Dan: My partner asked me…for an iguana. So I got him one. I don’t even worry about being gay anymore. I only worry about the iguana. The first thing I think about when I wake up is the iguana, and the last thing I think about before I go to sleep is the iguana. It figured out doorknobs.

thanks for the tag @katocaster❣️

Last song: element by pop smoke

Currently watching: every SNL comp titled something like “SNL skits that are stingy with the mustard” or “SNL moments that zoop down the fire tube”

Currently reading: The Years by Annie Ernaux (soso good this would be such a hit w the tumblr girlies)

Current obsession: buying trader joe’s flowers for my room ☺️ also not to sound like a tiktok commodity fetishist but i just got the tangle teezer brush for fine and fragile hair and i believe it has changed my life

tagging: @leepacey, @poetrylesbian, @vvienne, @hotgirlcoded, @foragings, @moofinjojo, @cryptonomica❣️✨🏄‍♀️

bill hader has given us more gay rep than disney ever could

master list - greatest hits

the best of each fandom, plus links to fandom-specific master lists (link in section title) for more content

rwrb

comprehensive timeline

weekly 100 word challenge: an (in)complete list: of 100 word drabbles

most recent fic: not a day I don't miss (those rude interruptions) [firstprince]

most popular fic: some element of mystery [firstprince]

the passion project: snl | season 45 episode 2 | hrh prince henry & fsotus alex claremont diaz [firstprince]

recommended fic: burn (they're watching us/i hope that they) [firstprince]

underrated fic: the frustrating, intoxicating, complicated sum of him [firstprince]

favorite post: june and nora's life experience [white house trio]

orv

most recent full fic: i told you, i don't usually- [joongdok]

most popular post: lgy and knw: unexpected companions [no ship]

favorite post: yjh's love language [no ship]

interesting meta: i (the realist) must protect him (the optimist) [implied joongdok]

svsss

most recent post: is sy an incel? [implied bingqiu]

favorite meme: sy vs transmigrating [no ship]

interesting meta: sy comp cis vs comp het: which would win? [no ship]

bts

most popular full fic: special instructions [jikook] (bffs vmin, pizza delivery boy!au)

most popular hc: dope au  [jikook] (mutual pining)

favorite video: how to make your bandmates uncomfortable in under 10 seconds [jikook] (+ bts being done w them)

underrated fic: 161204: 화양연화 (161204: the most beautiful moment in life) [no ship] (yoongi character study)

personas au

most recent full fic: all night (stay with me) [seagull x christian]

most popular hc: high school au [tattoo × baby g]

favorite hc: alpha!christian [no endgame specified] (non-trad abo, bffs seagull & christian, park clan, km 6)

featured hc: you should've seen the other guy [mentions of tattoo × baby g, ian × christian] (bros tattoo and christian, kid!seagull)

underrated hc: ian's "coffee" [no ship] (jeon clan antics)

cql

most recent full fic: the quintessential experience [no ship] (juniors trio, potentially romantic subtext if you squint)

hc contribution: mdzs idol au [no ship]

underrated fic: autumn rain, red lanterns, and bygone memories [no ship] (jiang cheng character study)

ok well all i can say is thank you. im not great at socializing with folk over the internet (or in general heh) but you guys are simply the coolest! on a more serious note, the time i started reblogging which i believe was around september or october was a rough time, i dont want to get into it but school was gwtting me down and i resprted back to rather unhealthy comping mechanisms... but watching snl has been a family tradition since i was in elementary school and i had liveblogged it a bit before so i thought i'd do it again. little did i know i would discover one of the best communities ive ever been in. i just wanted to thank you all for continuing to watch this weird hit or miss comedy show that refuses to die, and that ive been clean since september. i love you all, i'll see ya when i see ya! <3

her Nebraska (1982)

In July I flew to Massachusetts with a plague on, and I felt that it was wrong, but my mother had begged and I’d been out of work for months. Mornings there I ran in long, uneven ovals on the same roads I’d memorized in high school. There’s no sidewalks, but the few feet of dirt between the craggy pavement and the open mouths of the fields serve all right for a single body in motion. When a truck comes up close from behind, the ground shakes, and I step away bouncingly from the street toward thigh-high yellow weeds and grass, and keep going. I was slowly picking my way back in that dirt, sweat-slick from only a plodding couple of miles in peak summer heat, and sucking the wet cotton of my mask in between my teeth on every inhale, when Taylor Swift announced she was releasing a surprise album produced by the guy from The National. Not the guy from The National, like, the voice, but the guy from The National whose photo was circulated on Twitter earlier this year as some kind of antifa super soldier, which isn’t the case, but would’ve been rad. First, I stopped dead to send some outraged, misspelled text messages, and then I ran home faster than I’d moved in years.

