whatsarasaid

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nothing is worse than software that tells people when I’m online or when I read their message or when I’m typing something. I always want to be as unknowable in my silence as god

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"you will look for themes and motifs in media that isn't worth the effort" i will look for themes and motifs in the dirt. on the ground.

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i love you dude. let it rip.

prints + merch + commission info

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@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

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scavengers reign be like "here's a pretty shot. here's a funky creature. here's the most nauseating body horror known to man. here's a character going through unimaginable amounts of pathos. here's another funky creature"

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This show is rotating in my mind eternally it's just so good and like everything I love about scifi.

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Frank Bidart, “To the Dead”, Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016

[Text ID: “The love I’ve known is the love of two people staring

not at each other, but in the same direction.”]

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not being in any of the same fandoms as your mutuals but being excited for/with them when something happens within said fandoms

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9 People to Get to Know Better

Tagged by the always lovely @lordbhreanna.

1. Three ships: In general, you can just say the word 'partners' and my ears will perk up like a German shepherd who's just heard a slice of American cheese crinkle open, but here are three that my AO3 history says I've read in the past six months.

(Answers below the cut because this got long).

Jyn Erso/Cassian Andor (Star Wars): War refugees finding purpose in self-sacrifice to higher ideals. Brief comfort in each other while facing the horrors. Reading into the unsaid. This one is funny because it's had a lot of longevity for me although it's never lived in the hyperfixation category. The only time I like Star Wars is when it leaves the Jedi hocus-pocus and nostalgia references behind, which means Rogue One and Andor are my personal pinnacle of SW.

Simon "Ghost" Riley/John "Soap" MacTavish (COD): Similar to above, although the military propaganda bois here have less nobility in their cause. You know, it's that— “You want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself […] to be shipwrecked together, [to] perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him — to die in his arms, like a Spartan, kissed once on the lips […] or just run his errands in the meanwhile. You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.” (Stoppard, The Invention of Love) Safe to say, my definition of romance includes camaraderie, devotion, banter, and gritted teeth. Also, the pro of one-dimensional video game characters is that fic writers can fill in the blanks with whatever they want, and this ship has some crazy-talented authors who flesh them out excessively well.

Peter Parker/Wade Wilson (Marvel Comics/Sony): This is my lazily-popping-Ritz crackers-into-my-mouth ship, although I'm very fussy with which fics I read from it. It's wild and irreverent and dysfunctional, but the heart wants what it wants, and sometimes, it wants the sassy vigilante who's experienced a lifetime of grief to get caught in tête-à-têtes with an unfiltered mercenary who can't die.

2. First ever ship: Probably Zelda/Link (Legend of Zelda). Ocarina of Time told me to go rescue the princess, and my kid-self went, "Yeah, let's go get my girl. We're in love, bb."

3. Last song: Vampire Empire by Big Thief.

4. Last film: Poor Things. A willful and visually extravagant satire that made me cry once, flinch constantly, and laugh scornfully throughout. It fearlessly addressed the many ways men attempt to control women in general and their sexuality in particular. It felt like watching a novel, which is difficult to do, and the triumphant ending was a nice reward.

5. Currently reading: The Self Under Siege by Firestone, Firestone, and Catlett and Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Both are excellent and have tight, elegant writing styles that uphold their even better— although very different—content. I picked up This is How You Lose the Time War by El-Mohtar and Gladstone from the library recently, too. Why yes, that is too many books to be reading at once, thanks for noticing.

6. Currently watching: Nothing at the moment. The last thing I watched was season two of The Bear.

7. Currently consuming: Black coffee.

8. Currently craving: BBQ pork buns and guava curd doughnuts from the long-closed Asian-Portuguese fusion bakery that used to be a couple of blocks from me. RIP RIP RIP. Craving never to be slaked.

Tagging: @her-satanic-majesty @primewritessmut @periodically-puzzled @elenafisher-wong and, of course, anyone who wants to participate and make it nine for me. Tell me what you're into these days.

