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neil-gaiman · 8 days

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Hi Neil.

I know you are flooded with asks and this somehow became extremely long. Too long. “Why am I suddenly telling this poor man my life story?” too long. “I think I’d rather he work on the GO3 script than read this wild beast” too long. “He’s going to think you’re criminally dangerously insane” too long. If you never get to it, I’m good with never seeing a response from you. Maybe it’s better that way? Maybe an anon would have been nice here. But, it’s 2024, so I say “we ball.” It’s a privilege to be able to send this to you at all. You get a lot to this effect and I hope they give you good feels, so maybe what’s the harm, yeah? Because this is not an ask. This is a thank you letter.

First, thanks for reblogging my therapist post, I hope it amused you. I nearly sent you “How am i supposed to explain this to my therapist?!” But refrained. At that time.

So, therapy. What is therapy really? Well…

Things have been really rotten for as long as I can remember. Bad health, bad doctors, bad relationships, bad coping mechanisms, bad all kinds of things. (Yeah, bad is a weak and unhelpful word, my therapist reminds me, but we’re doing this.)

Well, things got even more really really rotten and BAD these last few years. Health declined further, coping mechanisms declined further and more intensely, packed up my life, applied for disability, moved back in with my parents across the country.

Then 4 years ago last week I watched my fiance die of a sudden heart attack. I was 29. Two years later my best friend died. Then last summer I sauntered vaguely into a cancer scare. Not long before an operation my cat who has been my companion through so much garbage died as well. I’m not entirely in the clear on the cancer scare front. All my attempts at going back to work, volunteering, going to grad school - they collapsed on me because I couldn’t get through this STUFF.

(Sometimes when I talk about this, when I tell people, I think “they are going to think you are a raging pathological liar.” Because I’m not sure I would believe someone if they told me all of this happened to them. In such a short time period. All before they were 35. And hell if that hasn’t been isolating. You know how it sounds? Lonely. And it is.)

I did the hypervigilant and sensation/experience chasing stage of PTSD. It got me in a lot of trouble in all kinds of ways. I had to do a lot of medical and psych advocating because things kept getting worse. That was exhausting. Then that peaked. I went into the thick of the “I feel absolutely nothing” stage for a long time. I didn’t feel fatigue or hunger or thirst. Not people, feelings, a reason. Not hope.

But of course, like seems be for a lot of us, I somehow found Good Omens at just the right time. I was a very “I’m so cool and intellectual I mostly consume non-fiction media” person for too long. Like, what? How is that even a real thing? And it wasn’t real. It was just part of this curated autism mask that I don’t think anyone really bought anyway.

I think I got to a point where I’d just had too much reality. I needed fantasy. I didn’t realize I always needed it. But I denied myself for too many odd and painful reasons. Maybe I thought it was an escape I didn’t deserve.

But as it turns out, it wasn’t an escape. I watched both seasons last fall, and then this light came on. I watched it again and again.

I came to tumblr because I needed more. I found this fandom. I stepped into this beautiful world of fanart and fanfiction and brain flexing meta writing and a sense of community and wonder that you and Terry created - that everyone involved in the show inflated - exploded in the right way - like fireworks if fireworks were some kind of autocatalytic reaction - a self perpetuating force.

It’s not a “saved my life” feeling. Not a “getting my life back” feeling. It’s been a “maybe it’s time for you to have the life you’ve always been denied - that you’ve denied yourself” feeling.

I’m creating. I’m not “great” yet. Not terribly “good” at all. Maybe “behind” as far as the “proper” timeline for starting. I know there isn’t one, not really, but boy does that society machine make ya feel like there is. And sure, I started and stopped a lot in the past. But the second it got hard I always gave up. I felt like if I didn’t get it “right” to begin with, then I just didn’t have it in me at all. But for once I’m really in it. I’m writing and trying to draw things that look less like fever dream five year old drawings. (Not that there’s anything wrong with those, is there? 🙃) I’m eating better. I’m sleeping better. I reach out to old friends more. I’ve made new friends who share this love of Good Omens.

My therapist has been floored by the change in me. After that first funny mini flop, he has been so encouraging about it. I saw him this week and I said “Maybe this is helping me get prepared to start living again. Maybe it’s a springboard.” And he honest to god said “But You ARE living. This is YOU LIVING. Why does it have to be a springboard? Why do you have to turn this into ‘work?’ Just let yourself have this for once in your life.”

But there were two more added elements that made it all work. And I can’t help but think this whole brainrot thing wouldn’t have happened without them. So many things just happened all at just the right time - a proper coincidence.

In all of the madness of the last few years I finally got the memo that I'm autistic. i figured I was for a while. But it finally sunk in for me and my docs and my people. So I’d been working on unpacking that. Grieving the life that could have been entirely different, shedding the mask. I let myself hyperfixate openly instead of hiding it and hating myself for “spiralling” or “obsessing” like others -!like ‘I’ always punished myself for before we knew that it was a trait and not a personality flaw.

Then over the last few months my therapist and I started trying this new exercise. One session he stopped me and said “in the last 20 minutes you have responded to what I’ve said with 9 ‘I knows.’” My response to that? “Ugh, I know.” So we started this “I know” swear jar type situation. Really, I’ve been afraid of not knowing. I couldn’t let myself “not know.” Because it meant I was “dumb.” I was just drowning for so long in guilt and self loathing for the “I knew better and screwed up anyway.” Or “I should’ve known better - I should know that by now.”

As it turns out, there’s a lot of things I don’t know. That I didn’t know. Things I will never know. And refusing to admit all of that kept me from learning a damn thing. Kept me from asking questions. Kept me from trying new things because it was scary to do something new - something unknown - and I "knew" how it would all turn out anyway. Kept me from connecting with people because it was painful or embarrassing when they knew things I didn’t and it seemed like I already should have. Kept me from getting better at making art, music, writing. Kept me from forgiving myself. Kept me from growing. And kept me from moving forward. Maybe not on. I don’t know if we ever “move on” from things. But we can move forward as we carry them. And as we do, the weight gets less. We’re able to carry it better. But only if we can admit that we don’t know how. Only if we don’t treat ourselves like this is something we do know or should know and we’re just failing because we’re less than. Not good enough. Not strong enough. Not deserving. We have to be able to say “I don’t know how to do this.” And then we can start looking for the answers. We can ask. We can learn.

I thought about the apple. Being able to tell the difference between good and evil. Aziraphale’s years and years of watching what he “knows” to be true be proven wrong. Crowley’s need to ask questions…

The simple and enormous gift of “Knowledge.” The “Knowledge” of the difference between Good and Evil. The “Knowledge” that can only be gained by realizing, accepting, admitting that there are things we don’t know. Asking the questions. Sometimes we get answers we don’t like. Sometimes the consequences of asking hurt us. And unless you want to stay in that painful place that painful knowledge got you, well, you’ve got to let yourself learn how to get out.

So all of this good? I never expected this. I never thought I deserved it. Joy and belonging and this sense that “Yeah, maybe things can get better. Maybe things can be good.” Because I said those things, not truly believing them, to the people I thought needed to hear it. But it couldn’t save them. It was hollow. The proof for us wasn’t really in our orbit or on our radar at the time. And now they’re gone.

People always say “it’s never too late.”

One of the people I lost said “it’s later than you think.”

I jokingly would respond “it’s already too late.”

It was for him in the end. For them. For some people I guess it really is. But maybe a lot of the “too late” people are there because they think “they know” that things will never be good for them. So they stop looking, they stop asking, stop finding. And eventually they just stop.

Then there came Crowley’s “It’s always too late.” The first time I heard it I thought “For sure, Crowley-cakes, I KNOW.”

But then…I just needed to rewatch the whole thing. And lines like that…familiar things…familiar themes…I was suddenly identifying with these characters. I suddenly saw myself. And the realization hit - I connected with something! Something new. And I FELT THAT. And that tiny little crack that made in the wall was just enough to start breaking it down. Yeah, when you start letting yourself feel after not feeling for so long, opening up to the good feelings means opening up to feelings and then the bad ones come out too. But when there IS good … it helps you balance. You can deal with the bad a little better because you’ve got the good thing to lean against when it gets too much. And now you’ve got feelings. You’ve got good and bad. You’ve got sticky foggy grey. You’ve got life.

Whew.

So, TLDR, thank you. From the bottom of my slowly healing heart, thank you.

And to sign off with some shits and giggles… I couldn’t find this in existence as a sticker so I had to custom order. Perhaps this will spread misery and panic among the humans of my city - or at least a malignant and creepy sense of unease.

Or maybe they’ll say “wtf” and go home and google it and they’ll fall into the Good Omens hole they never knew they needed too.

Thank you for this. I never quite know what to say to messages like this apart from I am really glad that it helps. (It becomes the weird extra piece that I worry about when writing season 3 -- hoping that it will be that thing again. Not just a story, but something that helps people feel and helps with healing and helps with love.)

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formulafics · 6 months

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★ MINI…ER LANDO: PT. 2 | LN4

scenario: a continuation of the first mini…er lando fic, in which he and his wife reveal her pregnancy.

pairing: lando norris x wife!reader

a/n: dad lando is growing on me 😭 not that i didn’t like it to begin with, but i wasn’t crazy about it. i hope all of the dad lando lovers enjoy! do we want a third part with actual dad lando rather than just pregnancy stuff?

PART THREE

requests are open for smau’s! | check pinned for more info

ynnorris

liked by carlossainz55, landonorris, danielricciardo, charles_leclerc, georgerussel63, carmenmundt, and 234,512 others

ynnorris baby norris is a girl 🩷 thank you to everyone who came to the baby shower. i love you guys so much!

view all 2,365 comments

nandoland asked for charles and got carlos…i’ll take it

⤷ ynnorris my apologies - charles was crying and i thought i’d save him the embarrassment @/charles_leclerc

⤷ charles_leclerc i appreciate that you didn’t take a picture but this is equally as bad 🤣

landonorris carlos picture before me? 🤨

⤷ ynnorris he got that jar open it only seemed appropriate

carmenmundt thank you for inviting me and george! i had such a good time and i’m so happy for you and lando 🫶🏻 can’t wait to meet her

⤷ ynnorris of course! don’t tell george, i don’t want to inflate his ego too much, but his gift made me weep after everyone left

⤷ georgerussel63 awe i’m happy that you like it ❤️ no ego inflated don’t worry

⤷ ynnorris that’s a lie from hell and you know it but thank you george

danielricciardo baby norris is already one of my favorite humans, just like her mom

⤷ landonorris what about me?

⤷ danielricciardo eh…

lando.jpg

liked by ynnorris, danielricciardo, alex_albon, charles_leclerc, lilymhe, lewishamilton, and 426,321 others

lando.jpg reporting from the hospital - baby norris is on her way 🫡

danielricciardo i am on the way tell yn to hold it

⤷ ynnorris HOLD IT???

