his chest, a fond forward shove toward the bathroom. “I’m starving to death.”
As his sibs depart the kitchen, Dick angles himself for a fast escape to the dishwasher, but Jason steps in front of him, purposefully overbearing. “Uh-uh. You too, Dicky.”
“Jay, I’m already good to go.” He indicates his faded jeans, his windbreaker that’s fallen from the chair during Jason’s see-saw sitting. “Besides,” Dick japes, lamely, “you don’t get to tell me what to do; I’m the big brother.”
Jason opens his mouth to say one thing, closes it, then reopens it to say something different. “You have a funny memory.” Jason sighs, puffs up his cheeks, then sighs again. “It’s reticulated.”
“Like it’s a giraffe’s ass?”
“Like it’s circling around the same platitudes over and over and getting shakier every time it has to.”
Dick falls silent, but he doesn’t withdraw his gaze from Jason. He looks measuringly at his brother for a time, beyond teal eyes and need-to-know bases, beyond, even, shared pasts and shared costumes and shared fathers. Rain was cobalt, like the grooves in his irises reflecting at least an alchemic silver lining if not his brother’s whole love.
Raking up the quiet, Jason speaks, “Trust fund baby? Seriously, that’s what got under your skin? Which of the implications was worse? That you were a snob or that you were a Wayne. Or weren’t a Wayne, as it goes.”
“Both! Neither. It was you wanting to hurt me because of it,” Dick snaps, instantly pissed off again. He ignores the tension line at one corner of his brother’s mouth, breaking it apart in his mind and scattering it to pieces. It’s only flesh, after all.
“Fuck you, Dick,” Jason says, in a low voice. His pulse is hammering. Common courtesy dictates he not raise his voice inside of doors and out of anger. “Not everybody has to love you all of the time. You didn’t for me. You aren’t for Bruce.”
“I do love Bruce.” He’s a father to me, as much as you are a brother to me, he doesn’t say.
“Then why don’t you tell him that and stop dragging me down the roads of your guilty conscience.”
For the gravid space of a breath, it really seems like Dick is going to lose his temper and explode into dynamite violence. Then he winces, as if going against a great backlash. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take any of this out on you.”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Dick.” No moniker for his name this time. “Forget about walking on eggshells; you are an emotional rhino in a china shop.” Jason fumbles a cigarette to his lips. “Except the china shop is holiday hullabaloo.” He fishes for his lighter, mumbling something about how his skinny ninny brother is a rhino, and can he believe this.
“I just miss knowing that I can’t lose my family at even the best of times. Don’t smoke in here.”
And because Jason’s feeling generous, he obeys, but he doesn’t remove the stick from his mouth. He rolls it with his tongue, longingly, between the borders of his lips. Nicotine is his sunrise; his lips, the horizon.
It is then that Tim and Damian file back into the room.
“I thought we were going for brunch,” says Dick in a flat voice, nonplussed when Tim, wearing a tasteful burgundy button-up, makes his way to the coffee pot for a second mug. Damian is wearing black slacks that look as though they’d been recently pressed by Alfred.
“That, too,” Jason remarks, in an offhand way. “But first you’re getting your Christmas present early, Dickface. Now go change. I’m cashing in on a few favors for this one.”
It isn’t until they are all four crammed into Jason’s beat-up ‘93 Mazda – with Dick wisely refraining from asking if it’s a stolen vehicle – that Jason spills the beans, reveals that they’re going to get their picture taken together, but doesn’t point out that Dick hasn’t hung a single portrait on a single wall of his apartment in any of the years that he’s lived there because Dick won’t hang anything if he can’t hang a picture of his family, and that’s why Jason’s taking them to the seedy studio of an even seedier acquaintance to get this done.
“You mean… You guys didn’t stay over just because Alfred cleared you out so he could wrap presents for under the tree?”
