a few goobers from the three planes, my magi-teslapunk fantasyish universe

(he/him for the 2 guys on the left, pe/per for the gentleskleph in the center, he/they for the fancy hat wearing automaton, she/xit for the fist-happy kit-de on the far left)

I love this painting (The Cyclops by Odilon Redon) but it kind of scares the shit out of me. It has a very dreamlike quality and also I have a lot of dreams about giant things pursuing me/watching me so it's a distressing combo (again, love it.)

When you idly think about Celegorm possibly being most like Nerdanel of all the sons of Feanor, and then you start thinking about Nerdanel getting a post-Darkening moral decay arc all of her own to mirror her son(s)'s.

reading da reddit discussions about anders makes me feel a little crazy because it's like oh you've never been a member of an oppressed group that got pushed around so badly that it made you violent. you can't conceptualise the bitterness and anger that brings and think only demonic possession could drive someone to extreme action. we live very different lives.

possibly my favourite lhl meta now is that extremely galaxy-brained half hour video essay on b站 exploring essentially one thing:

llh can be read as a "mother" and a symbol of femininity/maternity in its purest form

what if feminine and maternal qualities can be uncoupled from biology and patriarchy. what would it look like. it would look like lxy's rebirth as llh. it would look like llh's nurturing and guidance of fdb. it is essentially the spirit of freedom and life llh held. it transcends any notions of gender.

feeling more validated than ever. and this is also far more than i've ever asked for. my brain has been rewired. i'm kissing you on the mouth op

*watches the prequel trilogy with the og trilogy once* GUYS I THINK I UNDERSTAND STAR WARS NOW

I would like to ask myself, my past self, why I thought wrangling code and trying to chase off bug bounty hunters trying to get their bag was a great career choice.

Thoughts on the Steve-Nancy-Jonathan love triangle of season 4

There are two main problems, in my view, with the way the love triangle is set up. The first is this:

Jonathan should have told Nancy the truth, and he should have done it right off the bat, either at the start of the season or even shortly before it.

The thing is, the root conflict between Jonathan and Nancy makes sense. Nancy wants to go to a different college than Jonathan does, one too far away from his family for him to be able to support them the way he wants to. It makes sense he doesn’t want to follow her to Emerson, and it makes sense he doesn’t want her to follow him to his preferred college by giving up on her own dreams either. But Nancy would understand the weight of this as well—she cares about her education and her future.

If Jonathan tells Nancy his reservations, maybe Nancy’s immediate response is, fine, I’ll come with you instead, but on the strength of both her own and Jonathan’s wish for her to follow her own path in life, I think they could both spend season 4 just… thinking. They have by now spent over half a year in a long distance relationship—are they prepared to continue like this through all those years of college? What about after? Who knows what the situation might look like by then, what new concerns might keep them apart? How much of their lives are they willing to dedicate to uncertainty and distance?

We saw in season 3 that their relationship, while rooted in love and respect, is hardly some perfect cloudless fantasy life. Now, building on this, let’s ask the next question: how much are they willing to sacrifice to keep it?

This would give Nancy something real to think through over the course of the season about her relationship with Jonathan and what she’s willing to give up for it. It’s something that requires looking within herself and drawing a conclusion—rather than just being left in the dark to be kind of annoyed and unsure of where she stands with him. As for Jonathan, it avoids making him the cause of the problem, and gives one of the few things he’s got going on this season more weight than a simple lack-of-communication plot.

The likeliest reasons I can think of as to why the showrunners didn’t go this path to begin with would be either 1) because they didn’t think the “separate colleges” problem would be big enough to matter if Jonathan actually said anything about it, in which case Jonathan just looks stupid, or 2) because if this is what breaks Nancy and Jonathan apart, then it wasn’t really an issue of incompatibility between them but just life getting in the way, which could in turn make an endgame Nancy/Steve pairing feel like just a consolation prize to Nancy when she couldn’t be with the guy she really wanted.

I can understand the second one, but I don’t agree with it. People aren’t made for one specific other person; they find someone out of many possible someones and then build a life with them.