⤷ rizzciardo LMFAO HELP i live for yn daniel interactions theyre so funny

charles_leclerc CALL ME WHEN I CAN COME VISIT and let me know if you need anything

carmenmundt ahh!! i’m so excited for you both. george and i are always here if you need anything

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bitchesgetriches · 1 year

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Fundamentals of investing:

What’s the REAL Rate of Return on the Stock Market?

Do NOT Make This Disastrous Beginner Mistake With Your Retirement Funds

The Dark Magic of Financial Horcruxes: How and Why to Diversify Your Assets

Dafuq Is Interest? And How Does It Work for the Forces of Darkness?

Booms, Busts, Bubbles, and Beanie Babies: How Economic Cycles Work

When Money in the Bank Is a Bad Thing: Understanding Inflation and Depreciation

Investing Deathmatch series:

Investing Deathmatch: Managed Funds vs. Index Funds

Investing Deathmatch: Traditional IRA vs. Roth IRA

Investing Deathmatch: Investing in the Stock Market vs. Just… Not

Investing Deathmatch: Stocks vs. Bonds

Investing Deathmatch: Timing the Market vs. Time IN the Market

Investing Deathmatch: Paying off Debt vs. Investing in the Stock Market

Now that we’ve covered the basics, are you ready to invest but don’t know where to begin? We recommend starting small with micro-investing through our partner Acorns. They’ll round up your purchases to the nearest dollar and invest the change in a nicely diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, and ETFs. Easy as eating pancakes:

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Alternative investments:

Bullshit Reasons Not to Buy a House: Refuted

Investing in Cryptocurrency is Bad and Stupid

So I Got Chickens, Part 1: Return on Investment

Twelve Reasons Senior Pets Are an Awesome Investment

How To Save for Retirement When You Make Less Than $30,000 a Year

Understanding the stock market:

Ask the Bitches Pandemic Lightning Round: “Did Congress Really Give $1.5 Trillion to Wall Street?”

Season 3, Episode 2: “I Inherited Money. Should I Pay Off Debt, Invest It, or Blow It All on a Car?”

Money Is Fake and GameStop Is King: What Happened When Reddit and a Meme Stock Tanked Hedge Funds

Season 3, Episode 7: “I’m Finished With the Basic Shit. What Are the Advanced Financial Steps That Only Rich People Know?”

Retirement plans:

Dafuq Is a Retirement Plan and Why Do You Need One?

Procrastinating on Opening a Retirement Account? Here’s 3 Ways That’ll Fuck You Over

How to Painlessly Run the Gauntlet of a 401k Rollover

Ask the Bitches: “Can I Quit With Unvested Funds? Or Am I Walking Away From Too Much Money?”

Workplace Benefits and Other Cool Side Effects of Employment

You Need to Talk to Your Parents About Their Retirement Plan

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Recessions:

Season 1, Episode 12: “Should I Believe the Fear-Mongering about Another Recession?”

There’s a Storm a’Comin’: What We Know About the Next Recession

Ask the Bitches: How Do I Prepare for a Recession?

A Brief History of the 2008 Crash and Recession: We Were All So Fucked

Ask the Bitches Pandemic Lightning Round: “Is This the Right Time To Start Investing?”

#investing #stock market #investing for beginners

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celaenaeiln · 8 months

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Batman Issue #137 is fantastic

It's written so well it feels like a literary masterpiece, and I'm truly in awe of how well it's done. The parallelism, the character development and deterioration, the logic, the emotion, the art-all of it is spectacularly written. Like the people who wrote this issue must be some kind of geniuses to condens nearly a century of dc comic writing to come up with this. I highly, highly suggest everyone go read it because this is the most accurate representation of the members to date.

I know what I said is a contentious opinion but I think we need to step back from the issue and evaluate it from a "who is batman" perspective.

Batman at his core is a selfish human being. He created the identity because he wanted vengeance for the murder of his family, not because he particularly wanted to save the world. It's this desire that led him into a world of crime fighting because he refused to be the same as the person holding the gun.

Batman 137 is the peak depiction of Batman as an uncontrollable force of nature and what I love about this comic is they nailed him to a T. The batfamily's perception of Bruce are so accurate.

Dick and Barbara are exactly on the dot. He is out of control but also he's doing this to be in control.

Canonically, Bruce has a god complex.

And I know I shouldn't quote wiki but I like the way they worded their response:

"A god complex is an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility. The person is also highly dogmatic in their views, meaning the person speaks of their personal opinions as though they were unquestionably correct."

That is the core of who Bruce is.

Every action Bruce takes, he believes it is the best action. He is confident in his ability and he ensures his successes through planning and training. I believe in Dick and Barbara's points combined-Bruce is going out of control in order to be in control. He feels what he has done is not enough and thus is doing everything he can to correct that issue. To him, his personal opinions are unquestionably correct because he has analyzed every possible route to proceed in and has come to the one he believes is best.

This man was never meant to be a lovely family man which is precisely why Robin is so important to batman. Him hugging his kids, saying he's sorry, praising them-that's him on his very best days where everything is going his way. It's him on days where he's reaching into the past. It's him on days where he's tired and broken done. But that's not who he is at his worst.

And this issue is the downward cascade of his mental state.

At his worst, Bruce is the type of person who beats his kids for not following his rules:

He beats them for not obeying his orders:

He punishes them by endangering their loved ones:

He hurts them for not follow his rules and purposefully sets up tasks for them to fail for the purpose of them failing:

But

But even though he's done horrible things, he's not a bad person. he does it because he believes he's working in the city's best interest. And Jason understands this so well.

The reason why Selina calls Jason Batman's biggest failure is not because he's actually a failure but because he's the clearest proof of everything wrong with Bruce's God Complex.

Where Jason sees leniency, Bruce sees fault.

That's what makes their relationship so amazing. Bruce and Jason will never see eye to eye because their fundamental beliefs are different. It's a teetering relationship because they love each other but they can never accept each other and that delicate balance makes them so exciting (yeah sorry I love fcked up relationships).

Tim is on the fence

Before I can explain Tim's interaction, I need to drop Dick's, Cass's, Stephanie's and Duke's too

Okay back to Tim. Notice the extent of Bruce's reaction to each of the batfamily's views. Jason's view is the farthest from Bruce's and as a result he received the harshest punishment. Tim's view is grey and in response, Bruce's answer was grey too - a warning but not a damnation. Dick, Cass, Stephanie, and Duke's view on the issue was silence. They express no stand on the Selina vs Bruce's debate of criminals and as a result they receive an answer fitting of that.

The writers characterized each member of the family so, so, SO well. Everyone's perspective and character was on point and it didn't degrade any of their abilities, strengths, emotions, beliefs, or anything.

Furthermore, the family stands as one.

Dick checks in on Jason's mental health and makes sure he's feeling okay. Tim stops Bruce from killing Jason or hurting him too badly. The rest of the family shows up in time to protect the both of them and each other. Jason and Dick work together to bring Bruce down. When all of them talk on the batfamily channel, everyone gets an equal chance to speak including Steph. Which is a rarity.

The family dynamic is accurate.

Tim would look to Dick as the defacto leader for answers when Bruce is gone just like he did in every single other comic.

Damian would 100000% punch Jason in the face. He electrocuted him before, tried to kick him out, and attacked him before- he's not suddenly going to have reservations now.

Jason and Selina would absolutely work together the most and best because of their shared values and understanding of Gotham.

No one in this issue is irrational or out of character. Everything is so exact about this comic I'm over the moon by it! Sure it's not a "let's hug it out, guys!" issue but when has that ever made it bad? It's exciting, fun, meaningful, and logical and I love Bruce Wayne so incredibly much for it. I love the way he thinks, the way he acts, and what he believes.

If I were to characterize in a nutshell, I'd say issues 136 and 137 are all you need. The authors who created this - so much praise to them. They've capture each character as well as the family dynamic perfectly.

I can't speak much of Damian's intentions and behavior as of now because he's just entered the scene but I'm excitedly looking forward to the next issue.

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hunterscabin · 1 year

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The Lighthouse Part II

Summary: A hunt takes a turn for the worse, and Sam and Dean fight to keep you alive.

Pairings: Dean x Reader; Sam x Reader

Warnings: Angst; drowning; language; resuscitation; whump

Word Count: 2.2K

Author’s Note: I used Regina Femrite’s painting “Beam Of Hope” as inspiration for the setting. Comments and feedback are always appreciated! I hope you enjoy!

The Lighthouse Part I

Dean carried you to dry sand and sat down. He placed you in front of him, your back nestled in his chest. He wrapped two strong arms around you, balling one hand and grabbing it with the other. Expertly, he thrust his fist inward and upward. Water began to drain from your mouth. Sam fell to the sand in front of you and placed a gentle hand on your forehead to help keep you upright. Once Dean was satisfied that he’d expelled as much water from your lungs as he could, he cradled your head and laid you down.

Dean placed a calloused hand on your forehead and used two fingers to lift your chin. Despite ridding your lungs of water, you still were not breathing.

“Come on, kiddo,” Dean pleaded as he pinched your nose and sealed his mouth around yours, inflating your lungs. Sam grabbed your wrist praying to feel your heartbeat. It was faint and slowing, but detectable.

“Pulse?” Dean looked to his brother, dreading the answer. Sam nodded “yes,” still trying to catch his breath.

The urgency Sam felt turned to utter panic as he watched Dean continue to force air into your broken body. Your soaking wet clothes clung to your small frame. Your lips were an impossible shade of blue and your skin a deathly gray.

Dean wrapped his lips around yours, this time blowing more forcefully. “Breathe for me, Y/N/N,” he cried out between breaths, “Please, breathe.” Dean had barely registered the lightheaded feeling that began tugging at his senses, when his brother stirred next to him.

“Dean!” Sam’s voice was frantic. Letting go of your wrist, he reached across your body and pressed two fingers to your neck. Seconds spanned a lifetime as Sam waited for the beat of your heart to reach his touch. He could feel Dean’s air entering and leaving your body, but there was nothing else. His stomach dropped. “She doesn’t have a pulse.” Sam groaned.

Dean felt as if all of the blood drained from his body. A darkness loomed over the beach. The one thing he was supposed to protect was dying beneath him.

Dean moved to start CPR, but Sam was already hovered over you. He placed a hand in the center of your sternum, lacing the other on top. He locked his arms and began pumping your chest. After 30 compressions, he looked to Dean.

“Breathe.” Sam commanded.

Dean blew two deep breaths into you and looked back up at Sam who had already started his second round of compressions. Your delicate body rocked with each forceful push.

“Fuck,” Sam whimpered as he felt one of your ribs give way. Dean heard the crack and glanced up at his brother.

“Sammy,” Dean willed his brother to look at him. Sam’s eyes met Dean’s, defeat and exhaustion evident on his face. “You’re not hurting her, you’re saving her,” Dean assured, knowing exactly what Sam was thinking. Ever the caretaker, Dean found the words to comfort and encourage his brother even in the midst of his own fear. “You’re doing good, Sammy. Keep going.”