“Cripes no. Don’t ask stupid questions. You know how many rooms are in the Manor and you know how resourceful Alfred can be. We came because I rallied the troops.”
And Dick is moved to tears. His eyes are hot and runny, even after he adjusts the sticking vent in the dashboard. In the rearview mirror he watches Damian glaring balefully out of the window, but Dick knows by Damian’s acquiescent silence that the littlest bird isn’t actually bothered in the least. Dick sees Tim’s tired reflection but knows by the tall mug Tim’s holding that he doesn’t mind trying.
Dick scrubs his face with his knuckles. “You know, Jay, you don’t have to start a fight with me every time you want to make me feel better.” He raises both hands in a gesture of truce to ward off Jason’s dark scowl. “Though I appreciate the effort!”
“I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t always make it so hard for yourself. Self-saboteur. Quit flattering yourself. And anyway… It kinda wasn’t completely your fault. I was being… well… you-ish.”
Dick chuckles but wetly, in pieces over this whole being loved thing, and leans his head wordlessly against the passenger-side window.
After a few miles, he is distracted by a murmur coming from Jason – not so much by the sound as by the gravitas of the timbre applied to meet Dick halfway. It’s another Animal Crossing quote, of all things, and considering that Tim had formulated a calculation for the minimum mandatory animal conversations Jason was likely to play through in a given day, it isn’t at all surprising to Dick that Jason can recite verbatim:
“‘Everything you hold dear is under attack, and they’re going to do whatever they can to take it away.’” There is a considering lull – and Dick’s smile is lopsided and peaking – before Jason gives him a hard look. “‘It’s you…versus the ants.’”
Dick sits up straight. He reaches for a knob and clicks on the radio. It is Perry Como again, crooning the classic. Dick turns it up.
“Thank you, Little Wing.”
“Merry Christmas, Big Bird.”
Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays ♫ ‘Cause no matter how far away you roam ♫ If you wanna be happy in a million ways ♫ For the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home! ♫
#dick grayson#jason todd#batfamily#batfic#batfamily feels#tim drake#damian wayne#batboys#batfam#dick grayson has the holiday blues#too many animal crossing references#angst#fluff
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In her raving there was absolutely none then.
A feeble scratching on the gray desolation was terrible enough, but the illness of persons and animals who had been at it. There was a mistake of Nahum's family at all on the floor was too much like a great spot eaten by acid in the mud by the law. In May the milk began to point shakily and impressively. Only the bricks of the great rock that fell a year.
I gathered that no wind; but even so, I shall be glad when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to keep her locked in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the daytime, against a moonlit sky. Botanists, too, for the new reservoir. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which resembled some of the countryside. The strangely puffed insects died about that evil water Zenas never come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and foxes, but found it would be called a gas, but something within the lifetime of those terrible last words of Nahum's to tell people about the matter to them. Digging had borne no fruit, and always they lacked the power to get away; for Arkham and showed them to see the water come. It was just a color—but even so, I thought as I mentioned them in the upland lot along the road, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. Ammi could not convey it—when the professors gave it a smart blow with a long pole found that stone to be—someone must make it keep off—nothing was left in this motor age—grow skittish in the valley.
It was very inexplicable, for old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I feigned a matter of old legendry at all since the witch trials, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would be, several farmers spoke about the house. Ammi could see nothing at all on the gray desolation that sprawled open to the eye. It was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and once more, while Mrs. Pierce was blank, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce listened in a way which could not be exact; and the blasted heath. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the town by the road, there was poison in Nahum's ground. French-Canadians have tried it, but it told on his shoulder. It is not good for imagination, and infected the very look of the trees. And so all through the mud of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the way the great morbidity that had vanished too.
It come from that stricken, far-away spot he had begun to exude the faint but unmistakable luminosity of the blasted heath. It was just a color her face is getting to have the stars come out above me in the silent valley; and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the strange days. As I walked hurriedly by I saw above the ripped earth and charred grass near the well after it had drawn the lightning, as he mumbled his formless reflections. It was just a color out of the old road, and always they lacked the power to get away. On an anvil it appeared to shoot up from that stone it musta come in that ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England wood.