Tall, blonde, patrician pop star Taylor Swift is to me something like a cross-between a wife and a boogeyman. Bound we’ve been since we were really children. Time and its changes haven’t rid me of her, and what’s worse is I have never quite been able to wish they would, though I claim as much all the time. Countless hours of my one wild and precious life have been spent on endlessly analyzing the minutiae of Taylor Swift’s music, the mind that made it, the real world events which influenced it. And though all the while I have known she is only a person, and that people, while each strange and lovely in their own ways, are, in the end, mostly dull, needful in just the regular manner, the fantasy is better, the sick dream of a megalomaniac songstress, curious, thrilling, probably evil, and I choose that. I don’t know Taylor Alison Swift, born to this world in, I presume, the usual way. But my Taylor Swift? I’m a renowned expert. I’ve always eaten up stories—movies, music, celebrity news, the one my grandfather tells about falling off his bike once in Ireland as a boy and his face “cracking open like an egg”—like a starved dog. I’m obsessive about my interests, but not inclined to intense fandom, and certainly not fandom in the mode of the stan. For one, I’m too self-absorbed. But caring intensely for a famous person is falling in love with a ghost, and that’s all right—I mean, what the hell? We’re here together just dying... Let’s enjoy—but is an affair best undertaken with the knowledge that everyone alive has their own complex interiority, as unruly as your own, and that you, a stranger, are not in any real way connected to the lawless, blurry middle of that celebrity, and will never be. It’s freeing and fun to know this. I mean, these people are basically in your employ. Glamorous dollhouse dwellers. Acknowledging that uncrossable distance allows for a different, healthier closeness of pure imagination. My feelings, then, can comfortably be at once both fiercely intense and entirely silly. I am a foremost scholar in the art of the Taylor Swift who exists in my head. The real person raised in Pennsylvania I don’t know at all. I have some conjectures on the matter, and, as with all my conjectures, every hackneyed theory, each picky little opinion, I’m sure they’re perfect, brilliant, just absolutely right, but that’s still all they are. Taylor Swift, figure of the cultural imagination, is the Jodie Comer to my Sandra Oh in Killing Eve, annoying and pretty in frills, taunting me endlessly and holding us trapped together in a dance of most enchanting death. But the real Taylor Swift has favorite bed sheets and a social security number and a British boyfriend, none of which I have any desire to know about, and if I saw her at a restaurant I’d politely avert my eyes before, yes, dive-bombing the group text. There’s nobody on Earth I’d stand in line to speak to, but then I’ve been speaking to a certain figment of Taylor Swift for nearly half my life.

I went to a Taylor Swift concert the night before I moved into college in 2009. My father’s work friend, firefighter by day, near professional gambler by night, got comped tickets to the Fearless Tour stop taking place at the nearby casino, and he let me have them as a reward, mainly, for happening to be seventeen. Live in-person and performed acoustically, “Fifteen” made me cry. A few years after that, in the thick, sticky part of my first post-college summer, I wrote approximately twenty-three million words about her in these very pages.  (”Pages”) At that point, Taylor’s most recent release was 2012’s Red, and the work I produced that long ago July about Taylor and her career, writing I was fairly pleased with at the time, feels now, besides just being extremely clearly written by a twenty-one year old, strange to me for the way it favors the sweet over the sour almost uniformly. There is a wholesome kind of ardor in that writing which maybe I’ve outgrown the ability to hold. Or maybe Taylor just proceeded to spend the next half a decade plus releasing one bad single after another, and it was taste—and trespasses against taste—and not some shift in my nature which altered the tenor of our bond. I have real love for my particular image, gleaned from public statements and published art, of smart, bizarre famous woman Taylor Swift, and I admire the bulk of her output very much. I’m just no longer so inclined to fawn. This is not to say I am here to offer a Taylor Swift hate screed. I couldn’t swing it, and, anyway, I’m not a pop feminist-for-hire circa 2010. But we’re older now. Things are different. At twenty-eight, twenty-nine this month—Taylor will, also this December, turn thirty-one—I regard Taylor Swift warily, like an ex with whom you have a tentative friendship, perpetually on the brink of falling one way or the other into hatred or delight, only to wobble back the opposite direction again at the slightest provocation, but still, despite best efforts, even, I regard her all the time. 

folklore was released at midnight on July 24th 2020, but I was at a cabin in rural Vermont without Internet or cell service. I drank Bud Light seltzers with my mother while watching the eerie pandemic return of Major League Baseball, and when I got into a strange bed there I stewed, knowing there were people out in the world all over who were hearing Taylor Swift songs I never had, and that this was a fundamental wrong, a disruption in the balance of the universe. I listened to it the next morning in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. 