Sam nodded in understanding. He hung his head as he continued pressing down on your chest. “Please, Y/N/N,” Sam pleaded, “Come back."

Dean quietly joined in his brother's panic. You weren’t responding. They needed a new plan. He thought momentarily about finding a crossroad, but he knew you’d never forgive either of them for making a deal. That’s when Dean remembered.

"Sammy!” Dean’s exclamation jarred Sam’s already racing heart. “There’s an AED in Baby.” In their frantic attempts to revive you, Dean had forgotten the life-saving box that Bobby had given him “In case of an emergency.”

“What?” Sammy questioned in disbelief.

“After a bad hunt,” Dean said breathlessly, “we lost too many people that could have been saved.” Dean began to gauge the distance between him and the car. “Bobby swiped two AEDs and made me promise to keep one in Baby.”

“Take over for me,” Sam shifted, preparing to run.

“No,” Dean protested, “You have to be exhausted from swimming back with her. I’ll go.” It wasn’t the time to argue, but Dean saw the look of strain on his brother’s face and knew that running to the car and back would push him over the edge. He needed Sam to preserve whatever strength he had left; Dean couldn’t save you on his own.

Sam said nothing but agreed by finishing a cycle of compressions and leaning down to take over breathing for you. The second Sam pinched your nose and placed his mouth on yours, Dean took off. He had never run so quickly in his life. He closed the over 100-yard distance in a matter of seconds.

Despite the adrenaline coursing through him, Dean was winded when he returned. He couldn’t imagine how exhausted his brother must be. He looked at Sam who was bent over, breathing into you.

“Any change?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“Nothing.” Sam’s tone and face were flat. His entire body ached. His arms were burning, and even with the harsh wind against his wet clothes, he was sweating from the effort of keeping your heart beating. Still, he maintained a steady pace, determined to save you.

“Do you need to switch?” Dean asked as he opened the AED.

“I’ve got her.” Sam replied confidently. “Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Dean pulled the AED out of its case and turned it on. He reached down the inside pocket and pulled out a pair of medical shears.

“Don’t stop,” Dean advised as he began to cut your shirt, “I’ll work around you.” He pulled your clothing out from under his brother’s hands.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Dean muttered as he exposed your chest. Dean took off his flannel, and as soon as Sam moved to breathe for you, he used the opportunity to dry you off.

He pulled the pads from the AED and followed the instructions on the box, placing one near your right shoulder and the other on your left side. The machine prompted Sam to hold compressions and he fell back on his feet.

The machine called out for everyone to stand clear, and Dean pressed the glowing shock button. He cringed at the sight of your jerking body. Sam pressed his fingers to the side of your neck and Dean took up your wrist. Relief washed over them as they each felt your faint pulse growing stronger. Sam leaned down, placing an ear over your mouth. Dean watched as his brother’s face hardened.

“She’s still not breathing,” Sam announced with defeat. Dean positioned himself by your head to begin breathing for you again.

“You can do this, Y/N/N.” Dean muttered as he pinched your nose and sealed his mouth over yours. He glanced at your chest to make sure it rose with his breath and shuddered.

“Sammy,” Dean’s furrowed brow glanced down to your torso then back up to his brother, “cover her.”

Decency had taken a back seat to their frantic attempts to revive you, but now that your condition was less critical, both brothers were acutely aware of how exposed you were. Sam reached for Dean’s flannel and draped it over you.

Dean inflated your lungs again. This time, he felt something inside you pop, like a wet balloon becoming unstuck. He gave you one more deep breath, and as soon as he removed his mouth from yours, you began coughing up water.

“That’s my girl,” Dean encouraged as he rolled you onto your side, “Keep coughing, Y/N.”

Sam reached out and helped pull you over. He rubbed gentle strokes up and down your back as the coughing continued to rack your body. Dean kept one hand under your chin and another on your forehead to keep your airway open as your body worked to expel the remaining water in your lungs. Your coughing finally subsided and was replaced by a low, raspy wheeze.

Sam laid down on his side so that he was facing you. He lifted a hand to brush the hair away from your face, thankful to see the color returning to your cheeks. With his other hand, he grabbed yours and squeezed gently.

“Y/N?” he whispered, “Y/N, baby, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand.” It was faint, but he could feel your grip tighten ever so slightly.

“Good girl,” he sighed with relief, as he stroked your hair. “I’m right here, Y/N/N. Dean and I are right here.”

The sound of Sam’s voice stirred your senses, and you began to blink your eyes. A rush of pain coursed through your body, and you started to panic. Sam noticed your breathing become erratic and brought his face close to yours.

“Y/N, it’s okay. You’re okay, baby girl. Look at me.” Your eyes found Sam’s and immediately filled with tears.

“Hi, Y/N/N,” he breathed, his tone and face were warm with assurance. “Slow breaths in and out, okay?"

"Sammy,” you choked. Your voice was raw and your throat stung.

“I’m right here.” He leaned in and placed a firm kiss on your forehead.

A raspy sob escaped your lips. Instinctually, you began to curl your legs toward your chest for comfort, but it only intensified the pain.

“De.” you cried out. Dean’s heart swelled at the sound of his nickname. He was by your head in an instant. Sam sat up so his brother could move in. Dean crouched down so he was at eye level with you.

“I’m here, sweetheart.” Dean’s voice broke when your teary eyes met his. “We’re both right here.” Your arms feebly reached out for him. Dean slipped one hand under your head and the other under your waist. He pulled you close to him and felt how badly you were shaking.

“We need to get her out of these wet clothes.”

Sam found the medical shears in the sand and carefully cut the sleeves of your already torn shirt. He peeled the cold, wet fabric away and helped Dean slip your arms through the dry sleeves of the flannel that had been covering you. Sam wrapped the front of the shirt around your back, and Dean moved his arm to secure it in place.

“Let’s get her back to the car,” Sam urged as he unplugged the AED pads from the machine. Dean gathered the cords and lifted you with ease.

“De?” you whispered.

“Yeah, sweet girl?” he cooed, pulling you closer to him.

“S-s-o-c-c-cold.” you managed.

“I know, Y/N/N. We’re almost there,” he assured as the Impala came into view. You nuzzled your head in the crook of Dean’s neck, his familiar and comforting scent easing some of your pain.

Sam jogged ahead, opening the back door for you and Dean. He slid in and reached across to the front seat, starting the car and turning up the heat as high as it would go.

“I have a pair of sweatpants in my bag in the trunk,” Dean instructed, as he reached the car. He sat on the edge of the back seat with you in his arms and gently rocked you as he whispered soothing words in your ear.

Sam crouched in front of you with dry clothes and a blanket in hand. He pulled the shears out of the AED case and began to cut through your pants. Dean did the best he could to help maneuver you, in an effort to keep you covered. Fortunately, his large flannel enveloped you down to your knees. Still in his wet clothes, Sam was starting to shiver. At the mercy of his shaking hands, he struggled momentarily in helping you into Dean’s sweatpants, and you let out a pained and embarrassed whimper.

“I’m so sorry, Y/N/N.” Sam lamented, his eyes creased with sorrow.

“S'okay S-s-sammy,” you assured, your voice still hoarse. Sam successfully slipped a pair of dry socks on your feet, and he and Dean worked to wrap you in a blanket.

While Sam changed into dry clothes, Dean rubbed your back and arms hoping to restore some warmth to your frozen body. When Sam returned, Dean stood up with you and pressed a kiss to your temple before handing you over.

Sam held you close and slid into the back seat. Once he was situated, he made sure you were comfortable, and you gave a weak nod. Dean grabbed another blanket from the trunk and draped it over you and Sam. He shut your door and moved to the driver’s side, sliding into his seat. He directed all of the vents so they were blowing hot air toward the back of the car.

Dean caught Sam’s glance in the rear view mirror and they shared a long look of anxious relief. Dean nodded in understanding, and Sam’s eyes fell back to you. He cupped your face in his hand and pulled you closer, placing a kiss in your hair.

Before putting the car in gear, Dean paused to watch the two people he loved most in this world. The sight of you and Sam solidifying his unwavering vow to protect his family above all else.

Masterlist

#dean winchester x reader #dean x reader #sam winchester x reader #sam x reader #supernatural whump #spn fanfic #spn whump #cpr #resus #resuscitation

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linddzz · 1 year

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Why Are People Happy (or like, at least Not Freaking Out) About the USA Midterm Results?

(or in my case exhaling a held breath as I slightly lift my finger off the "oh fuck me and my spouse should worry for our future survival if we stay in the country" button for now)

So for newer voters there is the very valid question: why the hell are people acting like this is a victory for progressives/Democrats when they'll likely lose the House and barely hold on to the Senate?

Short Answer: because by historical pattern and all the usual indicators, anyone who even slightly caucused with Dems should have been trounced, and the fact that they weren't trounced has the far hardline right shaking.

To borrow from a great Reddit comment I saw; the GOP is freaking out because this was like a pro boxer went up against a sick six year old, and the boxer may have scored higher in the end but the six year old beat the shit out of them in the process.

For decades the pattern has been that the president's party loses at LEAST 20-40 seats in the midterms. Add in that Republicans tend to turn out more for midterms, gerrymandering, and the fact that in the past swing voters are swayed by inflation and gas prices and...it should have been so much worse. With how everything was stacked up this ended up being a historic turnout for an incumbent executive branch, the career politicians pay attention to shit like that.

And yeah with how things are, "holy shit it could have been so much worse" is worth something.

So I'm not like, popping bottles and cheering, but this to me is a great example of Voting as Harm Reduction in Action.

Voting did not Fix It. It can't. Voting will not stop fascism, strike that expectation from your mind and also really see that that is not what voting's role is in an action plan. Voting is the Minimum. Meaning if you can't do anything else you vote, but you don't rely on voting and expect it alone to fix problems.

(long post with more of a breakdown below. Tho this isn't a breakdown where I pulled sources and exact numbers. It's more of a General Take Away.)

The ultimate proof that this wasn't great for the far right is the fact that they're very openly freaking out. Go to the far right outlets and they are losing it. It has been loudly shown that they can't assume they can point to inflation and get away with OPEN pushes for total take over.

On one hand, we very VERY likely gained a couple more years to fight (either to stop a fascist take over or to at least set things up to save more lives, or to even reduce the power hold a fascist take over could keep.) On the other hand, people like Nick Fuentes are now openly saying "we are the minority and these results show why we need a dictatorship." Whether it's a good thing they're saying the quiet part even louder or not remains to be seen.

(My optimistic take is it may be a good thing, as it's way harder for moderates to accuse progressives of hysterics when the wackos won't stop saying the quiet part out loud and are in fact saying it louder. I kind of WANT the wackos to be louder and louder, there's now good evidence that freaks voters out.)