Nancy chose Jonathan over Steve once before, that’s true—but they are all three different people now, particularly Steve, and isn’t that the whole thing making her reconsider her relationship with him to begin with? I don’t think you need to demonstrate that Nancy and Jonathan could never have worked out under any circumstances in order to allow Nancy to have an equally worthy, or better, relationship with Steve.

This is not to say that Jonathan and Nancy can’t come out of this still together; in fact, I think this version of events will make an eventual reconciliation all the stronger. If, at the end of the day, they find that yes, they are willing to do what it takes to stay together, whether that means giving up on their individual plans for the future or accepting years of staying in a long-distance relationship or something other than that again, it would feel like their relationship has survived a real trial-by-fire and come out stronger for it. It would, when all is said and done at the end of the final season, give the season 4 strain in their relationship purpose, as it would lead to a real affirmation of the strength of their commitment to one another. But as it stands in canon—assuming Nancy and Jonathan remain together in the end, won’t this little detour of theirs feel kind of weird? What does it provide their relationship that their disagreement in season 3 did not?

In season 4 as it is, Nancy lacks agency, and Jonathan is unreliable. The whole situation feels insubstantial, made up as an excuse for more relationship drama. But it didn’t need to be that way.

There is real weight to Jonathan’s dilemma. Instead of making this another flimsy story about lack of communication breaking a relationship apart—just take the issue at hand seriously.

The second main problem is that Steve and Nancy should have spent the season becoming friends more than anything.

The thing about Steve and Nancy’s dynamic is that it has always been defined by romance. We meet them when they’re already pretty much together, and it’s clear there was no real “just friends” period before that point—just a steadily building flirtation. When they break up in season 2, that also marks the end of their interactions altogether, except for a line or two taking place in a larger group dynamic at the end of season 3. Then season 4 puts them together again and they immediately return to flirting.

The problem here is that their relationship lacks a real sense of foundation. What lies beneath the romance, the dating aspect? I don’t know. I’m not sure they do either. In their time together, they have always adhered to it—and Nancy in particular spent season 2 seeming to be mostly going through the motions of it more than anything. What do they look like together without the societal framework of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship to fall back on?

Additionally, Nancy and Steve have some real unresolved issues to work through. The show seems to have mostly decided the problem was just that Steve had a lot of growing left to do back when they were dating and leaves it at that, but the reality of their time together and how it impacted both of them could easily be delved into more deeply than that. Talking about it—offering each their perspectives, both what they thought then and how those thoughts have changed by now—would be a compelling way to show the two characters feeling their way back to something like solid ground with one another after so long adrift.

This—hashing out what went wrong in their old relationship—would be happening simultaneously as Nancy is contemplating her current one with Jonathan, pushing her to consider the two in relation to one another. Any hints of Nancy and Steve’s relationship blossoming back up come near the end of the season, when they’ve had time to settle back into being on good terms with each other, and it feels like something they unearth or build anew rather than them just kind of picking back up where they left off.

This also has the benefit of giving them more to do—more of a chance to grow, or to show how they’ve grown—than either of them really had this season otherwise.

Steve holds no speech about how it has “always been you”; he truly moved on in season 3, like he said, even if season 4 sees old feelings coming back to him. They might still talk about whether they might have made it as a couple as the people they are now, and this may or may not take the form of a confession. Eddie doesn’t make any claims about unambiguous signs of true love on Nancy’s part. Possibly nothing is ever stated explicitly—to avoid forcing the issue to come to a point, instead allowing them to potentially sink back into friendship at the end of the day—but there is a sense that an old door, or perhaps just a window, has been reopened.

Narratively, this will strengthen any potential endgame Nancy/Steve relationship, because it will give their difficulties in season 2 and time apart in season 3 greater impact. Their breakup mattered, and it defines their relationship even now, as they struggle to work through it. Their time apart mattered, and it changed how they feel about one another and the places from which they approach each other. It will also narratively strengthen an endgame where they don’t end up together, because their friendship will remain regardless now that it’s no longer dependent upon romance to exist; no matter what happens in the end, an important relationship was repaired and remains repaired, so the time spent developing it won’t feel wasted even if no romance ultimately comes of it.

Comparing canon—what are we left with if Nancy and Steve don’t end up together? What would be the point of it all? Steve-and-Nancy live and die by their romance, and so does the strength of their season 4 screentime together.