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every girl wants to get in a vehicle and flip 3-6 switches overhead in the process of turning it on

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critic considers siren song kitschy and derivative, saving the entire ship

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bilf (book i'd like to finish)

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hi sara! have you played re4r/separate ways? i really really really love your take on aeon, and would love to hear what you think about the new aeon characterization if you've played the game! hope you're doing well!

Whoa. This ask gave me a huge wave of nostalgia for when this blog was mostly multi-paragraph analyses of videogame characters posted at 1 am. I miss that.

I've played RE4R up through Chapter 3, and so naturally, haven't picked up Separate Ways. Why haven't I finished it? Well, for one I'm still knee-deep in LoZ: Tears of the Kingdom, also known as the game that never ends, it goes on and on, my friend (at least for semi-completionists like me). But mostly, Resident Evil has stopped scratching The Itch, and Leon and Ada are included in that. No longer makes brain go brrrr; no longer makes noggin hum like microwave. Every time I see some drop dead gorgeous Aeon art, I go, "Maybe...?" and then nothing happens.

If I get through the game and DLC and have thoughts that are worth furiously clacking out on a keyboard, then I'll definitely post them here. In the meantime, thank you. I still get comments on my old fics (some of which I still need to reply to, nobody look at me) telling me my take is their favorite or that it altered their perspective, and I'm always very teary-eyed-emoji when I hear things like that.

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earlier today i told an acquaintance in passing that i'll often be in the middle of a novel and think "man i wish this shit were more ambiguous" and had to reiterate twice that i wasn't being sarcastic before they believed me, so this post is to say: i love when writers don't bother to explain everything, i love when stories end uncertain and unsettling, i love being required to think as a reader, i love when stuff makes no damn sense, no i'm not kidding

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fic tag game

Rules: Make a new post and post your latest/most recent line from your WIP and tag as many people as there are words. Tagged by @eri-223.

From Nem, Re: "Do you still do this sort of thing?"

One of these days, the stars will align and I'll get back into fic writing (I have a feeling those stars will be called Death Stranding 2). Role-play currently satisfies all of the scribble urges. The collaboration is more appealing to me, too. It turns writing into two children violently knocking Barbies together while pruning in a mud puddle out back, and that's energy I struggle to find when writing solo. I think I also like facilitating ideas more than creating them. Always an angel, never a god—when it comes to writing, at least.

Anyway, here's the most recent last line I wrote from a role-play reply:

He moons over the cookies and cake, making some polite-haha joke about how you won’t find these in MREs.

The rules are made up and the points don't matter, so only tagging @visualheresy (I have a fic of yours languishing in an open tab, begging to be read, and I'm excited to sink my teeth in here soon), @tallmatcha (one day we'll share a fandom again <3, I have hope), and @primewritessmut.

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Cue me just rattling a cup, asking for any morsel from any media we've ever overlapped on ever. <3

(<3 I am tempted to dig around for something new to say about the Former, but also to write Death Stranding fic for the first time.) Later, when Fragile tried to remember moments of peace, she grabbed on to one in particular: a short timefall storm. 

She and Sam had recently met. The world through the curtain of rain was gray and blue and cold, orange lichen dappling rocks. It was beautiful and fecund, loud with water and chiralium, almost more so because she didn’t think the man beside her was beautiful at all. In their travels an unspoken, fraternal sense of safety had stolen over her business partnership with Sam. The ease didn’t help her forget her guilt after Middle Knot City, not exactly, but it made the guilt feel distant. Distorted the timeframe like the new rain. 

Her aged fingers curled dry and stiff around the handle of her umbrella. The physical discomfort was harder for her to ignore than the old mental scars. And she admitted she had sad standards to be grateful Sam didn’t comment on her restlessness, her stiff movements, her body at all. Higgs had done that to her, too — lowered her standards for the world.

But they lived in a low world. Higgs had been right about that. Fragile wouldn’t charge herself a toll for feeling safe for a moment.