The More Definitive Good:

-The GOP majority is not NEARLY what they were wanting, and a lot of their moderates are spooked. The status quo holders are seeing that hardline regressive politics like the overturn of Roe is BAD for them, and they can't rely on "but the gas prices." The GOP generally falls in line together yes, but remember how much they struggled to pass big change legislation when Trump was president? They're gonna have even more inter-party tensions now as the hardline right gets frustrated that they can't impeach Biden every week and the status quo moderates get more hesitant to back up policies that they KNOW won't be popular with their constituents. They will not be able to coast whatever they want through. Even if they end up flipping the House AND Senate it will not be with big enough majorities to do whatever they want.

-Listen if nothing else, if you're a petty bitch like me who enjoys a nice dish of shadenfreude, its probably gonna be very funny watching McCarthy struggle to keep his party on track if they retake the House.

-Cannot possibly stress enough that the fact that it's STILL not 100% certain the GOP will flip the house is buck fucking wild.

-GenZ turnout is giving me hope that the Youths are properly viewing voting as a minimal first step in an action plan and not as a "if it doesn't fix it why bother?" scenario. If voting is all you can do, do that so you can help give people who are fighting better ground to work on and more time. Stay involved in local elections especially!

-For me at least, this has let me take my mental finger off the PANIC AND FLEE NOW button so I can focus slightly less on survival for immediate family and more on helping others.

-Speaking of, LOOK UP HOW TO HELP YOUR NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITIES. The Indian Child Welfare Act is on the line at the supreme court. Look it up, look up how you can help.

Best Case Scenario Outcomes/Dreams

-Trump vs DeSantis actually does turn into a GOP civil war. Will this fight be good in the long run? I don't know but I know that at this moment it's very fun watching them claw at each other. Thoughts and prayers towards an ongoing GOP civil war. The established GOP wants Trump gone and see this midterm as proof he's bad for elections, but he's not going to go easy. I'm gonna be like Cersei Lannister looking out my window sipping wine watching them fight.

-GOP realizes "being seen as the social regression party is bad for us" and they stop being obstructionists. Best case here is they open up to climate legislation. That or they buckle down harder and piss everyone off more. Either way is likely to work out for progressives. Ultimate Dream is a GOP civil war and party shakeout leading to a conservative party with like, disagreements on tax policy and regulations being the biggest thing to worry about in the future.

-Bigger Dream; this is a death knell for the rise of Christo-Fascism. They overshot their reach with the Roe overturn and the power hold the hard right Christian block has on the conservative party goes downhill from here. This is more of a dream and not a realistic expectation though.

-I don't hold as much hope here but there's a CHANCE that this also signaled to Democrats that they can be more pushy and not suffer for it. Biden is a political beast and I wouldn't be surprised if his more openly progressive (by his standards) moves recently were to test how voters would respond to it. If Dems payed attention (big if) they got the message that people want more action.

-Trump probably lost the political backup he hoped for if he gets indicted. There's a GOOD chance that the establishment GOP won't stop the legal freight train about to hit him even if they get both House and Senate. I think it's silly to say "it's over for Trump!" but it's fair to say his tower is less protected than he likely hoped. It's likely the establishment is less afraid of his power than they were even after 2020.

-can you imagine if he made a third party and wrecked the GOP voting base? Like to charge reblog to cast.

-If nothing else; between Alex Jones, Elon flailing like an idiot and maybe taking down Twitter, and far right pundits screaming in confusion, there is entertainment to be had.

Now What:

-The fight is not over. It will never be over. The hill to fight up is less steep than expected now, but it's still there.

-We will likely not see much passed before 2024. This midterm was less about getting progressive platforms pushed and more about making it harder for regressive policies to pass. It'll be frustrating but with how things were stacked that's the best we could've hoped for.

-The GOP have gerrymandering and can win that way (it's likely how they end up winning the House) BUT more people are aware of it now and districts that should have been EASY wins were closer than the GOP would like. They're likely to try to gerrymander harder, it's now our job to be very very loud about that. Push for districting reform.

-The conservative voting bloc is ALSO sick of the two options. Peeking around in r/conservative revealed a surprising amount of support for rank choice voting. This is an area to plug your nose and work with people towards a common goal. Rank choice is at the moment, the most realistic strategy for breaking up the two party system.

-Hard to swallow pill: the majority of this country is moderate. It sucks. But it is. You cannot depend on the dream of a socialist revolution. Lying down and accepting that as a reason to give up is also not an option.

-Expanding on that; this midterm may be a sign that the moderates are more politically aware than they used to be, and that they're more persuadable towards progressive policy than I had expected. Try to keep that up, because it makes it harder for the hardline right to try to push their shit quietly.

-There will almost certainly not be a time where progressives can relax and say they fixed it.

-Celebrating "holy shit that could have been so much worse" can't be a sign that It's Fixed. I also don't think people view it that way. My big hope is that younger progressives have realized that they can't go "the system is fucked beyond repair so why bother."

-Celebrating increments and enjoying some shadenfreude can be good for your mental health. Shitting on people for celebrating "oh good I don't need to flee the country asap" doesn't really help anyone.

-There was a ZERO chance this midterm would have given total big majorities to progressives. If you are set on only celebrating Perfect Wins you're going to have a BAD TIME and will burn out fast.

-Fight for an ideal you don't expect to reach. Take every half step you can, push for bigger leaps. Do not give ground for the sake of not reaching the goal.

-If DeSantis is smart he will moderate his "anti woke" openly social-regression talk. Don't let him get away with remaking his image as "the nice safe moderate compared to Trump." Pull out the petty shit he did with Disney, point out every way he is JUST as low and mean.

-GenZ: the far right is now terrified of you. Good. Keep em scared.

#politics #usa politics #midterms 2022 #added a working readmore

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 9 months

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Is It Really That Bad?

I don’t think I’ve ever felt like the universe actively conspired against something until I witnessed the production of The Flash.

Since 1991 there have been quite a few proposals for Flash movies, but they never really got off the ground for whatever reason. Following Barry’s debut in Justice League, a movie finally was announced before multiple delays due to rewrites, in particular to cut Ray Fisher’s Cyborg from the story after he went public about the awful shit he had to deal with under Joss Whedon. Things seemed hopeless until It director Andy Muschietti came onboard, at which point production on the film finally started to go smoothly. Sure, there were rumblings about Ezra Miller having episodes on set, but that’s just typical actor nonsense, right? Surely it couldn’t get any worse!

Look, I’m here to review a movie so I’ll keep this brief: Miller committed crimes. Lots of crimes. So many, in fact, you’d think they were method acting for the role of Reverse-Flash. The thing is, despite all of this, Miller was basically given a slap on the wrist by the studio, being forbidden from doing promos and press tours (oh no! The horror!). And as if the situation wasn’t already a fucking mess, while Miller’s crime spree was ongoing WB canned the nearly-complete Batgirl movie that featured Michael Keaton and Academy Award-winning actor Brendan Fraser while simultaneously inflating The Flash’s budget to nearly $300 million with reshoots. It seems baffling to cancel a movie that was nearly done and that people were marginally interested in for the sake of a movie that people were losing interest in quickly due to its star’s erratic behavior, but remember: Leslie Grace isn’t white, while Ezra Miller is. WB is never beating those racism allegations at this rate.

With a normal movie, this is where the nonsense ends. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

This film was meant to smooth out the clusterfuck continuity of the “Snyderverse” with a soft reboot, with Henry Cavill filming a end-of-movie cameo alongside Miller, Gal Gadot, Keaton, and Supergirl’s actress Sasha Calle to establish the new direction of DC going forward. Unfortunately, the hierarchy of power at DC changed, and Gunn shot that down. While this meant the ending would probably not get people confused with regards to upcoming projects, it also meant the movie wasn’t going to really have any closure for the old universe. Affleck, Cavill, and who knows who else are just gone, and the future is just a big old question mark. At least Aquaman is safe, maybe?

Literally none of this news was very reassuring to fans. Nothing above is any good for a film’s perception to audiences under normal circumstances, but here we have all this news coming to a fanbase that genuinely did not want this fucking movie. The DCEU was already divisive when the film was announced, and Miller’s portrayal of Barry doubly so; the fact it was adapting Flashpoint was seen as lazy and uninspired, not to mention its not really a story that lets Flash stand on his own merits, making it seem more like this movie was just an excuse to reboot; it was a multiverse story in a day and age with an abundance of such stories, and it was releasing around the same time as Across the Spider-Verse to boot; and Gunn’s reboot plans meant this story was likely a narrative dead end. This movie had an uphill battle the likes of which haven’t been seen since Sisyphus.

But much like that mythological figure, the boulder came crashing right back down when the numbers came in. The movie would likely need to gross $500 million at minimum to break even after factoring in the reshoots and advertising, and it only managed half of that with a pitiful opening weekend followed by a massive 73% drop. It now sits alongside films like The Lone Ranger and Mortal Engines as one of the most expensive bombs in history, to the point where WB would have saved more money by cancelling it like they did with Batgirl. And despite glowing praise from the likes of Tom Cruise and Stephen King, it received middling reviews from mainstream critics.

Audiences haven’t been any less mixed, but considering most people weren’t particularly excited or invested in this film’s existence this is basically a miracle. Sure, there’s plenty of people out there saying this is the “worst comic book movie ever” like they do every time a new superhero movie drops, but even more people are saying they enjoyed the film… although even they tend to have some severe criticisms.

Even though I knew most of what was going to happen in the movie going in, I wasn’t really sure what to expect given everything surrounding the movie. But you know me, I’m willing to give almost any movie a chance, and bombs this big don’t happen every day, so even before it was voted on I was trying to make time to check it out. So sit down, microwave yourself a snack—

—and watch as I try and determine if The Flash is really that bad.

THE GOOD

The biggest shock of this film is that Ezra Miller is actually really good here.

Their Barry is still a bit of a goofball, but he’s clearly matured as a character since his precious appearances. They managed to make him much more charming and likable than he ever was, and this gets compounded when he interacts with the younger Barry and gets confronted with how annoying he was before. I think young Barry could have come off as really insufferable, but the fact he annoys everyone around him and also ends up maturing makes him a lot more endearing.

Miller really kills it with the emotional moments, particularly the ending encounter with Barry’s mom and the scene where old Barry snaps at young Barry. The film is really carried by the dramatic, emotional moments far more than any of the superheroics, and Miller manages to sell a lot of it very well. It was to the point where I started thinking, “I really wouldn’t mind if they stick around.” Then a scene where Barry says the Justice League has no real psychiatric help or where his younger self ends up repeatedly exposing himself in public by accident happens, and then I remembered, “Oh yeah, aren’t they a mentally unwell criminal?”

Unsurprisingly, Michael Keaton absolutely kills it in his role as Batman, but much more shockingly is that Ben Affleck's brief return as Bruce is pretty great as well. I always thought Affleck, much like Henry Cavill, was desperately trying to give a great performance while weighed down by bad writing; here, he gets an actual poignant scene where he talks to Barry about how dwelling on tragedies isn't the way to do things, and you should try and move forward instead. It shows he really could have been great if given better material to work with.

