#writeups

[paperchits]

hi ya'll,

if you're a writer and would like to find a community, I'm hosting a writing sprint this Sunday.

Instagram, sign up form for the sprint

i'm looking forward to seeing some of you there!

[ceramicteapot]

touch starved.

a word i had often heard being passed around in my circles. i knew the oxford definition that described it. i “knew” the concept.

but knowledge is not experience.

you can know things you haven’t experienced like space travel, cardiac surgery, childbirth. you can’t long for something you don’t know about- naturally, i lack examples here because i don’t know what i don’t know.

for this precise reason, i knew what the starvation of touch meant but i didn’t understand it, until i was touched lovingly, with intent, with admiration, and with a desire to not be abandoned again, by my friends.

despite having been in romantic relationships, i’ve only experienced this platonically. my family are not a fan of physical affection either. i give it, but it is not returned.

but god, is the feeling all-consuming. something that bites into you in the most delicious of ways, makes your joints crumble into gunpowder, digs crescents into your brain.

i can’t physically see my friends often now. we have lives we need to look after. but i miss the gentle calmness of their hands on my back, the way their nails would scratch my scalp in the winter sun, the way my skin would be covered in lipstick stains in random places.

(i discovered one on my ear as i went to shower one night after a long day at college. precious.)

it’s safe to say that now that i know, i long.

and because i long, i write.

[romulusfuckingroy]

that interview about how kendall never actually bullied roman as a child… I don’t see it I’m sorry!!! we literally see how bad kendall treats him in the show, why are they saying that roman was only ever the bully in their relationship when it’s ten times more interesting and realistic that they both had moments of hurting the other?

I feel like they’re sort of trying to sanitize kendall’s feelings toward roman for some reason? like in the show they’re literally described as two fighting dogs, and roman is the weak one. I can’t believe they tried to spin dog pound as some harmless game they played; we literally see kendall’s face change in a sort of sick realization when connor tells him kendall enjoyed the “game” too.

and sorry… kendall literally popped roman’s stitches open????? like I know, I know, everyone on the show says “oh, that’s what roman wanted, he’s so fucked up that that’s what he needed and kendall was just giving him that”— no. I’m sorry but that’s an incredibly violent thing to do to your younger brother who’s already near tears. I will forever say that that scene was just as much about kendall’s selfishness and need for control as it was about roman’s wanting to be hurt.

like… I’m sorry to the actors and writers but kendall roy will always be the guy who watched his brother piss himself in a dog crate and told him to wipe it up with newspapers as a kid. he is also the guy who stood up to their dad when roman got hit! roman will always be the guy who picked his big brother up from his drug binges and took him to safety. and yes, he’s also the guy who humiliated kendall at his 40th birthday party!

they’re both, both! they’re both the aggressor and the victim! that’s what makes it fucking interesting!

[beatcroc]

excessively long and complex read on pillar john, and the larger john collective

there are a lot of things in pizza tower that, to one extent or another, Are John. some, like the pillar johns, have known and stated canon; but there's a myriad of other things, from mini-johns to the tower itself, that could also be argued as Being John. this post aims to reconcile all of those things as different facets of the whole being that is "John".

now right out of the gate i want to be real. i want to level with you for where im coming from with all this. i do think john is akin to some kind of god. i don't mean this in a super literal sense, but this dude is absolutely [conditionally] immortal to me. he's been around for a very very very long time, and will likely continue to exist almost indefinitely. barring specific circumstances.

i don't have an exact image for the first type of john, so i'm using this scrapped type of block from betas bc it illustrates the concept well enough

this is what i'll henceforth be referring to as "john tower"

this is john in his purest essence; the tower itself, and/or a power or a presence or just a vibe contained in and by the tower's walls and bricks. john tower is 'where' it could be said john's true consciousness and memories lie, but by itself it isn't really "alive" and doesn't have a will its own.