And folklore is great. That’s the terrible thing. Slightly less great, maybe, than some people have insisted, tricked, I think, by just the pronounced shift in sound. But it’s great. A little gift I asked for a thousand times and was still surprised to get, like a wife who didn’t expect her henpecked husband to ever follow through and buy the paraffin wax hand bath as-see-on-TV. For years, I’ve been halfheartedly insisting that Taylor had a great album in her. I’d say it even, perhaps especially, while she stubbornly fed me gruel. Or worse, gruel with the occasional whiff of something better. With a ripe, little raspberry dropped into the slop. The bright, villainous thrill of “Getaway Car” made me believe Taylor, my Taylor, was in there somewhere under the lacquer of sequins and synth, which, while not objectionable by default, seemed a costume, and an ill-fitting one. The lived-in world of “Cornelia Street” made those old scars sting. That gay “Delicate” video. When she did “Call It What You Want” on SNL and played guitar while wearing an ugly sweater. If the abominable “ME!”, lead single off Lover, was the stick, 1989’s “Clean” was the carrot. I was Charlie Brown, and Taylor my Lucy, yanking the football back again and again. Over drinks I still yelled that Taylor Swift’s next album would be, “her Nebraska”, referring to my favorite Bruce Springsteen record, and learned to live with that egg on my face for good. I suppose I even came to like it. There was something inherently funny in taking up, like, “blind faith in the as of yet untapped greater artistic potential of massively wealthy and popular singer Taylor Swift” as my totally inane personal cause du jour, and eventually it was a bit, a gag I performed to be obstinate and didactic, but way down somewhere awful near my kidneys I meant it the whole while. And then she did it. A pandemic befell the world and amid a sea of human suffering Taylor Swift remembered she can write. She wrote, and with a massive, crucial assist from Aaron Dessner, whose music on this record is sometimes so beautiful it actually angers me, as the last thing I needed in already perilous times was to be made to try and marry my uniquely perverse emotional responses to beloved divorced dad band The National and fucking Taylor Swift,  she made an album which, if not her Nebraska, per se (I’ve come to realize that a major part of believing Taylor Swift will one day make an album I find as quietly devastating and gorgeous as Nebraska is knowing that no album will ever actually be Her Nebraska... That each will, rather, to me, be more and more evidence that it’s coming still, more proof that the limit is untouched, on and on ad infinitum, or at least until the seas take us into a place of salty peace.) is a shocking credit to all my hard-fought and deluded confidence. folklore is great. This fact has made me feel almost equally as disoriented from my understanding of the world as the time-melting COVID-19 lockdowns have, and it turned my Spotify year in review annual collective AI humiliation kink thing into a glaring indictment of my mental state, but still, I mean... It’s great.

In talking about folklore a bit this week, there are a number of specific topics I intend to cover—what a thrill it is to hear Taylor say “fuck”; Taylor’s terrifying birth chart; the astoundingly perfect bridge of “the last great american dynasty”; “because my ass is located at the back of my body”; the bit in last year’s “Lover” where deranged WASP Taylor Swift implies that to “leave the Christmas lights up til January” is some signifier of being a love-struck bohemian, when actually everyone who doesn’t employ domestic staff to take their lights down does this; how reputation is the best of the Taylor Swift records released in the latter half of the 2010s, actually, and the people who can’t see that are cowards—but intend mostly to let the muse move me where she will. Against the advice of my better angels, she—that tie-in marketing eldritch terror—always does.

Oh my god I need to not be pining over a stranger at 4 am with this level of anxiety and no Vyvanse, but you made my heart go yeehaw with that poetry shit. I'll light a candle to that. May your night be restful, Emmett.

asghffjf man thank you, cheers to that !

i hope your night is too! mine's nicd, i'm watching snl comps and hanging out in the living room lol

Today’s compilation:

Totally Hits 3 2000 Pop / Pop-Rock / Alternative Rock / R&B / Country

The success of the top 40 greatest hits comp throughout the late 90s and early aughts in America is just a phenomenon that I'm not sure that I'll ever totally understand. It's like, hey kids, you know those songs that we constantly inundate you with that you listen to literally all the time on radio and MTV for free? Well, how would you like to pay $18.99 for the ability to listen to those same exact songs all the time even more?! What a scam, man!

Anyway, the first top 40 greatest hits series to hit real paydirt in the US, as you probably know already, was Now That's What I Call Music!, which was the result of a partnership between Universal Music Group and EMI. The series had actually been around since 1983 in the UK, but it sold like fucking hotcakes when they finally decided to bring it stateside in 1998.