Okay, enough being nice to Affleck, I wanna talk about Keaton again. As much as the marketing hyped him up and as much as he is obviously the most blatant fanservice possible, it's still so cool to see him in the suit again. I am not immune to nostalgia pandering, and as corny as it could have been from anyone else, the zoom into his face when he says The Line really is a highlight of the movie. Keaton has a great deal of charisma, and while there are issues with Batman they aren't his fault at all. Most impressively, he doesn't steal the show away from Miller like I thought he would; he enhances the scenes he's in without stealing the spotlight completely from their performance. I feel like this is a problem in a lot of movies like this, where the lead gets overshadowed by a hyped up character, but somehow The Flash of all things managed to avoid this.

And as bad as the cameos could get, this movie gave two of the greatest cameos ever put to film with the return of the GOAT George Clooney Batman and, best of all, Nicolas Cage Superman from the unmade Superman Lives, fighting a giant spider to the death just as God intended. I am not immune to the charms of Nicolas Cage.

Overall, this movie presents us with a solid story, plenty of fun moments, great character dynamics, and more... for the first two acts, anyway.

THE BAD

Once this movie hits the third act, it basically just loses any and all focus and becomes a big dumb video game-esque battle against Zod and his forces in a bland desert landscape. While both Barrys admittedly get some pretty cool moments sprinkled in and Keaton’s Batman’s second death is actually a well done emotional moment, Supergirl ends up being completely wasted, with her sole role being to angrily scream and then die repeatedly.

This actually highlights the problem with Kara in this movie: She’s basically nothing but a plot device and has zero personality, and a good 80% of her dialogue is just angry screaming. As hot as Sasha Calle is and how much she obviously wants to make Kara compelling, she is given so little to work with that her efforts end up being fruitless. She does nothing of consequence after helping Barry get his powers back, and could be replaced or written out of the story and it would still make perfect sense.

Zod’s inclusion is pretty baffling as well, especially since they chose to water down one of the only good things from Man of Steel into a boring, generic doomsday villain. You can really feel that poor Michael Shannon would rather be doing anything else, and his bored performance just highlights how poorly implemented Zod is in the plot. Like, the Fladh has some of the best and most colorful DC villains in his rogues gallery, one’s that are often overlooked because Batman’s villains sell more toys. Why not highlight some of them instead of taking a Superman villain and stripping him of all personality to the point the actor clearly has no passion for the role? Cutting Zod would make cutting Supergirl even easier, and then two of the biggest problems with the movie are gone!

The third act does manage to mostly rerail itself once it goes back to Barry trying to unfuck the timeline, with only a disgustingly egregious bit of fanservice that I’ll discuss in the next section hampering it. But at the end, despite the incredibly based George Clooney cameo, there’s just so many unresolved and unanswered questions, with the biggest one being who killed Barry’s mom? Considering her death is what kickstarted the whole plot, you’d think this might come up, but it never does. A lot of other things come up and get dropped too, like whatever was going on with Batman in the opening, but maybe I’m just crazy for wanting elements introduced in a plot to have significance beyond just being there to be cool.

Even beyond that, there’s the fact that Supergirl and Keaton!Batman’s final fates are never really resolved, something that apparently wasn’t a problem in early versions of the film since they showed up alive in the final scene. As much as I loved seeing Clooney, I think trading him for getting some closure for Keaton and Calle would have been more satisfying.

Everyone harps on how bad the CGI is—and it absolutely is, don’t get me wrong—but for the most part I found it endearingly bad. Like the opening with the CGI babies? That’s too goofy for me to hate. But once the movie revolves into bland grey and black CGI bad guys and creepy deepfake celebrity cameos, I stop being quite so forgiving.

Oh, and on the subject of cameos, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one as pointless and unfunny as Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman showing up out of nowhere (complete with theme music) to make Bruce and Barry look like dumb assholes. Imagine thinking this was a good idea.

THE UGLY

The biggest point of contention surrounding this movie is the CGI necromancy used in the aforementioned cameo clusterfuck from the climax, which gives us George Reeve, Christopher Reeves, and Adam West posthumously reprising their DC roles in non-speaking appearances (there’s archived audio from West, but his cameo isn't really focused on to the point you can barely tell it's him) where they just stand there before the camera swoops around like in that Saul Goodman gif.

I think this is one of the very few times where I actually think the outrage is mostly justified. To be clear, I’m not getting mad on behalf of dead celebrities I never knew, and as long as the filmmakers went through the proper channels and the estates of these stars were properly compensated, I don’t have any legal objections. All of my distaste is coming from a subjective, moral standpoint.

I have never liked this CGI necromancy ever since Rogue One popularized it. I find it really gross and distasteful, and in most cases I think finding a lookalike actor would be preferable than playing Weekend at Bernie’s with a computer generated facsimile of a dead person. In The Flash, I understand having lookalikes would diminish the wow factor of the crossover, but there was an extremely easy workaround to this: Have cameos from all the living DC stars.

Was Brandon Routh not available to put on the Superman tights? Would it have been so bad to let Grant Gustin pop in for a cameo? They acknowledge Helen Slater, so why not Melissa Benoist? Hell, if you want to reference bad, campy movies, have Shaq show up as Steel or Josh Brolin pop in as Jonah Hex! Or even Ryan Reynolds, I’d bet he’d be down to return if you gave him a real suit this time!

Like there’s just no excuse for ghoulishly parading around dead guys when there’s so many alive guys you could use instead. People can complain all they want about the fanservice and cameos in the past few Spider-Man films, but at least they only had returning characters played by living actors. And when this movie already has the niche, out-there Nic Cage Superman cameo, proving they were down to do things as out there and inoffensively creative as reference unmade movies, it’s really just inexcusable. It doesn’t ruin the movie for me, but it makes me lose a bit of respect for the people who okayed this over less offensive cameo ideas.

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

To my surprise, this film actually turned out to be pretty good. Not “great,” not “the best superhero movie ever,” but genuinely mostly good and enjoyable.

My opinion is that the movie is good in spite of itself. The third act is truly a hot mess, the stupid desert battle against Zod is awful and boring, Supergirl is depressingly pointless, so many plot points are just dropped or otherwise forgotten, and the CGI necromancy is nothing short of ghoulish. But the rest of the movie is truly a lot of fun. Barry and his younger self have a fun dynamic, Keaton really manages to take what little he’s given and show that he’s still got it as Batman, the Clooney and Cage cameos were delightful, and most importantly the emotional moments are actually effective.

I think with a bit more polish this film could have actually lived up to the hype around it. There is a great movie in here being suffocated by fanservice and CGI but still managing to get a few gasps of air regardless. I think if they’d kept the conflict more grounded or made Reverse-Flash the primary antagonist, things might have turned out better.

I think its score is pretty fair. My friend @huyh172 described this as “the worst good DC movie,” and it’s an assessment I fully agree with. It’s not as good as Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Suicide Squad, the Snyder Cut, or Shazam!, and it’s definitely not as bad as stuff like Wonder Woman 1984 or Josstice League. It’s also a bit too enjoyable to be mid. It’s just a really solid movie held back from true greatness by some damning flaws… and really, that makes it the perfect capstone to the "Snyderverse," a cinematic universe that had some solid movies but was held back from greatness by incredibly bad ones.

#Is It Really that bad?#IIRTB #review #movie review #The Flash #The Flash 2023 #Ezra Miller #andy muschietti #DC #DCEU #Snyderverse #Michael Keaton #Batman #Sasha Calle #Supergirl #Barry Allen #superhero movie

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leconcombrerit · 3 months

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Results so far :

Main outtake for now : Phee is apparently this fandom's babyboo angel. Ta did a very good crying scene. Let's protect Phee together.

Por takes the lead as Non's main bully and de facto leader of the friend group. His attitude doesn't help. Seriously, we haven't seen Por do anything genuinely kind so far. I think his mom doting on him and everyone licking his boots inflated his ego beyond the point of no return. His father abuses him, which leads him to try and get his own achievements (in hope of impressing him? Make the abuse stop?) ; viewers might have been more sympathetic towards this if he didn't use people (Non) to do it. He never faces consequences, so he doesn't learn anything -until he gets impaled and realizes they did something bad. Far too little far too late to keep him from the Most Hated Position.

Tee gets the second place for now, mostly for dragging Non into real, illegal trouble. He's stuck in it himself, and I take he's been shaped by his surroundings a lot. But he's still ruthless and merciless. Unlike Por and Top, he does it for a reason, sure. But he goes way further than strictly necessary, and doesn't show remorse at all. I guess that's what gets him so high in the poll. He doesn't fucking learn either.

Top gets third place. He's an ass. I don't have much to say about him except that he seems to follow Por and Tee a lot. A bit like a leech. Seriously we don't have anything on him. He could represent gratuitous cruelty, I don't know. He's easy to hate.

Last with a significative amount of votes is Jin. His actions and betrayal are very fresh in everyone's memory, I guess timing doesn't help. I still don't think Jin is a terrible person -he's very human to me. He did something horrible in a moment of hurt, didn't seem to realize that dragging Non back was bad, and probably didn't even leak the video. Jin has a conscience. Whatever happened is eating him alive, and he's the only one to feel guilty in the OG group (Fluke is debatable). All this makes him even more easy to hate, because he was that close to being fully good. Jin's worst flaw is constantly falling short of viewers' expectations, just like he fell short of saving Non when he took the pills.

Fluke, Tan and Non have a few votes too. I'm curious about whoever voted for Tan. Seriously. What has Tan done to be worse than our main contenders. Tell me please I need to understand.

And WHO voted for White. WHO READ MY TAGS AS A CHALLENGE

#dead friend forever #dff the series

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my-head-is-an-animal · 6 months

Note

May I please request for some comfort fic with Plo? Reader having trouble handling her anxiety attack? Cue reader having ocd too if possible.

Hope this is okay for you!

Knowledge and Experience

Plo Koon x reader

Word Count: 615

Usually you could deal with anxiety attacks just fine, sometimes it would take a few goes at your breathing techniques, but you’d eventually always get there.

This one was never ending! Your chest felt tight, it was impossible to get any air in, so you were forced to take shallower breaths if you wanted to survive at all.

This was what you hated most, the lack of control, being forced to comply with the pathetic wishes of your mind that just couldn’t stay organised or calm to save your life.

You let your head bow and rest on your knees as you sat curled against the wall of your small kitchen. Coruscant didn’t allow for many large homes, certainly none that you could afford, but you didn’t necessarily mind the smaller space, until the anxiety attacks took over, then you felt trapped and like the walls had begun closing in.

‘Just breathe.’ Plo’s warm baritone voice surrounded you for just a moment, enough to realise you’d been panting hard for far longer than you thought. Your chest was aching far too much. ‘You’ve done this before, you can do it again.’

