and at the end of the day, people will still hate women.

because beyonce is a terrible songwriter who has a good body and nothing more and she's really nothing compared to olivia rodrigo, that stuck-up bitch who steals other people's music, but taylor swift is an old, bitter nothing who clearly hates other girls. and sabrina carpenter deserves to die because she followed her heart, not her brain, and that's exactly why zendaya will never be good enough for tom holland. don't forget about kylie jenner, who's stealing precious timothee's innocence away and dating her is like committing arthouse cinema suicide, or how we said the same thing about miley cyrus and her disgusting profanity, think of the children, poor liam hemsworth, trapped in a marriage with such a horrible woman. lana del rey was hot until she was big and she made trailerpark sexy until her ass got a little too fat. and ariana grande, talentless homewrecker, and selena gomez, jealous and unreasonable, and hailey bieber, even more boring than the blood drying on the knives you are so quick to pull. sophie turner is a bad mom and megan thee stallion deserved whatever was coming to her.

and amidst all of this, we still don't know these women. we cannot fathom the pain of having a public divorce, one where people choose sides and hurl insults at you until the battery on their phone dies. we don't watch them chase after sweet-cheeked children in tucked-away backyards or play board games with their best friends while their chests heave in laughter. we don't know their marriages and we don't know their solitudes. we don't watch them unravel themselves, time and time again, preparing for the battle that we have made of their lives. they can never make a mistake. they can never cry. they can never be who they believe themselves to be.

and we take all of this and we go to work, we ride the bus, we go grocery shopping, we walk in dappled sunlight, and we let ourselves shrivel. i compare myself to every body i see and i comfort in the fact that i can still encircle my wrists with my fingers. food turns to dust in my mouth when i think about the fact that taylor swift thinks she's fat and people still hate sabrina carpenter for sticking by joshua bassett's side when he almost died, for God's sake, and now the people on my twitter feed are saying GUTS is the worst album they've ever heard. i liked it, the tiny voice in my head cries out. she wrote songs that made me feel noticed. they're calling the song i relate to the most a total skip.

so i close the app. i try not to think about the endless profiles screaming about how much they hate a nineteen/thirty-two/thirty-eight/twenty-three/twenty-six/forty-two year old. i try not to think about how much they would hate me, if they knew anything at all.

she says he won't let her get a dog, which is fine, because they're in an apartment, and that's the kind of thing people say about their partners. he won't let me get a dog. and you're at a dinner party and you tilt your head a little to the side just like that dog he won't let her get, because is this the thing that's going to upset you? you don't know every corner of their relationship, she could be joking, they could have had so many healthy conversations about the dog, right, and maybe she's not letting herself get the dog because of money and time and whatever. but, like, she did say let

and she wants to move away from his hometown and he wants to stay and then he tells you with a wink and a conspiratorial stage whisper don't worry i'll convince her and she laughs about it - so clearly this is something they laugh about. but you do just stand there and stare at him like what the fuck, man. you can't say what you want to say which is why do you get the final say on everything because they're both obviously aware of the other person's stance on this and have obviously had private conversations about it and what are you going to do about it except make a scene and then he'll be mad at you and call you one of those bitches behind your back and she'll cut you off, which is a loss that doesn't feel worth it just because he makes you a little skeeved out every 3rd comment

and they both agree he just isn't the type to get flowers which is fine because everyone shows love differently, and are you really gonna judge someone based on their sense of individual relationship responsibility? maybe he's constantly cleaning her car and writing her poems and making her furniture or something. maybe she doesn't even like flowers and this is perfect, actually. and no you couldn't date him, obviously, ew; but like, she tells you she's happy. you almost send her a tiktok that says don't be 25 and the cool girl that doesn't need anything, you'll hate not getting flowers at 30, but that's like, starting drama & you shouldn't start drama needlessly.

and you're a little older than her but not so much older you can pull the whole trust me on this one babe thing and besides that wouldn't have worked anyway (when does it ever) and besides you have trauma so you and your therapist both agree that you're always looking for a problem even when there isn't one. and you tell yourself that just because you see them for 15 minutes every month does not mean you can identify every single red flag based on a single shitty half-joking(?) comment

and besides, what are you going to do? she says i actually wanted another stand mixer but thankfully he stops me when i'm about to spend too much money and you're standing there like are you okay? is this normal? is this just something people say? and again - what are you going to do?

to your therapist you try to language it - it's not, like, any of my business. but sometimes, doesn't it feel like - you should do something. there's got to be something, right? you've tried dropping little hints but they sail right through and you've tried having a single serious conversation and she got upset because why does it matter to you, yes it's different but we're happy, it doesn't need to make sense to you and you're like. really unwilling to push a boundary about it anymore; because the truth is that you know logically it shouldn't matter to you, as long as both parties are happy.

and besides, you've been wrong before. it's just... like, every time you see them both, something else happens, some kind of shiver down your spine like do you even hear each other when you talk. it's their strange, bickering orbit. just the way he's on his phone through dinner or watching sports instead of helping in the kitchen or, fuck, another one of these little throwaway comments he makes about we'll see about that, babe. she laughs when he calls her passions stupid shit and meanwhile she gets him tickets to see the knicks and he tells you well at least she's smart about something and still! it's none of your business.

you say get the dog anyway and she laughs. like, this is is you being funny. and not you saying - no really. get the dog. get the dog and get out of here. pack up and start running.

Her parents had come home with Phantom, captured and beaten in a cage. They'd taken him down to the basement, preparing to do a few hours of tests before really ripping into him to look at his insides.

With shaking hands, Jazz dialed, the call jumping around several different signals to get around the media blackout.