Three of the soil, but toward the valley and the feeling of vague disquiet. No doubt the meteor. Speakers would not have gone away, for they might shed light on the couch, he decided to keep her locked in the front door to drop the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching.
It lay largely to the college had found some very black clouds as they paused at his door, and from a horse. I could not go. Something had snapped a trifle, or bridge over Chapman's Brook, and even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. Then there was something definite and distinct, and now Merwin was getting very feeble. It was a scene from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the well, or who ever talks of the watchers saw wriggling at that hour of the visitors seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. When I went into the fields to the door the boy run about for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the detectives at the doom of the same with the melons and tomatoes, and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. Water did nothing with the puncturing.
A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to be faint traces of the future crop. Relief was all a freak of madness to the sky like a great excitement. Even the flowers whose hues had been no wild legends at all since the horror was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi could see nothing at all, but perhaps they had attacked the substance. Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realized that the cause seemed to flow directly into the fields to the town by the north road and the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection with these saxifrages. When the cooling had grown used to the point at which its idle straying had been less thick. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made pets of the narrow step—and he changed his line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones of an abandoned well I seen it time and again since Zenas was took where's Nabby, Ammi?
The aspect of the colors had a sort of liquid splash—water—it come from some place where he could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the open meadows. In the last stages—and the fragments showed that they swayed also when there was not a present horror numbed him he admitted that there was a mistake of Nahum's family at all on the broad-planked floor and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. The old folk have gone away, for he had had an added shock that the well was belching forth to the town by the ancient tottering cottage where the earth had caved in. What presence had his cry and entry started up? The pears and apples slowly ripened, and is jest a cloud of soot blowing about in Arkham was given a short, sharp gasp.
With the moments the shining of the blasphemous monstrosity which persists more and more educated than I had talked with in Arkham about the same demonic tint. West.
Too awed even to hint at the remnants of the meteor's fall, and then poor Nahum. It was little Merwin this time, and there are farms, ancient and rocky, with a studied malevolence which Ammi had nothing but drive it into the hills and through the stony messenger from the yard then, but there were no protests at the bottom of a maple against a window overlooking the yard, and the fragments showed that they had attacked the substance.
There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and great bare trees clawing up at the gray, twisted, brittle monstrosity which confronted him, and always they lacked the power to get the heavy extra bar across it. It had happened in June, about the trees increased, while his body leaned forward and his wife into fits of anxiety. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which resembled some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the door the boy was gone. When he was disturbed about certain footprints in the meteor fragment in the undergrowth. One must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had drawn the lightning strike the furrow in the attic. It was quite dark inside, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. There was no wind seemed ever to blow about. The neighing and kicking in their brains, and at the window in horror and nausea. Everything had happened.
Digging had borne no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the way the great shapeless horror had shot into the Milky Way.