‘I-I can’t.’ You panted, knowing that talking was a bad idea, it would only mean less air being used to inflate your already burning lungs.

‘We both know that is not true.’ Plo spoke low and quiet, keeping everything steady as he normally did, but it wasn’t working. You just needed to focus on surviving until it was over.

Plo ran his hand over your arm, clearly understanding you just needed to be left alone for a moment. You were glad for it, until you heard him moving around your kitchen.

You knew from sound alone that whilst he was trying to be kind and considerate, he was causing more disruption than actually helping. You could hear the way things were being put into drawers that it wasn’t right. You had an order to things and often Plo would allow you to go through your routines without trying to help, he knew you had a way of doing things.

Eventually it was too much and you could no longer focus on getting the little air into your body as was allowed, he needed to let you focus.

‘Plo, please,’ you snapped, standing up to see the chaos he had caused. ‘I just need a moment to focus, can I please do that?’ You stared around at the kitchen, seeing small trinkets slightly misaligned with the counter tops, it wasn’t as chaotic as your thought, but it still bothered you. ‘What have you done?’ You shook your head feeling your annoyance flaring.

You tried not to be too upset, but instead went about realigning everything so it sat neatly in place.

‘I’m sorry I got annoyed,’ you sighed. ‘I just need a moment to…’

You looked up at Plo who was smiling, leaning back against the counter with his arms folded. ‘Yes?’ He raised his eyebrow, knowingly.

‘You sneaky bastard.’ You half laughed, realising that through focusing on the small chaos he’d created, you’d managed to allow your chest to open up enough to steady out your breathing and the anxiety attack was over.

‘So, you have previously said.’ He chuckled.

‘Of course, now we have to deal with my OCD.’ You said, breathing in deep lungful’s of air and finally feeling calmer.

‘I’m sure I can come up with another sneaky tactic to resolve that as well.’

‘Over-confidence?’ You teased his Jedi ways.

‘Knowledge and experience.’ Plo chuckled.

It was true, he knew you very well and you had no doubts that he would find a way to help you through the next step.

If you liked this, please consider supporting me ☕ thanks for reading!

#plo koon #plo koon x reader #master plo koon #plo koon fic #requested

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viivdle · 2 months

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it's been a long time coming..

Dancing With Our Hands Tied (Jurdan's Version) with @annamatix <3

part 1!!

"I, I loved you in secret" is one of the many lyrics you don't need to use metaphorically for them to fit. he *did* love her in secret, and he hid his feelings with every action he took.

"First sight, yeah, we love without reason" we get a description of what he noticed first when he saw jude, and he was (very obviously, might i add) star struck. he didn't have a reason to be attracted to her. if anything, it was the opposite. his whole life he was taught to hate mortals and find them repulsing, but something about her was different.

"Oh, how were you to know?" i think sometimes cardan regrets his actions. he would do it again just to have the same outcome - being with jude. but i think he regrets how long it took because it cost them valuable time together. even after his feelings were clear, he did things that prolonged the time until they got to openly confess their love.

"And my, my love had been frozen" with everything in his life growing up, nobody reciprocated the love he tried to give, so he locked his heart away the best he could. he tried to freeze it so it wouldn't get hurt, but people still found ways to shatter it.

"Deep blue, but you painted me golden" cardan had a horrible life, nobody needs reminders of it. it's in everything he says and does. she ultimately saved his life in more ways than one. this can also be taken literally. "but you painted me golden" fits the scene in which jude struck him and smeared gold over his face, but that's just a funny thing to add. another way to interpret it (i'm already getting unhinged with this) is that he was with nicasia before he was with jude. not only were they bad together, which painted him blue, but nicasia is the princess of the undersea, nicasia is the deep blue that was replaced with gold, jude.

"Oh, and you held me close. Oh, how was I to know?" it's no secret that jude can lie. and that she takes great advantage of that ability. even after everything, i think cardan still had doubts about her love for him because she *could* be lying. he's very self-destructive and thinks little to nothing of himself. "it is a shabby, worm-eaten, and scabrous thing" is only one of the many admissions to it, verbal or not. while he knows jude loves him, but can't be certain.

"I could've spent forever with your hands in my pockets" screams cardan. he thought he was uncapable of being loved, and she proved him otherwise. he loves with all he has and all he can give, and when he got a taste of what it was like to be loved, he never wanted to let it go again. he would've spent forever with her hands in his pockets, and he would've been happy to do so.

"Picture of your face in an invisible locket" i love love LOVE this lyric, and cardan would too. as i said, he loves with all his might, and he proudly does so. he would 100% wear a locket with a picture of jude in it, nobody questions that. he would love it even more if the locket was invisible to show everyone who has his heart. in the standards elfhame sets, he shouldn't feel proud to love a mortal. he is anyway and after finding out how it feels to love her, he stops caring about it and he would scream it from the top of every building in the kingdom.

"You said there was nothing in the world that could stop it" need i remind everyone of when he was a serpent and knew nothing, not even himself (yes, i'm repeating myself again) but he knew jude? nothing in the world could stop his love for her, literally. and it most definitely something he'd admit to jude.

"I had a bad feeling" has so many meanings for me, looking at it and trying to connect it to cardan. literally, hate is a bad feeling - and he felt it for jude. a lot. cardan, despite his very inflated seeming ego, is extremely anxious when it comes to jude. not only is she the only family he has left, she's the only family he ever had. yes, he had his court. yes, he had a complex relationship with the people in it. yes, said relationship also included love. but no, it was never pure love. jude and cardan's story is anything but pure. it's tainted, bloody, cursed... but their love? it's the purest love in his life.

i know this is very, very long, and i doubt anyone's read it - but stay tuned for the rest of my version and anna's post on her account<33

#it's been over a month #it's been a LONG time coming #cardan greenbriar #jude duarte #jurdan #the cruel prince #the wicked king #the queen of nothing #tfota #the folk of the air #holly black #taylor swift #jurdan songs #taylor swift analysis #tfota songs #tfota song analysis #idk how to tag this ahhhh!!!!@#how the king of elfhame learned to hate stories #htkoelths

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bitchesgetriches · 27 days

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{ MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about Retirement and How to Retire

How to start saving for retirement

Dafuq Is a Retirement Plan and Why Do You Need One?

Procrastinating on Opening a Retirement Account? Here’s 3 Ways That’ll Fuck You Over.

Season 4, Episode 5: “401(k)s Aren��t Offered in My Industry. How Do I Save for Retirement if My Employer Won’t Help?”

How To Save for Retirement When You Make Less Than $30,000 a Year

Workplace Benefits and Other Cool Side Effects of Employment

Your School or Workplace Benefits Might Include Cool Free Stuff

Do NOT Make This Disastrous Beginner Mistake With Your Retirement Funds

The Financial Order of Operations: 10 Great Money Choices for Every Stage of Life

Advanced retirement moves

How to Painlessly Run the Gauntlet of a 401k Rollover

The Resignation Checklist: 25 Sneaky Ways To Bleed Your Employer Dry Before Quitting

Ask the Bitches: “Can I Quit With Unvested Funds? Or Am I Walking Away From Too Much Money?”

You Need to Talk to Your Parents About Their Retirement Plan

Season 4, Episode 8: “I’m Queer, and Want To Find an Affordable Place To Retire. How Do I Balance Safety With Cost of Living?”

How Dafuq Do Couples Share Their Money?

Ask the Bitches: “Do Women Need Different Financial Advice Than Men?”

From HYSAs to CDs, Here’s How to Level Up Your Financial Savings

Season 3, Episode 7: “I’m Finished With the Basic Shit. What Are the Advanced Financial Steps That Only Rich People Know?”

Speaking of advanced money moves, make sure you’re not funneling money to The Man through unnecessary account fees. Roll over your old retirement accounts FO’ FREE with our partner Capitalize:

Roll over your retirement fund with Capitalize

Investing for the long term

When Money in the Bank Is a Bad Thing: Understanding Inflation and Depreciation

Investing Deathmatch: Investing in the Stock Market vs. Just… Not

Investing Deathmatch: Traditional IRA vs. Roth IRA

Investing Deathmatch: Stocks vs. Bonds

Wait… Did I Just Lose All My Money Investing in the Stock Market?

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)

The FIRE Movement, Explained

Your Girl Is Officially Retiring at 35 Years Old

The Real Story of How I Paid off My Mortgage Early in 4 Years

My First 6 Months of Early Retirement Sucked Shit: What They Don’t Tell You about FIRE

Bitchtastic Book Review: Tanja Hester on Early Retirement, Privilege, and Her Book, Work Optional

Earning Her First $100K: An Interview with Tori Dunlap

We’ll periodically update this list with new links as we continue writing about retirement. And by “periodically,” we mean “when we remember to do it.” Maybe remind us, ok? It takes a village.

Contribute to our staff’s retirement!

Holy Justin Baldoni that’s a lot of lengthy, well-researched, thoughtful articles on the subject of retirement. It sure took a lot of time and effort to finely craft all them words over the last five years!

In case I’m not laying it on thick enough: running Bitches Get Riches is a labor of love, but it’s still labor. If our work helped you with your retirement goals, consider contributing to our Patreon to say thanks! You’ll get access to Patreon exclusives, giveaways, and monthly content polls! Join our Patreon or comment below to let us know if you would be interested in a BGR Discord server where you can chat with other Patrons and perhaps even the Bitches themselves! Our other Patrons are neat and we think you should hang out together.

Join the Bitches on Patreon

#retirement #retire #how to retire #retirement account #retirement fund #retirement funds #401k #403b #Roth IRA #Traditional IRA #investing #investors #investing in stocks #Capitalize #401k rollover #personal finance #money tips

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isabelleofnorcal · 1 year

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Which Godzilla movie should I see first?

Everyone wants to know: where should I start? Sure, we could come up with watch order lists and all of that. But the series has 33 36 movies in it. So, here's every Godzilla movie with a rating of how good of an idea it is for it to be your first Godzilla movie.

Every movie is rated on a scale of 1 (absolutely not) to 5 (excellent movie with no prior knowledge of Godzilla required).

I'm going in release order.

Buckle up!

Godzilla 1954 - 5 First movie is both very good and has no continuity with previous entries because there are no previous entries. This is always a good first choice for Godzilla.

Godzilla Raids Again - 3 Not as good as the previous one. Follows directly from the previous one. You should always watch the Godzilla 54 before this one.

King Kong vs. Godzilla - 4 (1962 Japanese, avoid the '63 American version at all costs) Doesn't follow directly before the previous one, though Raids again does explain why Godzilla is in an ice berg at the beginning of the movie.

Solid movie, good if you want to start with Godzilla fighting another monster in a big showdown.

Mothra vs. Godzilla - 4 This is a weird place to start, it kind of assumes knowledge of both Mothra and Godzilla. The only keeping it from being a 3 is that it's really, really good and that might overcome continuity concerns.

