So I love House because it's one of the only shows I've ever seen that acknowledges how hard life can be while also having fun with it all the way down. He makes Wilson a fun video in the c word, like seriously.

And the inherent complex morality of how screwed up the characters are. Like how they deliberately hurt others, or accidentally do, and how all of those motives are not always but often the same motives that drive them to do their kindest acts. How hard it is to show up and how fear and pain make us act out. How showing up and connecting is the key

Something something bad and good are not opposites something something reasons to live & fun in the darkness something something fear of death, fear of being alone & fear of being in pain vs. the euphoria of knowing & loving & experiencing

it's just so human

I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker.

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圣人有情而无累

dihua + 情 | 莲花楼 mysterious lotus casebook

he's everything, and he's just apollo <3

whoops i asked in the wrong place. would you be willing to do a request of the vargas boys in a SAW trap? thank you in advance <3

Day 2 - Was it not obvious enough

I've been thinking a lot about art and why it doesn't feel good anymore, and a lot of what I keep coming back to is a) simply not being happy with my style, but b) not feeling comfortable experimenting because I feel like I need things to be """post worthy""" 🙄 so like... it's kind of a vicious cycle lmao so I'm heeding the advice I used to give people trying to overcome perfectionism which was "don't worry about making things that are 'good enough' to post and just post everything."

So... some vague style experimenting 🤷‍♂️ and also a sketch of Ilya from forever ago that I really liked but kept thinking I would come back and do more with.

tagged by @mxmorel :D

Rules: Pick a bunch of your WIPs and summarize them as badly as possible, then ask your followers to vote on which one they’d be most likely to read. Multiple/all/none options are completely optional.

Tagging anyone who wants to participate!! I can't currently remember who has multiple active WIPs :D

Im happy that Link got to have a home he can be proud of, even if it was a cage v_v

These poor boys theyre trying their best... This downtime in the plot is making me more anxious of whats to come. I Love it.

and here I thought everyone would be relieved and excited to see a greatest hit compilation of the Chain having fun and bonding

That reminds me. I had a lot of ideas I couldn't get to. One of them was Legend making it his goal to "crack" Spirit and figure out what his whole goal was. He and Warriors were going to have a bit where Legend schemes and Warriors tiredly begs him to stop.

Of course, Legend's plans were never going to work. This would all cumulate in a scene where Legend realizes that he read Spirit all wrong, and that Spirit at his core was a working man who did not give a shit about being a hero.

So he sic Hyrule on him.

The Chain was going to be passing through a village when Hyrule would grab Spirit's arm and declare that they had to go drinking together. Spirit would be too shy to agree, but nonetheless get dragged away.

Cut to the end of the night when they return: Hyrule drunk out of his mind, being carried back by a peeved Spirit.

At that point, Legend would give up.

I didn't write this for obvious reasons lol

xiaolumi late-night brainrot because i feel like writing an entire essay about how much i love the way xiao and lumine look at each other.

the thing is... the both of them aren't the type of person to talk a lot - especially not about their feelings - but even if they stay quiet, their eyes say everything.

the quick stolen glances; because lumine just can't focus on the conversation with the others when xiao is right next to her. the way longing stares; when his eyes burn the expanse of her skin as soon as she talks with someone else again.

it's quite obvious how they feel because of that. but i think, while xiao might feel like lumine watches him a lot since she's not hiding it well - or more like, she's not doing it at all - he's the one who does it more often and longer, nevertheless. it's easy to stop caring about the passing time when the sight in front of him is so breathtaking. the mere glance of her golden hair shining in the warm sunlight, white dress fluttering when the wind grows stronger, her soft skin and flushed cheeks... it all stirs odd emotions deep within him.

he can't quite name them - is it longing? fondness? desire? - yet he can feel them take over his consciousness and make him want to call out her name, reach out to her hand and pull her into his arms so close that their chests brush with every shaky inhale. his fingers are shaking at the thought, itching to brush hair off her face and watch her look up at him.

xiao thinks it should scare him a little. how easy it would be to see right through him in that moment.

all of the thick walls of cold and aloofness he's been building around himself for long years would dissapear the second lumine's eyes - wide and shining with that golden color that's so familiar yet so hypnotizing - meet his. somehow, he can't look away even if he tried.

the longer he stares, the more he notices how open lumine is with him as well. close up she looks.. so innocent. so delicate, breakable. like she's just a young girl who has hopelessly fallen in love with a boy and now she's scared he might find out; but she's not good at hiding her feelings and pretending everything's just perfectly fine when he's around, and her heartbeat for sure doesn't race at all.

when his eyes fall onto her lips - it is just an instinct, one that xiao can't control even if he tried - he watches suck in a breath. she swallow, painfully aware of his burning gaze lingering on there longer than necessary. long enough for her to lose her mind, just a little bit. long enough for her thoughts to stray somewhere to the places he doesn't know about. the look on her face - cheeks flushed, eyes gleaming with a different kind of affection he has never seen before, the quick rise and fall if her chest - tells him that he might have an inkling of what she can be thinking about. it might be something similar to his own thoughts, ones that spread through his veins like the sweetest kind of venom. they're deadly, urging him to act upon his desires although he knows he can't. not if he wants lumine to be safe.

but it's so, so tempting...

it kills him a little.

xiao tries to pretend it's fine but something wraps around his heart when she's around. grips tightly on it as if to make him dig his claws into his chest. bury them there and take out his beating heart. offer it to her.

it belongs to her, anyway. he might deny it but the truth remains all the same.

he's nothing if not hers.

a part of him wonders if lumine can see it now. how badly he craves her, in every way possible. how sickening this yearning inside him is, simmering just beneath the indifferent expression he usually puts on like a ghost of his darkest desires.

even if lumine can't see it though, xiao is sure she can feel his heartbeat against her chest and knows. there's no way to escape this overwhelming love.