i'm not taking the brick itself Too seriously/literally since it's from beta, but i think it works for the general idea of "John is, and is within, the tower at its most fundamental level; and left to its own the tower will just sorta start making John-type things." Such as the following:

this one i will be calling "real john" this john is the physical, living manifestation of john tower, and what i would properly consider to be "John, Brother Of Gerome". he's a sapient guy with a personality and will and all the stuff that usually comes with being alive. this john is probably the most important type, and under normal circumstances there's only ever one of them at once.

these are just "dead johns". yknow because of the.

yeah. past incarnations of real john that died or got killed, or perhaps just wore out after awhile. real john dying isn't a particularly huge issue because, again, the tower just sorta Makes these things. and boy have there been a lot. they never seem to look quite the same between bodies, but they're all the same john with the same memories nonetheless, and so long as the tower stands, there will be more johns.

these are the pillar johns. this is known. these, as far as i know, are canonically clones of a cursed state of real john, and are mentally all the same guy by way of a hivemind. no speculation to be done here!

this "original john" is also stated canon the current real john, under a curse from pizzahead. physically the same being as real john, so the tower isn't just going to make a new one because this one's not technically Dead. i like to think john is closer to just being another brick of the tower like this, in something of a suspended state between being john tower and real john. still alive and sapient like real john, but much more connected to and in tune with the general sense of Energies of john tower. Has direct control over bits of it, which is primarily expressed as:

mini-johns! as real john is to john tower, so mini-johns are to pillar johns. there is no way to make this less confusing. mini-johns are essentially just random ass bricks and blocks of the tower that pillar john went 'ok little fucker you're gonna be alive now'. they're not part of either the pillar john hivemind OR the john tower collective and operate on their own agenda, which is i suppose is why they attack you, despite john generally seeming to be on your side about what you're doing to the tower. the little guys are a little more removed from their host, and aren't too thrilled about you tearing everything down. or maybe john is just pissed about getting killed over and over since there's no doubt that shit hurted. the john ghost certainly doesn't seem too happy about it either but honestly he's allowed to be a little vengeful in my book.

an aside note but there's also definitely some weird connection between them and [pillar] John Being Dead since they only ever appear during escape, except for in the graveyard-themed level [scrapyard] where everything is already dead... though interestingly not the JOHN graveyard level [john gutter] until pizza time? whatever. i don't have much of a sensible framing for this aside from it just being a general thematic thing and the mini-john section is too long already so i am moving on.

this john i frankly have no fucking clue about and am generally leaning more toward the idea that it's maybe not a literal thing that exists. more just a visual representation of one thing or another?

since it dies when you kill the final/original pillar john my initial read on it was that it's just sorta like an alternate view of original john so you could get a good look at the whole thing not restricted to the space in the 2d plane the player is on, but, crucially, it is missing real/original john's hat, which feels like too central a detail to leave out.

my alternate read on it is that it's a representation of the... overall state of the tower. emotionally, or perhaps structurally, which really might mean thing when you are talking about an arcane structure that is an undetermined amount of alive. either way, it's clear john, the tower, its energies, anything relating to such have been under duress and steadily, irreversibly decaying for....however long it's been since pizzahead took over. bit of a dour note to end on i suppose but that's just the way the tower crumbles man.

you may ask me what all this means for gerome. and i would answer, hell if i know?!? they're said to be brothers and clearly the same Kind of guy, but they don't seem to be cut from the same cloth, as it were. gerome doesn't seem to have Powers:tm: like john does, or pizzahead certainly would have been using him for shit as well, and there's also not a million versions of him lying around to land him in that weird pseudo-immortal space like john.

my best guess is he's something more intrinsically connected to the treasures, and something of a life support system or failsafe for the tower. i'm not sure how to Coherently articulate my thoughts here, but it's something like...little guy fundamental to but also entirely separate from the tower, made to help with its general upkeep [janitor stuff] and also to protect itself in dire straits [treasures]. not in any way attached to the john collective so that if something goes wrong there, at least gerome's small part of the tower's vibe remains untarnished. something about shaping and fragmenting the tower's energies into and across each of the levels by routing and/or stabilizing it through cloned johns; by proxy still this taps in to the gerome part of the tower's energies which manifests as its own separate door/room within that space that can't be altered by any other force re: the background in the treasure rooms always just being normal purple tower brick. treasures being condensed physical standalone bits of the tower's energy, enough of whatever's been channeled into that area to keep john going when given back to him should something disconnect/destroy the energies of the rest of that area. something like that.

honestly, i still have a bit of a hangup in saying gerome is of the same tower origin as john simply because he's not same shade of purple as all the other john tower stuff, but that's really kind of nitpicking at that point, so. hwatever.