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster - 3 This movie is where Godzilla becomes an anti-hero and you should watch the previous movies + Mothra and maybe even Rodan to appreciate it. It's a really good movie, but it's just not enough. It's like if Infinity War was your first MCU movie

Invasion of the Astro-Monster - 3 We're in the middle of the Showa era now. Godzilla is fully a good guy and Toho has their own little monsterverse going now.

At the end of the day, there are just better choices.

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep - 4 This is a bit surprising, but it's the start of some stand alone island adventure w/Godzilla. It's very representative of other Godzilla movies. If you like it, you'll like other movies in the series. If you don't, you might still like the best ones

Son of Godzilla - 4 Another stand alone island adventure. Representative of the series as a whole, but not the best of the series.

Destroy All Monsters - 2 This was meant to be the end of the series. To many references to other movies. Best saved till later.

All Monster’s Attack - 2 This is a straight-up clip show staring a little kid. Not bad, but best saved for when you're watching every movie in order or some other similar project.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah - 4 Good movie. Personal favorite of the 60s/70s era, which likely inflates my score. But it's a good stand alone and has a strong message. Also, the director was told he'd never make another Godzilla movie, but he was a producer on Godzilla 2014.

Godzilla vs. Gigan - 2 This movie is really a back door pilot for a Jet Jaguar series. It good enough on it's own, but it's just not a good enough example of a Godzilla movie to justify anything higher even though it's not bogged down in continuity.

Godzilla vs. Megalon - 3 An ok enough stand alone. Has aliens, manga artists with hot girlfriends. But that's really all it has going for it. Not the worst place to start, but unless your watching with someone who loves this movie specifically, I'd pick another one.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla - 3 Solid stand alone. It's a late entry, but I think it stands out. Not bogged down in continuity. But like Megalon, I wouldn't suggest watching this first unless it was with someone who liked this movie specifically.

Terror of Mechagodzilla - 2 It's the capstone of the Showa era. It's the last Godzilla movie for Ishiro Honda, and the last movie directed by him before going to work with his old mentor, the legendary Akira Kurosawa.

Honestly, this should be last Showa move you watch.

Return of Godzilla - 4 Technically in continuity with Godzilla 1954, but all you really need to know is that Godzilla attacked Tokyo 30 years earlier, which the movie helpfully explains.

It's a weird choice, but not a bad one.

Godzilla vs. Biollante - 3 Follows directly from Return of Godzilla and is closely tied to it, even as it has no returning cast members.

Godzilla vs. King Khidorah - 3 Not bogged down in continuity, but very much unrepresentative of the series as a whole, even as it does a good job or representing early 90s Godzilla movies.

You'd be better off starting from Return of Godzilla and watching in order till Destoroyah

Godzilla vs. Mothra - 3 We're starting to get some continuity here that might cause you to get lost, but I don't think it's enough to bump down to a 2. Again, you'd be better off starting at Return and going to Destoroyah.

Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II - 2 Not a sequel to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (that would be Terror of Mechagodzilla, see above) but a sequal to vs. Mothra above. And, by this point, we've got recurring characters and a full-blown 1-a-year series going on.

Godzilla vs. Spacegodzilla - 2 The title alone should make you want to watch it, but you should hold off till you've see the other movies in the Heisei series starting with Return. Sorry!

It's the capstone of the Heisei series AND it makes direct references to the 1954 movie. You will be lost if you start here. This movie is actually good, so I'm not giving it a 1.

Godzilla (1998) - 4 First American Godzilla and it's not great. The writing terrible, the acting worse, but it's just a huge amount of fun.

Will make whoever sees it curious about the Japanese films though!

Godzilla 2000 - 4 Honestly, the most solid entry point to Godzilla that isn't 1954 Godzilla or Shin Godzilla. There's no origin, Godzilla is an anti-hero and it's fun. It's theoretically in continuity with 1954, but it barely matters.

Godzilla vs. Megaguiarus - 3 It has a black hole gun. Add 1 to the "should I start with this movie" score if that's your thing.

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack - 2 Not bogged down in continuity per se, but it references a lot of previous movies. Best for Godzilla buffs or if your watching all the movies.

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla - 3 Fine movie, a little to pro-military for my tastes but I saw it in the theaters recently and still enjoyed it. No major continuity issues, but not the best example of the series as a whole.

Godzilla Tokyo S.O.S. - 2 In direct continuity with the previous movie. Kind of expects you to get all the references. There are way better choices.

Godzilla Final Wars - 2 A love letter to the Showa era. A 50th anniversary film chalk full of easter eggs and refs to previous Godzilla/Toho films.

You should watch every Showa era movie first, and then wait a year before seeing this. It's a great movie, but it requires nostalgia

Godzilla (2014) - 5 Good movie, no reliance on previous movies. It's only mark against it is that it's a Hollywood movie, not a Japanese one.

If you like this, you almost certainly like other Godzilla movies.

Shin Godzilla - 5 Excellent movie and requires 0 previous knowledge of other Godzilla movies. Has easter eggs for the fans, but they're not obvious and you will miss nothing if you don't know what they are.

Godzilla: Planet of Monsters - 1 First anime Godzilla and it sucks. To be avoided by anime fans and Godzilla fans alike. Requires no prior knowledge of Godzilla but the movie is so different from the every other Godzilla movie in the series, it's a terrible first movie.

Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle - 1 I could rate this lower, it's my scale after all, but I'm not going to. It's a direct sequel to Planet of Monsters and was teased at the end of the fist film.

I'm obviously not going to recommend this as your 1st Godzilla movie.

Godzilla: The Planet Eater - 1 Everything I said about City on the Edge of Battle applies to this movie as well.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters - 4 In a perfect world, you should probably see both Godzilla (2014) and Kong: Skull Island first, but fuck it. This movie is fun an awesome.

Godzilla vs. Kong - 4 Sure, it's a direct sequel to Skull Island and King of the Monsters, but let's face it, you want to see two famous monsters fight. And you want it Hollywood style.

And you should have that.

Gonna be honest with you, I can't imagine someone watching Godzilla vs. Kong and not becoming a Godzilla fan for life.

#godzilla #all of them #kaiju #monsterverse #showa #heisei godzilla #like it's hard to say "start with this #and you should definitely start here #there's just to many options #so pick one from the list and go from there

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beesmygod · 2 years

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look: the only arguments in favor of webtoons ive ever heard hinge greatly on the idea that the vastness of the audience on webtoons is crucial to one’s success in the “webcomic business” nowadays. people need money to live. to make money quickly in the entertainment business (and i would like to stress that this is the first time the artist makes a choice: when they decide to pursue art as a career. deciding to do this is not a choice that should be made lightly. additionally, i do not believe that people are being forced to turn to webcomics in order to make a living lol. can you even imagine), they turn toward the algorithmically curated and inflated numbers offered by webtoons.

i’ll start this off with my bone fides so i have to clarify any of this in follow up posts: i started workshopping my webcomic on tumblr in 2012 with doodles and by answering asks people would send me. i would also just post lore dumps for funsies. they are so barely related to the comic now, but they created interest and people asked me cool questions that made me think about the world i was creating. i started the comic in 2013. holy shit i really am coming up on a decade of webcomics. hold on i have to stand up and walk around for a second. picture to break up all these words so your eyes dont slide off the page:

i made enough money on patreon (as a very early adopter) to live in beaverton, oregon (with first 3, then 1 other roommate[s]) living the most spartan lifestyle a person could manage in order to avoid having to go back to my hometown. now i live in confusing moderate comfort in a house my bf and i bought in a burst of sheer market based luck right before everything exploded. we used all of my savings i earned working from age 15-30 as a down payment.

i still try to take care of myself entirely and contribute a proportional amt of my income to the bills. i use government aid and use(d) it get a lot of medical help that i would not have been able to afford otherwise (medicare for all btw its unconscionable that this isnt the norm). i sincerely enjoyed my poverty and i felt like i understood how to live under those parameters with ease and comfort. i was poor but i was free. i do not like that i have to disclose this in order for people not to immediately dismiss me as coming from a place of monetary privilege. this shit is none of your business. im not interested being assigned a perception to my work and character that does not come from my words and deeds. i do not want “poverty artist” to be the signifier attached to me, forever, that people can scrutinize and obsess over whether or not i deserve the adjective i dislike.

but for things i do like: i like my audience very much, and i hope that they understand that they are under no obligation to care for me, keep me alive, finance me, etc. that is entirely my responsibility. but it is through their continued donations and support that i am able to draw my comic full time in a lifestyle i found comfortable, something that i sincerely imagined would not be possible while i was still working and in college. my audience of ~1.5k (i think, google analytics is kinda whack. lotta bots. this is with all that shit i could find filtered out) has been built up gradually over the past near decade and is comprised of funny, lighthearted freaks of nature who make me laugh very frequently. i just cant let them know that or they will become too powerful and use jokes to destroy me. i dont think i have a single bad thing to say about AGS readers. you guys are a hoot lol.

i do not have a discord dedicated to my work because i find the idea pretty unappealing and have had moderator experience in the past on other websites that i did not enjoy. i did not have comments on my comic until this year. previously the only way to contact me was via twitter, tumblr ask or email. i advertise my comic twice on update days, once in the morning and once at night, so i dont flood dashboards. i do not sign up for zines or jobs. i do not promote my work otherwise. well, there’s a link in my sa avatar, but let’s be real. no one’s clicking that.

WITH ALL THAT SAID:

i cannot empathize with the people who pursue the webtoons line of monetization and i find parts of (what must be) their reasoning morally abhorrent. im not even going to get into the predatory and laughable “pay per page” concept, an idea so blatantly evil that if it were pitched in any other medium it would get you laughed out of the room at best. im not going to talk about the ridiculous audacity of a comic host demanding you produce a minimum number of panels “per page” (im old lol bear with me) in order to be granted the golden laurels of “publication” (another choice the artist makes is the choice to pursue becoming a “webtoons original” as a financial goal. i think this is wildly unreasonable for every reason. but whatever. you might as well bet on winning the lottery). im going to talk about the bizarre mentality i cannot wrap my head around when it comes to what people are expecting when they sign up for a website that openly flaunts how disinterested it is in anything other wringing its user base financially dry.

if webtoons is not interested in anything other than financial gain and their purpose is to make more money every quarter at any cost, then why would that mentality not directly impact and poison the relationship between you and your audience, as well as your relationship with your art?

but lets put even THAT aside. god there’s so much i could hammer on. i will just focus on audience right now.

1. the quantity of an audience is not proportional to the quality of the audience. i dont think anyone is going to debate with me that the webtoons audience is good lol. this is because the webtoons userbase is comprised almost entirely of random teenagers and adults under 25. this age range is permitted to act like insane hooligans (to an extent) because that’s what the vast majority of us were like in some capacity or another at that age. i frequently hear complaints from creators about how their webtoons audience are frequently ungrateful, irrational, and impatient to them. this is the obvious outcome when two parties, especially parties that are doing business with each other, are shoved together due to algorithmic decisions and not by their own volition. both parties have been robbed of the opportunity of building up a relationship of trust and respect between the artist and the audience. however, building up this relationship takes time. and people want to be be making money as artists right now. presumably.

