#rust course

[rustedgate]

[morszipan]

[aro-culture-is]

Aro culture is appreciating this blog and the mods 💪

:)

[dany36]

actually i need this very important exchange with teersa and very important hug on my blog now in remastered form

[thecurioustale]

The "Middle West"

I was recently watching Trump speak (not something I typically do 🤢), and the most interesting thing he said had nothing to do with anything he was actually talking about: It was that he used the term Middle West to refer to that generally north-central part of the United States, centered on the Mississippi River, that is neither the South nor the Northeast (nor the Mid-Atlantic, but that's really just a subcategory of the Northeast that Northeasterns use to not get lumped in with each other).

We all know it today as the Midwest. But in times past it was much more commonly known as the Middle West.

(Tangent: It is also one of many geographical region-name reminders of our national East Coast beginnings, as America has like six different kinds of "West": the Midwest, the Southwest, the (Pacific) Northwest, the Mountain West / Interior West, the West Coast / Pacific West—and that's not counting the deprecated terms (such as "Far West," i.e. distinguished from the Midwest) or the old Northwest (which would've referred to places like Ohio and (what we know as) West Virginia)!)

Over the course of the 20th century, "Midwest" became an increasingly common form of the term, eventually overtaking "Middle West" in popularity and, by our lifetimes, completely replacing it. The only people who still use "Middle West" today are very old. I'm only aware of the term's existence because I'm a fan of midcentury media and if you go watch (for example) old Dragnet episodes from the 1950s you'll hear the term used.

I was looking at the Google Ngram Viewer to get a sense of the relative usage frequencies of these terms, and I noticed something interesting: Not only has "Middle West" been driven almost extinct from active usage, but "Midwest" itself has also declined precipitously in the 21st century. People today are not calling the Midwest the "Midwest," at least not with the frequency and relevancy they once did. I was curious if this was another permutation of the usage, so I also looked up "Midwestern" (which I included in the link above), thinking that maybe people nowadays are calling it the clunkier "the Midwestern states" / "the Midwestern US," but the adjectival has declined in step with "Midwest." It really does seem to be that people are just using this geographical category less often.

Perhaps unsurprisingly: the sociopolitical cohesiveness of the Midwest has significantly diminished over time. I think most Midwesterners would still recognize and affiliate with the term if you applied it of them to their faces, but increasingly I think many of them do not think of it in their daily lives as a personal or cultural identifier. Which has many fascinating implications that I'm not going to get into.

(Another Tangent: I feel like I've talked about specifically this "Middle West / Midwest" thing on Tumblr before, but I feel that way about half of everything because after all I've been writing down my thoughts for over 20 years and I've been having thoughts for considerably longer than that, and it's often not clear to me what I've talked about publicly and where.)

Anyway, this entire post is really just me scratching the itch of verbal brain noise about the orange guy using a term in a public address that I never hear people use in the present day. A little piece of lost language, hearkening back to a completely different era and world.

[theboost]

Truly cannot buy any read of true detective where rust and marty genuinely like each other in 1995. Buddies in 2002? sure. Exploring each other’s prostates in 2012? Why not. But in 1995? No way.

[cobwebbedcat]

I truly love corruption kink with old men so much... Old men who are virgins and embarrassed about their inexperience, eager for you to take the lead, so expressive and open with their reactions because everything you do feels better than they could have even imagined.. old men who have had sex but it's been so long and they forgot how good it feels to have another touching them.. old men who are experienced, who've had many lovers before you, but feign innocence, and act like this is their first time. Goddddddd 🥴🤤

[ellzilla]

I love these silly oc templates

[reynaruina]

Do you still make art abt Competent Zim?

if so

PLS MAKE MORE (with gir i want to find out more abt them and dr mem)

its one of meh fav iv AUs beside Merzim and lovebug

(First of all, sorry to everyone who have been tossing asks my way! i've gotten them all, my inbox is just more stuffed than a gimp on a good weekend and it gives me Mad Performance Anxiety. Literally having to have a friend of mine in a corner of the ring here massaging my shounders as I sip on mineral water, to even consider tackling this. Jesus)

There will be more CZ coming, yes!! Very soon, matter of fact!! finished a new comic on stream a bit ago, just leaving it on Patreon first for the ppl there then will bring it here :D And I DEFINITELY wanna touch up more on Membrane and Gir later on!! Especially Mem and his relatiohship w the RoboParents, It's one of my favorite dynamics of this entire AU, just a lil' glimpse of how f'ed up things can get over here :D

[morszipan]

In his 🎀diva🎀 mode and I respect him for that.

[stoneantler]

One great thing about Rust Cohle is that I can make that man read anything and it's believable. Most of the time I worry about making a character's reading choices accurate but not him. He would read it. He would read anything. He probably goes to the library and checks out whole shelves at a time

[merrymorningofmay]

come to think of it, rust has a sigil tattooed on his chest with no definitive canonical meaning, and the king in yellow has a sigil with no canonical design in the book...... dots begging to be connected

[robobbin]

Literally crying about @magic-hcs' Rust, he's the Most Teddy Man ever (ﾉ⸝⸝⸝༎ຶ 3 ༎ຶ⸝⸝⸝)ノ♡･:*♡･.。

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

realistically, Rust Cohle would smell like cigarette smoke and probably some boring default masculine soap that he buys because it's the first thing on the shelf, like Irish Spring or some shit. Irish Spring and smoke and smoke and SMOKE and depending on where he is on his personal journey, booze. also sweat because that man is sad and wet a lot of the time.

however, my pitch for a Rust Cohle themed perfume would be one of those black phoenix alchemy lab style descriptions that goes on for paragraphs and paragraphs, quotes various poems and literature, and at the end says something like: "a bad taste in your mouth: aluminum and ash." there are no scent notes listed. nobody knows what it's supposed to smell like. it's always sold out anyway.