ANYWAY all that said and done the most important thing you should take away from this post is that at one point gerome might have had a brother that looked like this

[board-has-star]

(Insert the sniffer incident)

so, hi. this may be one of the funniest incidents that has ever happened on our minecraft server

ENTER: THE SNIFFER

gorgeous creatures, sniffers. wonderful creatures. this was one of TWO baby sniffers we hatched inside of the beautiful town of susville (long story), and we loved them to bits.

however.

as you might be able to tell, this sniffer smells A LITTLE WHITE SOMETHING in a nearby player’s hand. this, my dear friends, is crack cocaine. and our sniffers liked to sniff it very, very much.

you can blame maxine, pictured above, for enabling what was essentially a crippling cocaine addiction.

despite their obvious... issues, we still loved our sniffers. they were our children.

so you can imagine our shock when we received news that our beloved, drug-addicted babies… were in fact, so drugged up, that any offspring they created would immediately crash the entire server.

the sniffers were killed within minutes.

our babies.

our beautiful, cocaine-loving babies.

they were no longer with us.

a funeral ensued. “Cocaine Addict #1” and “Cocaine Addict #2” were buried where they had hatched - inside of the glass dome we called the DRUG RING.

many were invited to attend to pay their respects.

tears were shed.

so many tears.

life would never truly be the same.

this all happened within the span of a few hours and it was seriously like the wildest thing ever

[pandawonder]

Dear Reader,

If your dad is still here with you, Give him a hug when you see this. Because a day will come and you'd realise that no amount of time you got to spend with him was ever enough. Even worse, when you didn't spend any quality time with him.

***

I love you dad. I miss you. It's been 5 terrible years without you. If you can, say something to me. I am lost.

[lostchild02]

Somedays I just get this really bad urge, I mean it's good tho nothing bad about it but, yk I feel like cutting off social media completely for months straight and then drown myself into the world of Knowledge, like reading novels that lay on my shelf unread, watching shows that I want to, writing poems, thoughts anything in my journal, painting anything I want to, reading articles about history, geopolitics like serious knowledge gain, reading about different poets and authors lives what pursued them to write that daunting piece of art, working out, going for early morning walks in the fields, watching the sunsets at my house from the top of the hill with a book and coffee to go, listening to songs, dancing to them, meeting friends, playing outdoor sports like in childhood, sitting by the river, talking and laughing your hearts out, going for treks where there is no signal, making new recipes, just making real, lively, happy memories and not glued to your screens, it's pathetic that I wrote all this in my phone and not in my journal.

I mean i hope you get the whole point ??? I want to LIVE LIFE, NOT JUST DREAM OF IT. <3

[apocketfullofpoem]

[wholesoul20]

reinvent yourself. so much so that when they meet you again, they need to re-know you!

~hustle is a culture

[praphull-ki-diary]

बहुत तेज़ हवा चल रही है। कई दिनों बाद मेरे चेहरे पर मुझे ठंड महसूस हो रही है। पिछले कुछ दिनों से बहुत गर्मी थी। शरीर एकदम झुलस चुका था गर्मी के मारे। न जाने कितने बोतल पानी के गटकने के बाद भी संतोष नहीं होता था। बारिश होना गर्मी में जन्नत के समान है। मगर बारिश भी नहीं हो रही। बस हवा है। ऐसी गर्मी में सफर करना मुश्किल है। मगर ज़िंदगी सर्दी गर्मी के लिए कहाँ रुकती। एग्जाम्स तो और नहीं रुकते। अब सोचता हूँ बेकार इतने फॉर्म्स भर दिए। ख़ैर।