And jealously witnessing all those moved units from the sidelines were BMG and Warner Music Group, who then decided to form their own partnership, and ended up releasing their own series, Totally Hits, which played as the consummate MadTV to Now's SNL.

Now, I think what seems to get lost in the sauce between series like Now and Totally Hits is that people think that these are just comps that merely take chart-busting hits and put them on a CD. But what people don't seem to realize is that every song placed on these comps is actually owned by one of the labels participating in their respective partnerships. That is to say, every song that appears on a Now comp comes from either Universal Music Group or EMI and their many sublabels and subsidiaries, and every song that appears on a Totally Hits comp comes from either BMG or Warner Music Group and their many sublabels and subsidiaries.

So, who's got the better catalog? I think it's pretty clearly the Now labels. But then again, it was never really a contest, was it? I mean, people still watched MadTV, right? And MadTV knew they'd never touch SNL, but they got high enough ratings to make the venture still seem worth the effort. Same for Totally Hits. I don't think BMG and Warner ever expected to sniff Now's throne, but they still managed to sell plenty of records for themselves.

And honestly, in retrospect, I think the lane that Totally Hits occupied was one that effectively presented hits that we may have actually at this point totally forgotten about. They definitely had #1s, and they put those on their CDs, but I'd be totally lying if I told you that I had heard "Wifey" by Next since it came out 21 years ago. And when's the last time you thought about Vitamin C? Did you actually completely forget about her solo career? Be honest!

Now is all the hits you remember, but Totally Hits, because of their less robust catalog, actually turns out to be the hits you remember and also some hits you probably haven't heard in a very long time. And in some ways, that makes it more enjoyable. It's a good series to pillage for nostalgia junkies like myself who thought they'd actually hit a dead end in uncovering all the  nostalgia that they could find, but actually came upon a pretty sweet fix instead.

Highlights:

P!nk - "Most Girls" Matchbox Twenty - "Bent" Vertical Horizon - "Everything You Want" Third Eye Blind - "Deep Inside of You" Barenaked Ladies - "Pinch Me" Dido - "Here With Me" Toni Braxton - "He Wasn't Man Enough" Christina Aguilera - "What a Girl Wants" Next - "Wifey" Vitamin C - "Graduation" The Corrs - "Breathless" Whitney Houston - "Fine"

no i dont watch snl but yes i will watch snl comps on youtube

9, 21, 29 🌻

9. a quote that you would consider getting tattooed or putting in a frame

Hmmm. Anything about kindness or love, or Memento Mori, or any line from “i carry your heart with me”. I love that poem. Or “Have courage and be kind”! There’s a lot of good quotes out there

21. a youtube video you find useful, entertaining or relaxing

Both “Chonk” and “Hoops” by SNL make me laugh outrageously, and so does  “Dot Dot Dot”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2Z23SAFVA

And also any good vine comp

29. a favourite easy recipe: 5 ingredients or less, or takes less than 30 min to make

Ramen? I don’t do a lot of cooking right now. I need to work on that. I like scrambled egg sandwiches, and ham and mayo sandwiches too

was anyone going to tell me that the love story of the century took place on snl weekend update in the early 2010s, or did i have to watch a compilation about stefon and seth meyers on my own???

#ThinkPositive2019: Oct 30

Slept until my alarm went off - might have got at least 5 hours of sleep

Had a very chill day at work

Used some comp time to leave early and run a few personal errands

Did a test run of my Jack Skellington makeup for tomorrow night and I AM PUMPED at how it turned out. Hoping it turns out even better tomorrow!

Had dinner at home with my parents

Watched part of Game 7 of the World Series

Had ice cream with the best friend and our minions

Lots of cuddles from Mr. Chips

Had a lovely chat with Susie on my drive home

Niall’s tweets and insta posts

NIALL ANNOUNCED THE NICE TO MEET YA TOUR - Hello Tulsa, Phoenix, and Vegas!!!! (at least that’s the plan)

More video clips of Harry from pre-recorded radio interviews - we are getting something this weekend

New pics of Harry from when he filmed his segments on Jools Holland - I’m.... THE SUSPENDERS BETTER BE STICKING AROUND

Luke’s insta posts

Ashton’s insta posts

Calum’s insta posts

Alejandro’s insta posts

1 SLEEP UNTIL I SEE 5SOS ON HALLOWEEN

2 SLEEPS UNTIL I SEE KELLI O’HARA, AMBER RILEY, CHITA RIVERA, AND ADAM PASCAL

3 SLEEPS UNTIL I SEE KRISTIN CHENOWETH

17 SLEEPS UNTIL I SEE ALEJANDRO

17 SLEEPS UNTIL HARRY PULLS DOUBLE DUTY ON SNL