Lady Boy Friend Is Getting Interesting (at ep 7/16)

Nobody should take this as an endorsement to watch the show, because I think it is really hard to watch for most people and for good reason (it's also hard for me to watch at points). But Lady Boy Friend the Series is doing some really interesting things, and I have to talk about it. It took several episodes before I could get the sense of the overarching plot but now that I do understand what it's doing I'm really curious about where it's going. Spoilers for plot points through to ep7 follow from here.

The core plot of this show is about a class of high school students. The main character is Jeedny, who shows up on the first day of what I think would be equivalent to North American high school (~Grade 10) out of the closet as kathoey, but all of the other kids who are kathoey don't trust her because they've all been out for years and already have their own cliques. So they treat her cattily (they also treat each other cattily, to be fair), and she responds badly by pranking them. She starts desperately grabbing for attention; first by trying to fit in, and when she's rejected, she tries for attention by standing out, and it's not taken well by her peers. Finally in this episode it got to a point where the other kathoeys in her grade have banded together across clique lines to ostracize Jeedny, and it all comes to a head when she finally admits that she's been shitty to them but that it was in response to being rejected in the first place. Everyone apologizes to her but says they'll just stay out of her business, and she's left alone again which is the opposite of what she wanted.

Meanwhile the boys in the class have their own drama. There is a playboy (Jet) who starts flirting with another boy (New) who is cautious but enjoying the attention. It takes a few episodes of concerted flirting to get through that Jet is seriously interested and not just teasing him, and New starts to believe that maybe this could be real. They have sex, and then Jet ghosts New. When New tries to confront him, Jet acts totally disinterested and says he's just not into him like that. New is heartbroken and Jet is clearly discomforted by that; when New starts emotionally distancing himself from Jet and showing disinterest, that discomforts Jet even more. Jet keeps trying to get New's attention back but New's not having it, and he calls Jet out on his bullshit. Jet's own friends also call him out on how his actions differ from his words and how he seems to be leading people on, both New and the girls he dates, and how uncool that is. Jet seems to be unable to leave New alone.

I appreciate that this series is wrestling with in-fighting, cliques, how difficult it can be to get past queer gatekeeping, and how we band together against what we see as a threat. I also love how it's getting in how isolating that can feel if you're on the other side of it, and how difficult it is to come at your queerness at a different age than your peers (even though Jeedny is still so young!). I love that this show has a plotline around "straight" fuckboys and the very real games they play. I appreciate that in the conflict between the kathoey characters, nobody is in the right.

We're only just about halfway through the series, and I still don't have a a sense of what the back half of the show is going to be about (it could all still fall apart), but for now, now that the first half has crystallized into a plot I'm enjoying it. Even when these characters are being awful to one another it feels very familiar and...comforting, in a way. Sometimes I miss being in queer spaces and need to hear people insult one another for five minutes and then offer to throw hands at any outsiders who so much as look at the person they were just insulting with their whole chest.

So why am I not shouting for people to go give this show a try? There is a lot of Thai humour (more specifically the brand of Thai humour that reminds me of older series like Make it Right and Diary of Tootsies) in this show that doesn't necessarily land well, because it's based in puns which just don't translate, fatphobia, colourism, toilet humour, sexual aggression against men as comedy, etc. There are parts that I find hard to watch, and parts that I find boring. There are some scenes that I just don't know what to do with, e.g. when one of the boys is asked to provide a sperm sample for their science class to look at under a microscope. The acting is very uneven, quality of the cinematography, colour grading, sound, and other production elements are low budget. The translation is also lacking, which makes watching all that much harder.

A lot of the comments on MDL are about how this show feels transphobic and I can see why they'd say that, especially in the early episodes. The kathoey characters can come across like caricatures rather than people, especially at first (some of this I chalk up to these characters being young and trying to establish their identities; this does also improve as the show goes on), and the joke seems to consistently be that none of them are attractive or likeable to the male characters (possibly also improving as the show goes on, we'll see). There are many ways in which it's not a good show. It is about the ways we can be terrible to each other even as it's also about how we can hold each other up, which is understandably not something people necessarily want to watch. I really struggled at first, and even as it's become more clear what the show is doing, there hasn't yet been enough of a turn to get fully away from the parts that are difficult, and I'm not expecting the show to ever fully stop being difficult for me at times (it would be unrealistic to expect this show to become something completely different from what it is).

But even with all of that, I'm tentatively excited by the themes it's exploring and wanted to share.

currently drawing/painting kristen painting gorgug as their downtime hanging out failed relaxation roll but i can't decide what the funniest pose for gorgug would be

what is the general consensus around interacting with OCs that don't yet have a MASSIVELY fleshed-out bio but a general one? 🤔

i can't remember when I've been this happy 🥹

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Searching for very specific book recs again because people on goodreads can't read:

Looking for a book like Contact by Carl Sagan, realistic science fiction about alien contact that's subtle with no big wars or battles or alternate histories or dystopian futures or greys or such, more of a focus on the characters, on people and their reactions, and doesn't stray too far from actual science, set preferably mostly on Earth in an unchanged present day/or within the past 30-50 years/maybe next 10 years at most, more on the scale of wow, this could really actually happen like now or something like that. Preferably NOT YA. 

Alternatively:

Also searching for a sci-fi book (again NOT YA) where I can get overly attached to a funky little scientist man. In the sense that I am currently projecting all my love on Newton Geiszler from Pacific Rim right now when I didn't even have particularly strong feelings for the movie itself.