#H.P. Lovecraft#automatically generated text#Patrick Mooney#Python#Markov chains#The Colour out of Space#1927#The Colour out of Space week
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How should young women react as #MeToo moves into dating? Female writers discuss | Anne Perkins, Iman Amrani, Marie Le Conte, Rachel Shabi and Ash Sarkar
New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/how-should-young-women-react-as-metoo-moves-into-dating-female-writers-discuss-anne-perkins-iman-amrani-marie-le-conte-rachel-shabi-and-ash-sarkar/
How should young women react as #MeToo moves into dating? Female writers discuss | Anne Perkins, Iman Amrani, Marie Le Conte, Rachel Shabi and Ash Sarkar
Five female commentators share their views on how Aziz Ansari and Cat Person are taking the #MeToo debate into todays dating scene, showing gender disparity and raising consent issues
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How should young women react as #MeToo moves into dating? Female writers discuss
Aziz Ansari and Cat Person are taking the #MeToo debate into todays dating scene, showing gender disparity and raising consent issues
Anne Perkins, Iman Amrani, Marie Le Conte, Rachel Shabi and Ash Sarkar
Wed 17 Jan 2018 07.48EST Last modified on Wed 17 Jan 2018 17.54EST
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I recognise that by blaming Graces response, I am also saying that on one level Ansaris behaviour is OK. Photograph: Cassie Wright/WireImage
Anne Perkins: Being young is the time when you should be utopian in your views
Part of me wants to give Grace a really good shake. What did she expect, dating Aziz Ansari, a man 10 years older than herself and famous enough to have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, whatever his public reputation as a thoughtful and considerate person fully signed up to #MeToo. The message of his haste to leave the restaurant, the food barely finished, the wine untasted, and race her back to his apartment is so blatant it might have been written up in one of those neon bubbles.
Her failure to tell him where to go once things went pear-shaped when she was there is even more worrying. Sure, she indicated that it was not what she wanted. A genuinely thoughtful man of course would have responded appropriately. He didnt. She should have left. That is level one in elementary social skills.
But I recognise that by blaming Graces response, I am also saying that on one level Ansaris behaviour is OK. Thats what men do. Its down to women to handle it. Get used to it.
And the point of telling stories like this is to say to other women, and men, its not you, its him. To say, check your ideas about consent. Consent is not the absence of rejection. It is not a tense silence. It is not passive. It should not be capable of being misread.
Utopian, perhaps. But whats the point of being 23 if you dont refuse to get used to stuff thats wrong?
Anne Perkins is a Guardian columnist
Iman Amrani: Bad experiences should not be lumped with serious assaults
There are three main things in my experience that can expose young women to exploitative or uncomfortable situations. First, money. Whether its keeping a job or a roof over your head, the need for it can push some women into circumstances that they wouldnt freely choose. Second, ambition. Drive can lead to women feeling forced to put up with things that they know are unacceptable, in order to achieve a greater objective.
Both of these factors expose women to abuses of power as we have seen in many of the cases of workplace harassment, from Hollywood to Westminster to all the women contributing to the #MeToo movement. Its this power struggle that adds weight to the stories about hands being placed on womens knees or unwanted advances, and its important this movement continues.
The third trap is the desire to be liked. There is a societal pressure on women to be attractive, friendly, and grateful, felt most acutely in young women. Aziz Ansaris accuser, Grace, and the narrator of Cat Person fall into this one. The latter might be fictional, but both accounts resonated widely with many young women. Both feature women in their early 20s, who found themselves in circumstances they didnt want, but felt unable to fully vocalise that they had reached their comfort limits.
Part of dating and sex as a young person is finding our boundaries, learning to protect them and develop the confidence to tell people who overstep, in no uncertain terms, where they can go. Not many people are born with this confidence, and it isnt something you can learn in a two-hour workshop on consent, but through making mistakes. Some of the situations that contribute to our experience may be unpleasant or regretful, but that doesnt necessarily mean that they should be grouped with assault, harassment or rape.
There has to be room for both men and women to make mistakes, to create a space where real dialogue can happen and where people can learn what is and isnt OK. Lumping all these grey-area stories in the wider #MeToo debate about rape, assault and the abuse of power only serves to drown out the voices of women whose stories should be focusing on this week, such as Simone Biles, and the countless other women who are bravely speaking out.
Iman Amrani is a Guardian multimedia journalist
Marie Le Conte: Men can no longer be seen as guided by their sweaty crotches
I had a conversation with an older feminist recently and she asked why women of my generation seem to hate men. We never stop criticising them, find endless examples of objectionable behaviour, and will gleefully turn on any man deemed not good enough by our precious standards.
She wasnt entirely wrong our expectations are undeniably higher than they used to be but my response was that it was, at least from my viewpoint, the exact opposite.
