#we always end up doing this!

[inkskinned]

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.

[barawrah]

beloved

[paper-lilypie]

ok but that kid Mobius couldn’t prune was Loki right. like, that was Loki right. The brothers at the dock. That was Loki and Thor right. It was Loki

Mobius couldn’t kill Loki, chose his burden, and dedicated his life to him instead.

Mobius’s story started and ended with Loki. It had to be Loki.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

while teen while goblin while aroace while injured while doing your best

[turtleblogatlast]

Man “Battle Nexus: New York” was a great episode but I do have one major gripe with it.

Like. Raph being paired up with Ghostbear? Makes sense. Works great. Works amazing, even.

Mikey being paired up with Meatsweats? Yeah that checks out!!

Donnie getting…Hypno…? I mean. I guess Donnie doesn’t like magic so it kindaaa works but Kendra would have been a much better choice to me personally. Maybe Big Mama didn’t wanna include a human or something…

And Leo getting…uh…one of the Sando Brothers???? Of all villains? Nah let’s be real, his main villain is more Big Mama herself (or Leo could be considered his own worst enemy lmao-). Hell Hypno would have probably worked better here considering their shared love for magic tricks and stuff, but Carl Sando????

[mugentakeda]

category 5 jetko moment

[ashleyloob]

ok but every time I tell a dude about a time I got harassed by another man, they always say some shit along the lines of "you should have kicked him in the nuts" & tell me to start carrying a gun so I can shoot them, ooor they tell u their violent fantasy on how they would've absolutely beat up the other dude. why do they want to see violence so bad

[thepunkmuppet]

gwen and alice toxic workplace yuri I LOVE YOU

[myuminji]

dedicated to the audience: me, myself, and I— I finished the discarded sketch

[perenial]

idk how to say this without sounding like an asshole but the idea that being a marginalised person inherently makes ur opinion on both that specific form of marginalisation and oppression as a whole Correct has rly fucked with how people engage with intersectional analysis

this post was just me venting abt marking undergrad gender studies essays btw

[azaracyy]

a lesson on good karma digimon survive week 2024 day 4: supporting characters

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[mwagneto]

a thing about rtd's era that i really really love seeing again is how he will usually wrap up the plot 10 or even 20 minutes before the episode ends and then the rest of that time is just dedicated to the characters talking to each other and dealing with their emotions and situations. like instead of a last minute win and a two minute goodbye they always get these massive spans of time to really get into everything emotionally and it always makes the episodes hit even harder

[faeriecap]

mcu releasing cacw like: “sorry mackie ur character who is actually a crucial part of the cap storyline historically can’t get any significant screentime in cap 3 yeah we know it’s the final movie sorry we had to have an endless fucking montage of maria stark trauma porn bc it actually wasn’t already clear tony was emotionally unstable and had mommy and daddy issues followed by the wandavision cooking special for,,,,,, reasons,,,,,,,,,,,, and oh yeah did we forget to mention this is actually another avengers movie and the first spiderman??? best we can do is a scene where sam’s mean to bucky lol …… what about steve rogers??? wait whos that uhhhh is he even in this script?”

(it’s bc they didn’t care about developing sam at all until he was their “only” option for cap and could safely not be shipped with steve if they ever actually interacted wait what huh who said that)

[tommarvoloriddlesdiary]

Tom: Harry, we already tried things your way.

Harry: What? No, we didn’t - when?

Tom: Well, we tried it in my head.

Tom: And it didn’t work.

[b4kuch1n]

sunstroll