2. the primary purpose of an audience is not to obtain money from them. at least, dear god, i really hope this is not the idea driving people’s desire to do webcomics as a career. the creators entering the field with this mindset are DOA, straight up. even if you were capable of hiding your odious motivations, whose money are you willing to pursue? would you change your comic if it meant making more money from the audience? do the highest bidders influence the artistic choices being made? is that the relationship you want with your audience? in that case, why not just take furry porn commissions, a field which makes fucking stacks upon stacks of cash? why bother with webcomics and all this extra work?

3. why would an audience of teens and young adults have money to spare? lol for real tho. teens dont often have unfettered access to cash. college age adults are famously deeply in debt to the nightmare state we live in. to jump into this audience with your hands held open is going to result in disappointment when they’ve already prioritized giving what little they have to artists they already know. i dont know what people are expecting with this one. it’s like panning for gold in a swimming pool.

this doesnt even touch on the uglier stuff. but the choice to go all in with webtoon is foolish, selfish, motivated by greed and childish false promises of fame. i do not have any respect for the artists that line up in the hopes that they can simply “jump the line” and skip one of the most, if not the single most, important aspects of a career in art, as though it’s a tutorial mission they are simply too advanced and skilled to sit through. i am not going to feel bad for or comfort the people who saw a company strangling and smothering everything it touches, a company that is subjecting its customers into increasingly more incremental means of payment, a company that has objectively unreasonable demands for the art they host compared to what they pay out, AND WILLINGLY SIGNED ON TO SECURE THEIR OWN BAG.

so that they didnt have to build an audience! the fuck!

my assessment is that to use webtoons is to have a vast amount of disrespect for your audience.

#webtoons #long post/

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fallingforel · 1 year

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arabella pt 3- Talk!

masterlist

when the debrief happens and y/n cant find alex anywhere

warnings- swearing, heartbreak, mentions of cheating, please let me know if there are anymore and I will add them to this list

“look all I’m trying to say George is that maybe we should go over some of the pacts we made and see if some of them need rediscussing or not” “Look just get some sleep matty, we all need rest, lets discuss this better when we’re actually not delusional” the bed being well inflated by now I hug George goodnight retrieving a blanket from the pile of junk on one side of the room. and getting some well-deserved rest.

⋆｡°✩

After a well deserved night of rest from last nights activities its safe to say I was still sore after all Alex and I did have a few rounds, anyway I’m letting my point digress. Right now its currently 1pm and I’ve just woken up to an empty bed, Alex nowhere to be found. The thing that woke me up? George singing a bad rendition of an elvis presley song, probably to get me up to make him and everyone juice. Thats the thing with George, the thing with all the boys really, once they get an idea in their head they literally do not let go, so it looks like im going to have to get up and go on the hunt for alex to ask if he wants a juice and a bacon sandwich because I just know that Ross will be making them, Its what we’ve always done we go on a night out, then the morning after we have bacon sandwiches and juice and debrief from the night befores previous’ antics.

So eventually managing to stand, i get up and go look for Alex not finding him on the balcony, I then admit my defeat of being unlucky trying to find the chocolate eyed boy and head into the kitchen met with surprise because George was cooking the bacon sandwiches this time. “Ahh y/n/n was wondering when you’d get up, here woke up and found this on the side” George said handing me a napkin folded over with my name on it with words scribbled in sharpie inside. “Hey! You should apologise it was your god awful rendition of elvis presley that woke me up from my beauty sleep, lord knows, thanks. You didn’t read it did you?” my words coming out to George a bit more mean than usual.

“No. I didn't, thought you wouldn't want me too. Plus it wouldn’t be very gentlemanly of me would it?” laughing at his words “since when are you a gentleman George?” to that i was just met with a hum in response so I decided to open the napkin which read.

“y/n i really enjoyed last night had to run though have to record in the studio for the new album coming, think you’ll really like this one, its got a bit of everything in it, so sorry to run wouldve loved to try your juice. anyway , heres my number 07*********, call me sometime soon we can organise something im sure

Al x :)”

Smiling like a giddy school girl whos just got invited to her first date, I put it in my pocket of my hoodie, saving it for later making a mental note to call him when everyone was gone. George then spoke up from infront of me interrupting my train of thought, “So y/n what did you get up to last night? Anything interesting?” “whats that supposed to mean G?” i asked raising my eyebrows in question. “Nothing just wanted to know if anything happened with alex, he seems like a good lad and also i noticed how close you two were last night. I also may or may not have heard you two just a tad.” Burying my head in my hands out of abashment, “oh god i only thought matty had heard, dear lord. Im so sorry G.”

“Yeah well it wasnt just matty was it, it was Ross and I aswell okay it might have been a bit embarrassing but when have you not heard one of us, im very happy for you though, y/n/n, glad to see you get back on the field especially after col-” holding my finger out interrupting his sentence “dont you dare utter his name, other wise i will manifest that that bacon spits at you so much that you have burns all over your fingers that they blister and its unbearable pain for weeks”

George then and there admitted his defeat holding his hands up. “Woah a bit harsh y/n/n,” my threat was overheard and interrupted by Matty, and Ross by the looks of it, entering the room “Hey, it was completely fair, he almost brought up his name” ross replies. “Thank you, ross I knew I liked you the most out of all of our friendship” for that i was met with a chorus of “heys” even adam, and ross’ “welcome, love.” just sticking his middle finger up at george, hann and matty in response to their hurtful glares at me. “Just kidding i love you all equally, youre all my joint favourite.” i say to put their glares at rest.

“Anyway Hann when did you get here?” “about an hour ago knew we all needed to debrief from the night and when you lot had disappeared knew you would be at the closest flat from the pub, yours of course” adam explained himself. “Yours is the closest to anywhere we go on a night out bug. How is that?” “its because where i live, is club and pub central, dont forget that the uni is literally a 10 minute car ride down the road aswell. even some nights ms. lambert goes out with her old mates to the pub 5 minutes down the road mad i swear plus on nights when im not out i get to catch pub fights through my window, best place ive ever lived i swear, anyway im going off on a tangent plus it looks like the bacons almost done so, does everyone want juice?” just met with a chorus of “yeahs” i get started on making the juice for 5 of us.

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After 3 minutes everyone was sat on the sofa, and soon we were talking about how last night went for all of us. “So hann,” i started, “who was the girl you were sucking face with last night,seemed very interested in eachother. You barely spoke to us!” “ahh y/n, her names carly, very nice girl ive been on a few dates with her, its early days but i think it might be a really good relationship, last night was only meant to be us but she just happened to be there, think you’ll get along with her, shes very nice and not like em at all” “thats good for you hann, we have to get together sometime so i can meet her, you deserve happiness especially after emma cheated on you with him” i knew you could hear the disgust in my voice, that really hurt when that happened, ross was at a cafe on a date and found them together kissing in a booth he joint called adam and i and we both felt betrayed i guess it was more hurtful for adam as he didnt expect it to happen he thought they were fine, happy and in love, but i knew, i knew her, she always took my boyfriends even when she already had one, she could never let me have my moment in the sun, when she started dating Adam i had warned him but he said it was different now and that she had changed, but when ross found them together i knew he was heartbroken and through that we had grown a lot closer together. The both of us mending our hearts together.

“What about you, bug. You gonna tell hann where you disappeared off to last night when ross, G and i came back from smoking” matty said to me hann raising his eyebrows in question as if to say ooh which is what followed. I rolled my eyes playfully smiling “i kinda met someone, kinda the lead singer of arctic monkeys” i said taking another bite of my bacon sandwich. “Oh yeah do tell. What did the night lead to?” adam said jokingly wiggling his eyebrows at me. And then george piped in “lots of headboard smashing and loud noises lets just say that” i playfully smacked his chest raising my eyebrows at him. “Oh yeah? Good on you y/n/n im very proud of you, youve come along quite nicely from the heartbreak that we both experienced 6 months ago” “so have you hann, and there we were thinking that we would never experience a love life again, and here we are both with potential love interests” i state sighing in content happy with the little family i have here in the heart of the U.K.

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After a few meaningless chats about last nights happenings like what what we had to eat and best food after a night out conclusion; it's a doner kebab. And then ross stood up “right im gonna go get some clothes on, ive got a date” “whats her name this time macdonald?” I stated with an airy chuckle “gemma.” “wow. You actually know her name this time, at least you were courteous enough this time to remember” matty states which the rest of us just laughed at. “shut up the lot of you okay, at least i play the field a bit, while im still in my prime before i settle down, plus its not like you have a leg to stand on healy, how many girlfriends have you had since ‘02” matty then huffed and crossed his arms an apparent scowl on his face impeding on the smile he had on his face just a few mere moments ago. “That shut him up quick, note to self bring up the many girlfriends healy has had to quite his waffle” george said holding a hand out mimicking out writing on a piece of paper.

After ross had disappeared to get changed and come back out he appeared again “so ill see you all later we gonna head up to wilmslow together later?” “shit” i exclaimed “whats the time” “errrr just coming up to 2 why?” “shit i was meant to leave at 10 to help lucy with the wedding. fuck, why did no one wake me up, you shits, right im gonna have to quickly get changed and hop in my car, stink dont suppose you could pack my case for me?”

“Yeah course go get changed and ill do it as soon as your out of your bedroom, dont worry dont panic if need be just blame me ill gladly take a hit from bridezilla for you, bug”

“Thank you! I dont have time to get changed, ive got to go now, Youre a blooming life saver, stink, all right ross ill see you later about 9 ish lots of love all of you” i quickly run to my room grab my phone and my car keys on my nightstand and grab my bag thats chucked on the floor and run out of my house on the phone to lucy.

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“WHERE ARE YOU? YOURE MEANT TO BE HERE BY NOW! I MEAN IT Y/N I NEED AN EXPLANATION. NO THEY DONT GO THERE ON THE MAIN TABLE SMALLER CENTERPIECES ON THE ROUND TABLES, I NEED AN EXPLANATION?? IM WAITING ON ONE.”

“It was matty okay luce, he forgot to wake me up, so im gonna be just a tad 3 hours late”

“Oh good lord, okay look as long as youre here for the rehearsal dinner everything is going to be fine im sure”

“Okay good? How are things anyway? Hows henry? Luce?”

“Err alls good here. We have a slightly larger problem though. Em and him just walked in”

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#matty healy x y/n #matty healy x you #matty healy x reader #matty healy #the 1975 #Adam Hann #ross mcdonald #george daniel #alex turner x you #alex turner x reader #arctic monkeys #wedding #fanfiction #fanfic #x reader #Spotify

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