We expect more from men because we want to have more faith in them.
I refuse to see them as foolish animals, clumsy and to be pitied because life isnt easy when one simply cannot understand the complex and confusing women around them, choosing instead to be guided by their sweaty crotches.
This is why some of the responses to the claims about Aziz Ansari felt puzzling sure, we could have an argument about why the woman didnt leave, but why not talk about why he felt the need to keep trying it on?
Why can so many men feel so comfortable trying to sleep with women who dont want to sleep with them? Why do so many men think they can plunge their tongue down a womans throat before making sure its wanted?
Incidents which to some feel too small to be scandalous actually reveal the way men see women, and if they have no trouble crossing womens boundaries once or twice, where will they stop?
Weve been raised to see men as the superior intellectual gender, so spare me the idea that they just dont know what theyre doing.
If women can go through life without lunging at men, groping them, and treating their bodies as property, then surely we can expect men to do the same in return.
Marie Le Conte is a French freelance journalist living in London
Rachel Shabi: Older women wondering why millennials dont walk away have forgotten dark times
These stories have forced light into another area where it is sorely lacking: the stark lack of parity over sexual agency, expectation and desire. Its there in harsh, excruciating detail: the distorting and damaging ways in which heterosexual men and women are socialised about sex.
This isnt about a generational divide, despite some of the responses to such stories. Doubtless this terrain is thornier for younger women who, on top of the usual biases, are also navigating complications imposed by a certain kind of porn culture, and the image- and confidence-twisting burdens of social media.
But maybe the older women wondering why millennials dont just walk away from horrible sexual encounters have forgotten the times when they also stayed, rather than dealing with the awkwardness, risk his angry response, or navigating the paralysing weight of confusing expectation. Because women are socialised to be polite and accommodating, and are under constant pressure to be passive pleasers in every way, to the extent that our own desires and ambitions are routinely subjugated.
Such is the pervasive social messaging around gender and sexuality, such are the ever-present biases, that a woman asserting her own will or expressing a preference risks being labelled as unpleasant, unattractive or aggressive as it is in the boardroom, so it is in the bedroom. And thats before we even get to the men in the equation, with all their socially conditioned expectations, damaging biases and toxic assumptions.
Its messy and awkward and all tangled up, but if this #Metoo discussion is bringing us on to the question of what genuine equality in sex and relationships might look like, then good. In that spirit as with all parts of this debate we could do with less judgment and a lot more listening.
Rachel Shabi is a freelance writer and commentator
Ash Sarkar: A divergence in perception between men and women must be addressed
Theres a truth to the Aziz Ansari story which extends beyond whether or not he behaved in the manner alleged; that all too many of us have had sexual encounters in which one persons comfort is subordinated to the urgency of anothers desire.
Traditional feminist discourse from Susan Brownmillers Against Our Will to more recent discussions prompted by the Harvey Weinstein revelations has focused on a figure of the rapist as monstrous and malevolent. However, nearly one in three women have experienced sexual violence at the hands of an intimate partner the archetypical perpetrator looks less like a grotesque outsider, and more like a familiar neighbour. We hold him in affection and esteem. We trust him. We might even desire him.
Whatever we wear, wherever we go yes means yes, and no means no! The old Reclaim the Night slogan misled a generation of feminists into understanding consent as binary, and violation as self-evident. Were supposed to announce our consent (or lack thereof) like were entering a plea at trial.
But yes, in a context of mutual respect, might be a joyful wordlessness; no might come in the guise of not now, maybe later, or even well, OK then. In a society where sex is often seen as something to be extracted from partners like a mineral or an ore, a soft no is just so much social sediment to be worn away.
A rigidly legalistic model for understanding consent doesnt encourage men to shift the parameters of how they understand sex. The Ansari allegations show us that the task isnt to get men to see themselves as rapists, but to see their partners pace of desire as being of equal primacy to their own. There is no god-given right to orgasm: even a one-night stand requires patience, empathy and a capacity to interpret more complex cues than what is accepted in a court of law.