रात को सर दर्द करता रहता है। शायद अधिक सोचने के कारण। बीमार रहना मुझे एकदम पसंद नहीं। मगर बीमारी टालना अपने हाथ में नहीं। कुछ भी अपने हाथ में नहीं। जीवन ऐसा ही है। कभी कभी विज्ञान से भरोसा उठने लगता है और उन बातों पर यकीन होने लगता है जिसे मैं हंसकर टाल दिया करता था। लोग कहते है व्रत करने से भगवान हम सबका ख्याल रखते है। मगर माँ को भूखे देखना एकदम अच्छा नहीं लगता। मेरे लिए तो व्रत करने के भी कोई फायदे नहीं।

छत पर हवा सुंदर है। आसमान में तारे बहुत कम है। न जाने कहाँ छिप गए है सब। सिर घुमाने पर चाँद दिखा। रात बहुत शांत होती है। काश दिन भी ऐसा होता। दिन बहुत शोर भरा होता है। शोर मुझे नहीं पसंद। शांति मेरी सबसे प्रिय चीज़ है। और रात में शांति है। रात ने कभी मुझे नहीं रोका सच होने से। सच—जैसा मैं हूँ। दिन मुझे नकाब में रखता है। हँसना सीखना पड़ता है दिन में जीने के लिए। और कुछ सीखने में बहुत मेहनत है। जब खुद को बदलने की बात हो तब मैं आलसी हूँ। बचपन में रात से डर लगता था। क्योंकि दिन में कोई फ़िक्र नहीं थी नक़ाब लगा कर घूमने की। मगर अब दिन और रात के मायने बदल चुके है।

एक दिन जीवन सही होगा मगर सही करने में जीवन लगेगा। न जाने ये कितना सही होगा। ज़िंदगी लगाना ज़िंदगी के लिए। ख़ैर सब लगाते है मैं कोई पहला नहीं। जीवन को जीने के बहुत तरीके हो सकते थे मगर हम इंसानों ने एक अजीब सा तरीका चुना है। और बदलाव लाना मेरे बस की बात नहीं।।।

—praphull

[pyaariposting]

tumhari mohabbat ne kuch bura nahin kiya mera,

to accha chorha bhi kahan hai?

teri dosti ne kuch cheena nahi mera,

to aitbaar chorha bhi kahan hai?

sab kehte hain tum badal gyi 'mizan"

to aapne pehle jaisa chorha bhi kahan hai?

~ me

[bloodintoink-blog]

ugly poems

I reread my poem until they turn ugly

Till the metaphors don't make sense nomore Till the personifications aren't interesting anymore Till the similes get old Till the rhymes bore Till I can't bear to read them anymore

—𝓓, (unedited from) Cacography

[ceramicteapot]

i went to a children's park today. nothing has made me feel sadder in quite a while now. it's like i can sense the loss, more like, the lack, of a childhood in my own life as i watched the children.

i was nothing like them. they're loud. they laugh. they have friends. they have mothers who wipe their tears and patient fathers who teach them how to ride a bike. i had none of that.

i was quiet as a tree, blending into the background like dirt. no one waited on me. i was barely ever picked up. i never learned how to ride a bicycle.

where's my compensation for any of that? how do i get my childhood back? how do i heal from any of what happened which wasn't even my fault? how do i tolerate the person i have become?

it's never easy watching others be happy when you just feel so sorry for yourself. and how do you stop that? i genuinely want to not feel the pang of pain in my chest when this happens. i want to be utterly happy for others too.

[whiskeyeah]

I wonder who will replace me when I am gone.

[igrewheartbones]

“The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.”

— Mikko Harvey, from "For M," Foundry (no. 9, September 2018)

[pandawonder]

I respect the sun’s unwillingness to be looked at. I want to be that useful and beautiful. But left alone.