In this new version of the story, things don’t look too dissimilar to canon by the end of the season. Like before, Nancy has come to view Steve in a new light. Like before, Jonathan and Nancy still haven’t worked out their problems. Like before, all their relationships face an uncertain future. The destination remains the same; it’s only that the path there has been slightly altered.

Yeah I can tell people have lost their grasp on basic ongoing forms of oppression when they say things like "hatred of men and masculinity is one of the reasons trans women, BIPOC and Jewish men are persecuted" like what a non-sequiteur. Imagine being so ignorant of power structures in your attempt to """progressively""" defend men that you become transphobic

tom definitely read tons of homoerotic fiction in college all while not consciously picking up on it, but absolutely gravitating toward those themes and simply not touching any discussions of homoeroticism (and especially not whether it's *actually gay*) with a ten foot pole. just in his own little bubble with piles upon piles of everything but two men making love to each other in plain text, and no acknowledgment of why or what it made him, or even attempting to argue that it didn't because part of him just knew not to bring it up. maybe he could be seen reading them and he could respond if someone else initiated a discussion but if the word gay came up he'd go quiet and withdraw and feel discouraged from continuing to read it for a bit. maybe one day he came across Maurice and started reading and saw himself in it so deeply and simply had enough cognitive dissonance to not fully register the homosexuality until he was so far in that he could not possibly put the book down, and by the end he wept with the realization of what he was and it hurt so bad that he couldn't cope. he just put the book back on the shelf and stopped reading entirely for a long time.

this is so silly. one of the perks of having goody gardens as a thing is that it gives me an excuse to have like 50 billion fursonas. but then i'll keep thinking "but what about my truesona" as if that doesn't completely defeat the purpose

sniffles sadly. every day im so sad that fnaf didnt go with placing vanny into aftons role.... god forbid women do anything ! ! !

want to make a resources zine/web page for the general intersection of trauma/compassion/vulnerability/dissociation/IFS stuff since like a good 85% of any given advice i have to offer comes from this framing, but due to Being A Person Who Severely Needs These Resources Myself i dont really have the time or energy to compile rn. and idk when i will. so here i find myself telling ppl to search the same terms for the umpteenth time

sometimes someone seems autistic and they're literally. just Asian. western medicine does this.

i need to work on learning spanish again

Migration Patterns snippet

“Dick’s not the only one who got a shit ton of training,” he told her, tilting his head. Trying to judge the evenness of her pupils. “You’re cold.”   “City dropped me in my fucking pajamas,” Elle said, tone repressive as the arms she crossed tight over her chest. Like a mirror- the feel of it more a joke, something warm, warm, warm lighting wildly through Jason, she matched the angle of his face before saying in a whole different voice, “Didn’t miss you choking men with your thighs.”   There was blood on the jacket. A least one tear, a missed knife dragged through heavy, expensive fabric- it was sure as shit warmer than the tank top and yoga pants she was wearing.   Jason had it halfway off before he answered, belated. “You were going to kill all of them.”   “Shockingly,” Elle drawled, a whole wave of heat choking him as she held out her hand, taking the suit jacket like a forgone conclusion. “My morals take a raincheck when assholes shoot at my head.”   She wasn’t that small, not really. Short without those shit stomping shoes he was used to seeing her in- delicate to the point of absurdity drowning in his clothes, huddled, huge eyes catching neon.   “Self defense,” Jason heard himself offer, just to see her blink.   Scowl.   A Gotham girl, barefoot in an alley and still ready to go.   “I wasn’t worried,” Elle said, skirting around his body and making a sharp left toward the street.   “I’m parked the other way.”   Elle stopped. Closed her eyes right in the moment he might have really been able to see them, paused beneath the golden light of the stupid faux old-fashion streetlights the city had thrown up all over this district. Not even fucking solar, ugly as sin and twice as expensive as what had been there in the first place.   “I’m good,” she said, before looking back, somewhere toward Jason’s left shoulder, “Thanks for the jacket.”   The absolute fuck she was.   “Elle.”   A tired, inexplicable smile was all the real answer he got. “Night, Jay.”