For what its worth, I believe Grace in her account of events. I also believe Ansari when he says: It was true that everything did seem OK to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned. Its precisely this divergence of perception which men need to address. That starts with viewing consent as the beginning of a social process not a verdict at the end of a long process of litigation.
Ash Sarkar is a senior editor at Novara Media, and lectures in political theory at Anglia Ruskin and the Sandberg Instituut
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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Season 5 so far feels like a return to the old formula, but with a twist. Also a new party member. I can't believe they named him that.
I forgot how much I hate when this show gets all... wet. The squicks I put up with for good storytelling.
#pear listens to malevolent#i am a weenie and don't like descriptions of bugs and stuff#or wet visceral noises#but i suck it up for this#which is probably the best compliment i can give
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I have been catching up on my backlog of podcasts and I am through episode 39 of Malevolent. I'd stalled out in the middle of the season because I wasn't sure where things were heading, and it was starting to get frustrating. It's a fucking around trying new things season, and not everything stuck.
After three seasons with just Arthur and John, I can see how it would be interesting to get other people into the mix. I don't think it was done particularly well, and until John and Arthur hashed it out after the farm it was difficult to figure out what exactly was going on beyond John's memory lapses (which still have not been addressed). It's just so weird that after hours of dialogue that conveys both Arthur and John's interiority well this is where it starts to fall apart.
It's back on track now, but it was kinda rough. The season finale is two hours and I don't think I have the emotional fortitude for it tonight.
#pear listens to malevolent#i have a lot of criticisms but it doesn't mean i still didn't enjoy it?#it's still one of the more interesting fiction podcasts out there#and one that makes clever use of both the limits and advantages of the medium
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I really need to stop listening to Malevolent in the mornings because it is Too Much to have such intense feelings about sad detective and eldritch hitchhiker before work!! But can I wait until after work? Also no.
This episode had the range, damn. Arthur completely off his rocker consumed with thoughts of revenge, John pleading with him to see reason, remember his humanity. Such a good role reversal.
One of the things I love about this podcast is how good the audio production is. In addition to Arthur's blindness being a clever conceit as a vehicle for (literal) description, And the music is part of this. There's not a lot of variation in what's used: Faroe's song, "You Call It Madness", maybe something else. And when you hear something else, that's like a big screeching siren that you need to pay attention. I don't even know what that discordant sound that plays when Arthur and John are having their argument about whether Arthur's intended actions are justified. Maybe something scraping over piano strings?
The pacing is also impeccable--just enough time for the building dread and concern for this character (who we've spent so much time with and rooted for) to coalesce before it all goes to shit. Arthur dropping the knife. Stabbing the empty bed. And then, a literal repeat of what Arthur and Yellow did to get into Uncle's room. The music box was a nice touch, in a real fucked-up way. I respect that.
I'm also so fucking mad the way "bedrock" is used in this episode. At first I thought it was John not getting the idiom quite correct. But the way it comes up again with Peter, it's also a base. Something with stability that you can use to build on, climb up from. I don't think we've ever gotten any information canonically about what Arthur and Peter's relationship was like until now. And he's absolutely cast in the same position as John: the constant, the one good thing. I have no way of knowing if Arthur included Parker in "Because I can't lose another person!" but I'd like to think so. (And oh, to be so intimate with the being who took somebody that dear and important away from you. There's a story there that I wish somebody would tell.)
(Also, there is something to be said about how all the important people in Arthur's life are ghosts by the time we get to know them.)
The thing about fictional characters(') suffering is that it is, ultimately, selfish. They're not real, so it doesn't matter if they hurt. Which is not to say that it can't be done poorly or gratuitously, but it is for us, the creators and the consumers of said work to tell us things we need to hear. You do not need to walk a hundred miles in the desert on your knees, repenting. A terrible mistake does not mean you are unforgivable. The discovery of your humanity can help you transcend the wrongs you did for eons. You are not a monster. And even if you are, it doesn't matter. Somebody will love you anyways.
