anybody else wrecked by the fact that they get to be alive at the same time as dan and phil

is anyone else here both a neonnova and cuttletavio shipper?

ARE YOU SEEING THIS. IT'S THE SAME SHIP BUT WITH CEPHALOPODS.

brutal love is a good ass opener to an album and it never fails to rip my soul to pieces with every listen

i lied, i can't stop thinking about this. disclaimer that i don't know aaaanyyyyythiiiiiing about shakespeare, i am just an idiot with feelings and a blog. hamlet makes sense to me most completely as a play about death. all the tragedies end in death, but hamlet begins in death - not just the aftermath of the murder, but the literal apparition of a ghost haunting elsinore (ghosts being, of course, one form of undeath). even before the revelation of the extent of claudius's betrayal, hamlet cannot forgive his uncle for assuming the throne, nor can he forgive his mother - a woman whose permissible paths in life all end in her marrying a man in power - for forgetting his father so easily. he cannot accept his father's death as a thing to be mourned and moved on from. it is an unassimilable catastrophe in his life. when he speaks of his father he describes him in larger than life terms: he gives him the attributes of gods and conquerors, figures out of myth or out of history so distant and so grand it has become legend. he accepts the duty of revenge laid on him by the ghost, but then spends most of the rest of the play pretending to act like a crazy person to hide the fact that he's running around like a crazy person and staging plays about pretend fratricide and killing the wrong person instead of just stabbing his stupid uncle once and for all. and the thing is i think this works whether you think the ghost is real or not or somewhere in between: to me his actions look like the actions of someone who very badly doesn't want something to be true. he doesn't really want to avenge his murdering incestuous uncle, because if he does - if the ghost was real, if the ghost was right, if hamlet closes the story - that means his father is really dead. and if his father is really dead, then anyone could die. even him. which is fucked up for hamlet, because he is very afraid of death. that's the payoff of the to be or not to be speech: life's a bitch, but death is worse - death must be worse, because why else would anyone ever choose to stay alive? if death itself is not to be feared, why would anyone avoid its embrace to linger in this world where your uncle can marry your mother after killing your father and you just have to live with that, forever - you just have to carry that always, even if you get your vengeance, even if you take him out. you take claudius out, your father's still gone. it's hard to imagine anything could be worse than that, but death must be, or else there would be no reason to survive it. the rejection of death and the rejection of life go hand in hand. you can't face death so you go around pretending to be mad and staging plays about pretend fratricides and you drive your girlfriend insane and your uncle is still out here getting away with it.

and then he meets up with his bro in the graveyard where they're getting ready to bury his dead girlfriend, who would maybe be alive if hamlet had just decided to be normal, and he sees all these bodies that once were people, and thinks about all the stuff they had that is nothing now. he sees the skull of someone he knew, someone who was alive and is properly gone, not a ghost but a memory; he touches death, really sees it, for the first time. he thinks about the fact that alexander, who was a king & a conqueror, a figure out of legend, also died; that in death he became dust, became earth, became maybe a fucking bottle-stop because that's what the living do with the earth. alexander, and caesar too, men like his father. men who were kings, conquerors, almost like gods, and now nothing, which is to say, in the end they were men like any other man. you can rule the world and you'll still wind up in the same place as poor yorick, a fucking jester. and hamlet is not handling this well, because this is not a play about a person who handles things well; it's a tragedy. it's a tragedy and the best that can be hoped for is that, once hamlet has looked death literally in its fleshless face, finally it becomes real to him; finally he can hide no more, and he drops his bullshit long enough to set in motion the chain of events leading to his destiny, which is both to avenge his father and to die, because his father's death and his own death were always one and the same: it was always just the end of the world that looked untouchable. it was always too late for hamlet, once his father was gone. but it feels significant, to me, that when he thinks about alexander becoming dust, becoming earth, becoming loam, he takes it to the place of becoming something people use. the one who ruled returns to serve. alexander who wept because he owned all the world belongs to humanity again. he separated himself from the world but the world always takes us back. and the other thing about the graveyard scene is: it's ophelia's grave they're digging, ophelia who was ruined by grief as a result of hamlet's carelessness, his refusal to look squarely on at what he was doing. that's the other way that death becomes real to him: his cognitive dissonance has a body count now. it was always too late for hamlet, maybe, but it didn't have to be too late for ophelia. that was something he did. refusing to accept the fundamental truth of your own humanity comes with a cost other people have to pay.