"Justice League hotline, what's your emergency?"

She swallowed. "My parents have kidnapped a meta kid and they're planning on experimenting on him. They're holding him down in our basement and I can't get him out."

horrible children who are. so so mean to each other

Athena Cykes!!

whenever Andrew or Neil are talking about Kevin to the other they refer to him as "your boytoy"

And then you get into a queerplatonic relationship with a person who's same-assigned-gender-at-birth as you and some peeps respond with homophobia because winning is overrated... But at least it's a response ig

you romanticize the theatre rehearsal– you love the idea of bloodied shakespeare traded from desperate palm to desperate palm, you dream of the sweat dripping from a dancer's brow like the sun glinting off the sea, but in between all of this imaginary want, you miss the whole point.

you miss the clutter of foldable tables holding laptops and open scripts and the rind of an orange, four empty water bottles and six uncapped pens. two rings of keys and one folded up piece of my notebook paper that represents a letter prop. you miss our running document of silly things people have said in the heat of the moment and you miss the hundred clarifying questions that are asked. you miss the hunger in everyone's eyes, the want, the need, the lust. the unspoken something between my eyes and the boy i love to make laugh– you miss the way he's like that with everyone who has the pleasure to come him across, and i can't bring myself to particularly mind.

and you know what? you do miss the bone-chilling scream of a man who's eyes are ripp'd from his traitor skull (the vocal-conscious yell of a grad actor with voice and speech tomorrow morning), the sharp lines drawn between two bodies moving against the grain of a tango. you miss the magic that settles in-between the creased brow of a determined designer and you miss the silent cheering folded behind a heavy black curtain when the tricky scene change goes exactly as we put it to paper. you miss it. you miss everything, when you aren't here.

but tonight, i'm here, and i'll explain exactly what it all means. i hike my skirt up above my calves and i swiftly collect the rehearsal props littered around the room; someone yells "I'm not a fucking liar!" and we're supposed to be running King Lear. the animosity from blind father to vengeful son never bleeds into our equity 10-minute breaks. we all tune in, for just a moment, and we all feel the same damn thing run through our bones. it's the same, it's the same, we're the same. we to you to me to us to them to zip to zap to zop.

fireworks show 🎆

material preview version is very cute also :)

i struggled with the lighting on this one so badly, but it turned out alright in the end.

i actually started it last year for new years 2023 but never got around to finishing it, hence no progress pictures this time sadly lol. i do have a very low-res, first draft, test gif though

stills 🥳

Fit: Connecting...

Pac: Nice. Maybe it's gonna be a bit laggy since we- we are kinda like far away from each other?

Fit: Oh, no distance can keep us apart, Pac. You know this. You know this.

Pac: Wow! Wow, wow, wow! The game– wow! I'm- I'm speechless, you know? [Laughs]

If somebody in your life offers to knit or crochet or, really, create anything for you, please be an active participant in the creation of the piece they are making. I adore making and gifting things, but nothing bums me out quicker than a person who passively just goes "okay," to my ideas about what I'm making them - it can send the message that they won't like it, or that they don't care, even if they're happy about my offering. The back-and-forth feedback is a great way to make sure that you are being gifted something that was truly worth the time, effort, expertise, and money that will inevitably go into the gift!

I know it's really hard to be an active participant, believe me, I'm an anxious ball of horror, but it will only do good for both parties to interact in this situation. It is a big deal to be offered a hand-crafted gift, but it's also something we want you to love and use, and that can only happen if you tell us what would make you fall in love with what we create.

I think there's a genuine conversation to be had about how aro spaces have begun pushing QPRs in a similar way that amatonormativity pushes romantic relationships onto people but a majority of aros just refuse to engage in the discussion because they see it as an attack on QPRs or people saying QPRs are romantic relationships lite instead of actually looking at the fact it's critiquing how some Aros have begun pushing it almost like an alternative to romance and something all Aro's want.

No one is saying QPRs are bad but rather that there is too much push that the idea of a QPR will fix people's problems. "oh you're lonely? just find a QPR!" "You dont have to be in a romantic relationship you can be in a QPR!" "QPR is MORE than friendship" etc etc.

There's a genuine critique here of QPRs being used to continue to push amatonormativity by again assuming that every aro wants a partner - even if not romantic - and I think we can have a genuine conversation about this rather than going at each other throats over a fake argument of "QPRs bad"

please

i can't bear this

just a little bit longer

please

What’s funny about Jonathan’s magical girl transformation with the stark white hair is that it’s just impossible. Like, yes, we all know it is, but I hadn’t been focussing on that until now.

I was like “yeah, stress can cause early greying bc you’re no longer producing the melanin in your hair--” and then I realized like “wait, why would that change the colour of the already-grown strands as if they were fucking dead coral?” Because it’s not like if you pulled out a strand of your own hair, the colour would fade and go white.

Jonathan’s hair is alive? Dead now, alive before? Jonathan’s out here being Rapunzel from Tangled and everyone surrounding him is like “seems aight”.

It's still kind of sad how c!Dream acts pragmatic about his torture but secretly does want people to acknowledge how messed up it was and that he didn't deserve it. With c!Sapnap, c!Tommy and c!Foolish, he brings it up to achieve certain goals and then drops it quickly once that doesn't work or the goal has been achieved. But then with c!Sam, he insists that he didn't deserve to get tortured and that it is evil and wrong to torture others or to allow it to happen. And then there's c!Punz who talks quite emotionally to c!Purpled about how the torture was not okay (so you can imagine what he said when Dream told him). As much as Dream tries to leverage his torture, I do think he desperately wants to hear others say that it shouldn't have happened, that not even he deserved to go through that.