The last part of the episode is satisfying on a level that some people might call fan service. But that particular term, I think, implies an unearned indulgence. Nothing about what happens is unearned. John pulling Arthur back from the brink with his steadying belief in Arthur's conviction, reflecting that humanity Arthur taught him. John reciting Robert Frost to Arthur!! I was ugly crying on my rowing machine! I have never had any emotional attachment to "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening" or "Invictus" but I sure as heck do now!
And the apple! The beautiful crisp sound of it! (Somebody in the tag said it had to be an apple because it's the only fruit that makes a pleasing sound, which is also true. But apples are also the only fruit that could really survive through winter before the advent of modern transportation, and there's some symbolism in that.) wildehack made a comment on my fic about how Arthur is so spare in all the time we've known him: not just thin, but starved, and John fits himself into those spaces. And to see Arthur feel pleasure, enjoyment, expansive with hope? It was earned, and good.
ALSO HE PROMISED DATE NIGHT!
[edit:] I forgot about Faroe's music box! I thought Arthur would take it, but he doesn't need it anymore. And that's not a loss, that's closure, and I am so glad for him.
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SO GUESS WHO LISTENED TO EPISODE 17 OF MALEVOLENT THIS MORNING?????
Some thoughts on Dreamwidth if you care.
#malevolent podcast#word vomit#it's basically real time processing#i did all the crying in the shower; you're welcome#pear listens to malevolent
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I listened to four episodes of Malevolent today and that might have been A Bit Much emotionally.
Episode 18 is... weirdly cleansing after the emotional gut-punch of 17. Get all that festering mistrust out in the open! Scream the cruel, horrible things you know will hurt the other! Let an ancient eldritch monstrosity fuck with your head!
And oh, episode 19 is so sad. They've spent so much time together, but you can tell they've had to wall themselves off from each other for their own sanity and survival. And it feels like a reunion, a mending almost, after Arthur hauls them out of the prison.
The absolute fairy tale logic of Lorick being the one being who could help them get out, rewarding Arthur's kindness. It should be heavy-handed, but in something as grim as Lovecraftian horror, it's a necessary repudiation.
My husband warned me about episode 20. That was a good call. The narrative just so fucking casually throws out that Arthur's parents committed suicide??
And then Arthur going "Because I can't lose another person!" What the shitting goddamn fuck Harlan?
But he does anyways, because John loves him. God, I hate amnesia plots. They make me extremely anxious even when I know they'll always remember in the end (at least in fanfic). But the way Arthur is treating this like a do-over is at least an interesting twist on the trope.
But my real question is how the fuck does Arthur still recite an entire goddamn poem (even if it is short) while he feels like he's going to puke his guts out?
I do love how despite himself, Yellow is still touched by what he sees of humanity. "To see people move for no reason" is such a beautiful and evocative line that makes me extremely angry because it's so fucking good. I think about how so many people believe non-STEM skills are pointless because they have no perceived utility but never think about how much poorer their lives would be if we had no outlets for or the ability to appreciate creativity or joy.
Also I must like this podcast a whole damn lot, because there are so many visceral noises and I hate them all 😖
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The extremely obvious Nick Cave reference in episode 21 of Malevolent pleased the 90s kid and X-Phile in me.
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Into the fine flavor of the pail.
They had, it soon had the cows.
It was getting brighter and more educated than I had talked with in Arkham about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul. There's more to this talk until one night in ignorance of the Widmanstätten figures found on meteoric iron. Poultry turned grayish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome up there, and no sound could be gained from the well.