uh. so i feel like it's obvious why i have been ruminating on hamlet on this, Dracula To Dust Day, but either to make myself sound slightly less insane or at the risk of really proving i've lost it: this is what the count did, right? he was a warlord, a conqueror; he was alexander who said i will not be dust, i will not return to the earth. i will not become matter which belongs to the soil, which can be harvested for human activity. instead i will take - and it's possible this wasn't exactly a choice; the book is ambiguous about how dracula became patient zero for vampirism, how much the feral hunger of other vampires is something he shares versus something he is able to control; it's possible that all he ever wanted was not to die, and he didn't know until he was lost exactly what that would require or what it would make him - but by the time we meet him, his un-life is: instead i will take the lives of others, to steal more life for myself. it makes him immortal, or almost; it makes him fearsome, powerful; and it makes him very alone. the book never gives a reason for why he lets jonathan live in his castle as long as he does; maybe stoker couldn't come up with a justification but knew he needed that arc, to set the stakes (pun not intended) of the horror properly. but you can read loneliness into it, for sure: his monstrous habits have severed him from human contact such that the best option remaining is to play with his food. which gives some extra weight, i think, to how much bram stoker's dracula (1897) really and truly is a story about how the real stake through the heart is the friends we made along the way. our heroes can't command the weather or the wolves; they can't fly, or shape shift, or turn to mist, or paralyze their enemies with their sight. and it's very clear, i think, in the book, that one person with all the garlic & communion wafers in the world couldn't take dracula down - it has to be a team effort. that's their superpower: not vampire allergens or van helsing's knowledge or quincey's guns or arthur's gold, but literally and quite simply the fact that they can work together. that they can communicate, that they can be in a small and strange community. that they can forge alliances, because they can be allies. which they can do because they're human. which dracula cannot do - i mean, if he had been able to tell one dude "pull this boat up over here" it would have been a whole different ballgame - because he is not.

which also, i mean, okay, in my heart quincey morris who has never in his life done anything but be perfect makes a miraculous recovery and lives to tell the tale of this and all his other globe-trotting gun-slinging horse-riding adventures - but this is also why someone does have to die, in the end of this particular book. this is why we can't have our heroes all face down the horror and come out unscathed. it would be cheating, a little bit. not always, but this time. at the end of a book about the unfathomable horror of a creature who lives by the theft of blood, you do kind of need the mathematical balance of a hero who dies in giving the gift of blood. i guess also maybe in a christian gothic horror novel you as a nineteenth century protestant need someone to wind up on the cross (was i too harsh on the kenneth branaugh hamlet all those years ago? - no, i don't think i was) - and wow, it's crazy to me that in six months of reading a book about loving god and drinking blood i've never once stopped to meditate on the transmutational overtones of this situation, but what are quincey's last words if not a variation on "this is my blood, which is given for you"? spilling on the snow so that mina can be redeemed. this is, like, no one ever accused nineteenth century protestant novelists of being subtle, god bless their tender hearts. but, but, okay and - and points were made, i think, beyond the god-architecture of it all. points like: a life given is a life lived. a life ungiven, a life hoarded, a life spent in a castle on a hill, a life spent in a box viewing the world as the means to your unending end - is a life unlived. is an unlife. is a living death, and therefore a horror. and points like: dracula lived, half-lived, refused to die, for centuries, alone; quincey made it, what, not even thirty years - a handful of trips around the sun, by comparison, but he didn't spend those years alone, and he didn't die alone, either. in fact he died in pursuing the act that would disintegrate the forces that had been drawing mina away from the world: she notes in her narration she can cross the holy circle to go to him, and thus she can be with him in his final moment because of what he did. his death is a suturing, a great reconnection, because he died for how much he values life. (which is a lot, i mean, of all of them, he had the least cause to be there. he got wind that some weird shit was going down with his crush and his bros and he was all in.) because it goes the other way too, about how rejecting death is rejecting life: if you love life, like really love it, you're too busy living to worry much about dying. i mean, i wouldn't really know, i think about death all the fucking time, obviously, which is why i am not a laconic cowboy but a deranged blogger forever spitting nonsense into my metaphorical phonograph. but it's nice to consider, as something to aspire to. that maybe the goal is becoming the kind of person too preoccupied with navigating the eastern snows by an old friend en route to fight evil itself for the soul of a a woman i met a month ago to have much room to worry about much else. to be too busy living life to ruminate on its end.

