“Smart Tartan” fashion spread from Sassy, August 1988.

edit: THIS POST BREACHED THE CONTAINMENT OF THE TARGET AUDIENCE, "28-YEAR-OLDS WHO SAW THEIR FIRST ANIMES IN PIECES ON YOUTUBE DURING THEIR TEENAGE YEARS." PEOPLE WHO WATCHED SAILOR MOON WHILE SIPPING APPLEY JUICE IN PRESCHOOL I'M SORRY I GUESS THIS ONE ISN'T FOR YOU

Some Stargate text posts I made a while ago and forgot about :)

remember that time that spock said “this is about sex” but he couldn’t say sex so instead he said “biology” and kirk clearly knew what he meant but was awkwardly like “what kind of biology” and spock got this look on his face like ‘oh lordy i’m not dealing with this today’ and said “vulcan biology” and kirk can’t say the word sex either so he goes “u mean the biology of vulcans” and then they stood there in silence for ten seconds like a pair of fucking idiots

Dusk on the Gunflint Trail

Superior National Forest, taken February 2024

3,312..... it's um. gotten away from me a little 🙃🤓

honestly, the swan imitation Scully must have been doing to maintain her role as Mulder's scientific examination system across almost every field (chemistry, genetics, medicine, physics, meteorology, psychology, ecology etc etc)..... it's exhausting to contemplate! 😂

they both must have been subscribed to a ridiculously wide and strange variety of academic and scientific journals -- though when they found time to read them I have no idea. All the plane rides, I suppose, and the long nights in motels.

d'you think they just kept a big communal stack of periodicals in a briefcase and rock-paper-scissors'd or something to figure out who got to read which things first? d'you think there was a 'spoilers' moratorium until they'd both read most things and then they discussed them? or was it more a free for all with reading excerpts out or shoving an article in the other one's face and saying 'here, read this and tell me if i'm right in thinking this guy's an idiot' or what have you?

you ever have a headache so bad that you decide to fly into a pulsar? relatable 🤣

finally finished this wip that has taken my soul from me 🫡

but here is my beautiful wife if anyone looks at her i will blow this whole place up

I just have a lot of strong feelings about argument and seeking specificity as loving acts of Devotion and methods of appreciation. As actions of trust and offers of vulnerability. As a way to share in something. To be honest. Because of reasons.

Which is why I find it so important to see Mulder and Scully as dwelling in that space of conversation from a shared place of. If not positive belief, then Open Heartedness. Not with him inside it and her outside scoffing but both of them together, using different methods but looking in the same direction.

I agree that it doesn't mean that Scully is automatically wrong, though she can be.

Imo the way the story works, though, is that Mulder is Always Right (for given values of dramatic variance), in the universal schema of the X Files, and what's more Scully believes that he's right from like, season 2 if not when she held an alien fetus in her hand in Erlenmeyer Flask. Right in the broadly stated substance of things if not the details. She just also knows it's her role in The Work and Mulder's professional relationship with her (ie her perception of her value to him) to advocate for the Platonic Ideal Of Science, and argue with him through the details until they figure out the details of what specifically is going on in each case. There are signs from very early on that she does Believe, she just doesn't allow herself to talk about without quantification to back her up because [complicated personal and professional fear based reason that would be its own meta post if i got into it lol].

But like, she wouldn't have followed him after that first relentless year if she hadn't believed in him and wanted broadly to share in and understand his beliefs. Imo, anyway. To be honest a big stave of the X Files narrative/the MSR relationship is a Visionary + (accidental) Disciple structure. Which i think speaks to why it's not a 'rivals' with 'competing points of view' structure, as is the case in many of the relationships to which MSR is often compared.

okay here's an x-files argument. it's fair to say mulder is always right, because that's the way the writers talked about it. (source: frank spotnitz gave a talk at my office in 2015 and said the writers realized early on that mulder always had to be right and scully had to be wrong because the alternative was too depressing.) it was a guiding principle of the show. sure you could "well actually" every declarative statement about the x-files to the point where it's impossible to see the big picture, but then you're losing the way the contradictions bump into the big picture and make the show feel alive. it's the spirit of the thing. people aren't reading brian phillips' "in the dark" enough anymore

house md is compelling because it presents a version of sherlock holmes that 1. lives in new jersey 2. is really into monster trucks and 3. says things like "party time" and "who da man? i da man"

vampires have been drinking human blood for centuries they don't give a fuck about guys on eight different antidepressants. they were sucking on asbestos factory workers

i feel like people are too hard on Mulder for not cutting diana off/telling Diana off For Scully's Sake in s6. This is the woman he had a 4 or 5 year serious, compulsive but extremely unhealthy relationship with, who emotionally neglected him, manipulated him and consistently gaslit him. She was also physically and emotionally similar to his mother, who also neglected, emotionally manipulated him and gaslit him. He was seemingly aware enough to realize that it wasn't a personally positive experience for him overall, but he had to shoulder some of the blame and believe that her [Diana's and Teena's] intentions were good even if they ended up in a bad place, because otherwise his sense of self + self worth + his image of his reality would be dangerously undermined. He's afraid of falling into a pit he can't climb out of where foundational people in his life only used him for what they could get out of him because he's too broken and gullible to be worth anything else to anyone. He has to stay open and keep extending his hand to Diana and viewing her attention as a potential positive because then what they had was a relationship that went bad when he went off the rails too much, and not a trap she engineered (with or without the Syndicate's prodding).

Oh, she was catty and dismissive and nasty to Scully? She hurt her feelings on purpose? Yeah, that's bad and genuinely it hurt badly to see Scully so sad and upset and angry. But the idea that Mulder needs to get mad and get even with Diana 'on Scully's behalf' above everything has always struck me as a little off base.

That's a person who isolated and manipulated him and tried to warp him into seeing her approval as the metric of his self worth, either because his vulnerability and ascendant genius appealed to her independently, or at the urging of Mulder's biological father if she was already involved with the Syndicate (and potentially even armed by CSM with a profile of Teena to mimic). (I headcanon that she wore a similar perfume to his mother, either by design or by coincidence.) And imo Diana stringing him along and making her care for him into a transaction in service of her comfort, adoration by him, and their career advancement, and then dropping him when he started to struggle visibly with his trauma and developed unappealing interests, that's actually worse than if the Syndicate sent her after him from the start.

So I guess I think that Mulder should be allowed to be angry with Diana on his own behalf, or be allowed to choose to let it go, or to investigate that experience of abuse or not for himself on his own timeline regardless of what would make a cathartic outburst.

Some people just aren't able to form or maintain hate for their abusers, either because they still have positive-conflicted feelings for that person or because of self defense mechanisms that they haven't yet and might never unpack. Mulder is shown to be one of those people from the very earliest days, i think.