excuse me while i cry myself to sleep.

hehrhe... WHAT

Picture this, you're in grade 7 and you and the colossal dick that's the other functioning member of the debate team get volun-told to emcee the school talent show. You have a brief, extremely petty squabble over who gets to hold the mic and then the curtains move and you guys go on stage and do your job.

Now picture the look on my face when a girl I reconnected with from middle school informs me the mic was on the whole time and the whole school listened in on us having a bitch fit about who's hands were less clammy and who was taller before we acted like the consummate little professionals we were and fucking joyously introduced a Michael Jackson impersonator.

it's been a couple days but you asked why jeffcest was a tag already. may i direct you to look at the youtube thumbnail of jeff saturs music video "ghost". that was the third video of his where he had sexual tension with himself. good for him. it kicked off a jeffcest fandom

WHAT.

Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei Dei

I AM HAVIN A MAJOR LIFE CRISIS RIGHT NOW

I just learned there are

ONLY 5 CHAPTERS LEFT OF TOKYO REVENGERS

Dei please save me

I am not ready

EXCUSE ME-

no. you are lying to me, and no, there is still at least 200 chapters, for sure/j

i am not accepting this. nope.

nah.

5???? pft more like 50

no

4000 posts!

Wow!!!!

Woooww!!!!!

Woooooow!!!!!!!

Wooooooooow!!!!!!!

Hey, did you know that the Nairn company used to run a regular bus service from Baghdad to Cairo, starting in the 1920s, that could actually beat the plane for speed? Among the problems the buses encountered were attacks by tribes who knew they were carrying gold, lava roads that wrecked the cars to hell and back, and temperatures so hot the tires sometimes caught fire. Fun fact! https://martintristramrose.org/2016/09/24/running-to-catch-the-bus-1/

A h-heartfelt reunion..?

Bonus

Phee is a quiet crier

thats a red flag narinder, get that crown back while you still can

+ top panel without text below the cut

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

IT WAS ERIC AFTER ALL!!!! I'm so glad we got to meet him (before Vil snaps him away with those Infinity Gauntlets) (can't wait to see what happens when we get the matching Infinity Tiara to go with them, there will be no survivors)

(sorry to be so slow/rough lately, just got a lot of stuff on the ol' brain at the moment! alas, if only I could spend all my time drawing incredibly stupid characters I mean I do but)

i'm sorry but i cannot stop thinking about it for reallll imagine you're richer than god and never had to face consequences for anything and you have so much money you don't even know what to do with it so you toss a quarter million at the stupidest tourism option on earth. and you see that the paper you have to sign tells you you could die and you look at the flimsy metal tube you're going to be plummeting into the ocean in and it doesn't even phase you because bad things don't happen to people like you. imagine some hours into the journey you realise something is wrong. maybe not you but somehow the knowledge that there was a fuckup becomes known to the 5 of you trapped in there. and you know you can't get out from the inside and you know you have no food and no bathroom and not even the room to ever stand up again. when does the realisation that your wealth cannot protect you from your inevitable mortality set in. how does someone like that reconcile with both death and the fact that it's 100% their own doing? can someone like this even come to terms with that or will they be fighting to find someone to blame until the last second? when does it reach you that all 5 of you are going to die one by one and there's nothing you can do? does the fact that 5 of you have enough air until thursday but one of you could have enough air until at least next week ever cross anyone's mind.

leverage is so fucking funny. man manages to find the most mentally ill and neurodivergent group of thieves on the market + an even more mentally ill guy whose literal job description was trying to chase all of them, and forces them into a found family speed-run by trying to blow them all up. they lowkey stage a full fucking country wide coup and are like eh 🤷 just another wednesday. this might be a fun place to vacation tho i guess. sophie shows up to her own funeral twice. they're so good at convincing people of their shit that they make a guy's body start reacting to an illness he doesn't have because it isn't real. go completely out on a limb and basically hand this one guy a new password for his computer so they can get into it and he goes with it. parker and hardison have straight up just "fake it 'till you make it"d into the fbi without even attempting to cover their tracks beyond just These Two Guys. half their clients never asked to be their clients and don't know they're their clients, and the other half are random people who find them who fuckin knows how, meanwhile no government agency can track them down without selling their soul to sterling. they make a point to have a dramatic scene w a Big Bad Shadowy Government Guy who doesn't actually get caught or brought to justice or anything telling them he's going to hunt them all down, and in any other show this would probably earn at least a minor arc later on but he literally never shows up again. an entire season finale hinged on a cake and a bunch of clams. they accidentally made eliot a celebrity not once, not twice, but three times. parker blew up her foster parents' house when she was like. nine. and it's hardly a footnote. hardison is just casually an artistic prodigy but it's only ever brought up for the most background of background gags. eliot's biggest beef with parker and hardison for like two and a half seasons is that they won't stop making weird food with lasers and refuse to realize they can't make a decent beer to save their lives. sophie's immediate response to being shot is to call her shooter a wanker. there's a character who has literally killed a man with a mop and they had the audacity to only put her in one episode.

finally at that age where i'm thinking i should get a tattoo. not bc i feel strongly about it, just seems like a waste not to. i've got so much skin i'm not using