Most of the cellar, some mineral element from the black and blasted landscape. Is it fastened to the county asylum, but the shape in the silent valley; for it had completely caved in. There are dark narrow glens where the blasted heath. It had acted quite unbelievably in that ancient and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the fathomless gulfs outside; and the fragments showed that they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the visitors seemed so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there came from poor tethered Hero such a thing of sinister menace, and the rim. A sort of liquid splash—water—it grew down there.
The bad fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the morning sky, and was very plain that healthy living things must leave that house. Their dreams at night with a studied malevolence which Ammi had to be, since the water come.
The pears and apples had crept into my soul. He climbed the slope to the growing luminosity of the lamplight it was only a darkness to which the strange days are never talked about in the sections where reservoirs were to gruesome experiences, not one single jot was fit to eat. The veterinary shivered, the unknown color flared suddenly stronger and the buggy which they could, but Ammi to question; for Arkham people. The ooze and slime at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. He had gone out late at night Thad and Merwin and Zenas if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a pair of shriveled saplings by the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the pleasant farmstead in the light from the Gardner dogs seemed so far as he mumbled his formless reflections.
I asked old people in Arkham. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and sending forth to the Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though, beyond a doubt. Then there had been no house or ruin near; even in the yard near the well-sweep, half-hour, but he has never been there, and arrived at the bottom of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a charred spot marked the place from which his horses had stampeded. It had shrunk, and in another second they had both suffered from the stars come out above me in the yard, and Ammi turned away from the soil.
Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
Almost at the various social events of the spirits as of the subject as any man could gasp or cry out. Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the kitchen. It was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the visitors seemed so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot near the stone they smashed it it was blind groping from there to the sense of dread expectancy, the sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form.
It is forty-four years now since the strange days which so many others of the farm, and had wondered why the Gardner place bagged a very queer color, and a rabbit had run across the day before. The bad fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the way. It is forty-four years now since the water will always be very deep—but even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. I could not help glancing nervously at the various social events of the professors told Ammi as they ate their meager and ill-cooked meals and did not send her to the country legends. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable, and foreigners do not like to live in the well—in the old road, and arrived at the miles of old wood and farmland to be—someone must make it keep off—nothing was ever still in the dark ancient valleys through which he had thought they meant to do at night they swayed ominously in the yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. Is it fastened to the growing luminosity of the fall of night over that accursed place, and I wondered how it had completely caved in. Every person in that aerolite two summers ago, had all vanished one night when he wished to draw notice to the woods and fields? When the early saxifrage came out it had been at it. People vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. Hot as it had faded wholly away when brought up by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, it developed, nearly lost the property. I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a way which could not fancy what for, since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with the hues of the old days the place again. As the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that ye can hardly see and can't tell what. Night had fully set in, and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. It was a sort of heavy dragging, and in the woodshed behind, and the fruit was growing smaller and burning the bottom of a large dog in about the district. Is it fastened to the well. And by night all Arkham had heard of again. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the years after Nahum's taking, and foreigners do not know—that is imagined. They had uncovered what seemed to me, and of the well immediately, so Ammi had come from beyond had not been wholly changed to lethal gray brittleness. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when a detective silently called attention to old Ammi said, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England wood. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house in his mind had snapped a trifle, or face another time that gray blasted heath. French-Canadians have tried it, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the strange vegetable conditions, the wide-planked floor. It was not so bad as the shapeless stream of unplaceable color left the well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the front door to do but go back to the attic for some purpose. He went much against his will, for he had never come back. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and his wife had gone with the proper reagents. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and was crushed forever with a caved-in earth.
Then something struck the cows driven to the night, they protest, are very horrible in that frightful room above. Was right look out, Ammi managed to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. No one could explain. Then something struck the cows were freely pastured in the woods and fields, he has never been quite right since. It had now most certainly shrunk, Nahum included, saw it, but the shape in the barn.
#H.P. Lovecraft#automatically generated text#Patrick Mooney#Python#Markov chains#The Colour out of Space#1927#The Colour out of Space week
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