in conclusion: wow i really can't believe that one of the most enduring and popular novels of the past century in a half is like good actually and contains themes and ideas that speak to readers generation beyond its author's death. please congratulate me on not quoting either t. s. eliot or rilo kiley in this post which i definitely almost did.

theatre life is not real. i have an audition next week for a black swan musical written by dave molloy. and i have to just be normal about that

Becoming increasingly aware how much experiencing utena at age 15 might have helped keep me tf away from creepy older men whew

Someone sneezed like 20 ft away from me and I jumped #mihashi core

“if I draw the cover for a fic I want to write, it’ll encourage me to write it!” really shot yourself in the foot with that one there bud

                    @perditos   /    cont from. ↷

❝ It’s not really about a cat; it’s an early human analogy for... something in quantum mechanics... Wait, Garrus, do you know what  cats are? ❞

mara becomes the patron god of particle accelerators because ultimately they are about smashing things open to see what’s inside. destruction for a constructive purpose

Feelin’ like a friggin’ audio engineer over here, adding highpass filters and de-essers and EQ effects and a compressor

I honestly don’t get how some people can just...speak into their mic and not have any problems?? I’m starting to think my voice is especially tricky??

Me having to tell my friends that I didn't sleep last night because of the episode ignis soundtrack again

Danny runs for Mayor

Simple Prompt: Danny runs for the Gotham Mayor position

Extended Prompt: Danny is an absolute little shit throughout his entire campaign but still manages to win because he is legitimately one of the best candidates around

Just imagine the crack that could come from this!

Reporter: What is your stance on Vigilantism? Danny: Well I agree that Vigilantes are helpful for the communities that need them, and they should work with the police at every opportunity, I feel like the idea will always be a city where Vigilantes are not needed. Also I fail to see the relevancy of the question, there are no vigilantes in Gotham Reporter: What do you mean? What about the Bat-Family? Danny: No, Batman isn’t a Vigilante. Batman is a Crime Lord.

Or

Danny: As mayor, I promise that I will not be infected by corruption. Not because of my moral standings, but because I absolutely fucking hate clowns and I will never accept a bribe as long as that guy is still alive. Yes this is me putting a hit out on the Joker. Crime Bosses, if you want to try and bribe me, you gotta kill him first or I won’t even consider it!

Or

Batman: Why is a Meta-Human running for Gotham Office? You know this city doesn’t have a very good track record with people like you. Even the Signal had a rough start. Danny: Well, I just had a strong compulsion to help this city reach the peak of it’s potential *looks over Batman’s shoulder to see Lady Gotham holding up Cue Cards telling him what to say. She promised to help with his paperwork for the next 50 years if he became Mayor and helped fix her city* Danny: Such a strong compulsion...

Or

Penguin: Look kid, I don’t care if you have enough power to destroy me at the subatomic level, I have enough money to ruin you, your sister, your parents, even your uncle! Danny: Oh really? I could get the souls of every person you have ever killed to get confessions out of them. Or I could give them the power to rip you apart. Or I could even just possess you and donate all your money to charity.

Or

Danny: Oh god dammit! Vlad: Hello Badger! Glad to see you followed in my footsteps instead of your fathers! Danny: This wasn’t because of you! Lady Gotham asked for help! Vlad: A WIN IS A WIN!

hi guys I survived watching the ofmd s2 premier but I am a fundamentally changed person on a subatomic level how are the rest of y'all faring