I would lay down my life to hear more about Will's relationship with his mom from you

will LOVES his mama. SO bad.

naomi loves him too. obviously. that's her BABY.

naomi had will when she was nineteen. she was kicked out as soon as she started showing -- came home from her friend's house to find her guitar and packed backpack on the lawn. choked it back, turned around, got back in her car, and started driving.

texas was warm, at least. lot harder to sleep in your car when it's cold out.

course, it's also hard to sleep in your car when you're pregnant.

when things were toughest, when she had heartburn seemingly everywhere and her ankles hurt and her feet swelled up and she was just scared and furious and defeated all at once, she'd grit her teeth, clench her fists, unclench them, place them gently on her belly, and mutter it's you and me and sheer fucking will, baby. this was a regular occurance.

she sang to herself. constantly, of course she did. as she bussed tables and scrubbed dishes and played and played and played her guitar, she was singing. dolly parton was in there a lot, and and reba mcentire and june carter cash. tina turner every day of the week. she had that swingin, raspy voice like glass of smoked whiskey.

there's a reason she attracted apollo's attention.

when her water broke she started sobbing and didn't stop. she hadn't cried in months and suddenly all her terror hit her at once -- she was alone, she had slept with a god, she was going to have a kid and she didn't have a fucking place to raise it. and the fucking hospital bills -- what the hell was she gonna do about the hospital bills --

it hurt like sweet hell. she knew it was gonna hurt but god. god, fuck, it hurt, it hurt so bad, and the only person holding her hand was the nurse with the kind eyes, but she wanted her fucking mama. but she hadn't spoken to mama in months. and she hadn't smiled at her in longer.

she'd heard a thousand stories about how all the pain melts away the first time you touch your baby, but not for her. she could barely stand to hold him. she turned away and cried into her pillow until she passed out.

there was no magic moment when she finally held her son for the first time. he cried the whole time and shook his pudgy little fists and was mostly bright candy red with the force of her yelling. he kicked her in the face, too, and of course it wasn't his fault but her first words to her newborn baby son were watch it, you little shit and it was so absurd that it knocked the terror right out of her.

some fuckin' mother she was, cussin out her baby. she rested him against her chest and bit her knuckle hard to keep her giggles in, and didn't come close to managing and her poor baby bounced a little as her chest shook. strangely, it seemed to rock him. he stopped crying.

I Am Stopping Here Because I Am Going To Write This Actually Gimme A Couple Hours

update: it’s here

If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)

At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.

Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.

some more of these two

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.

my dead goth son and his friendly neighborhood personified concept of insanity

Bisan is calling for another global strike!

I saw some posts just outlining Jan 21st, and wanted to clarify that Bisan has called for a full seven days of action.

What a global strike would look like is:

calling in sick to work

purchasing bare essentials ahead of the week so you can observe the general boycott of goods / buying as little as you genuinely can

putting in a concerted effort to elevate Palestinian voices and make it clear that this strike is in support of a permanent ceasefire!

For those who will have to purchase necessary goods during this time, please observe the brands that the BDS movement is asking us to boycott!

♢♢♢

Right now is also a good time to mention some better uses for your money during this week.

Available e-sims in Gaza are running low!!

Mirna El Helbawi and her team are working round the clock to continue to connect Palestinians as Israel does its best to cut them off from the rest of the world.

You can learn how to purchase and send e-sims here, and below you’ll find a list of what is currently needed (the areas in brackets indicate what region you should select to buy e-sims in).

--

CareforGaza is an organisation that does verifiably good work, distributing supplies directly to Palestinian families.

They have a Gofundme set up at the moment, but because of Gofundme’s poor track record regarding refusing to transfer funds to Palestinians, I’d recommend continuing to donate directly to their PayPal here.

Good luck to all of you. Don't turn away from Palestine!

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

quiet hours

closeups under the cut :]

i really like these

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

FNAF movie Vanessa’s childhood was never hers

babygirl the way you forsake your happiness on your relentless quest to vengeance, your complicated relationship with gender and the way you're covered in blood have bewitched me body and soul

yeah Zoro we know what you mean..... or do we?

The "radical leftists" on this site who talk constantly about the importance of solidarity and kindness and compassion and then immediately tell anyone who disagrees with them to kill themselves are going to be devastated when they learn how much of actual union organizing involves talking to people whose politics you find incredibly repugnant and meeting them where they're at in order to find common ground

Ayo 😳

The first time Danny sees Dick Grayson he calls him Tata.

Danny, in his Ghost Zone travels, befriended the Flying Graysons. John and Mary like him so much, that it started as a joke, sort of.

"Ahhhhh, the son we never had! Welcome!"

"My little Robin's long lost little brother, come, come!"

And it morphed into him jokingly calling them Tata and Daj. Then it wasn't really a joke anymore.

Then the Observants inform him that as far as Ghost Law is concerned, they're his Ghost Guardians.

This means that Danny has two sets of parents; Jack and Maddie on the human side of things, and John and Mary on the ghost side of thing.

So when he sees Dick Grayson, who looks a lot like John, it just slips out.

This leads to a very awkward stare off in the middle of a coffee shop.

Danny has no idea how to explain himself.

this is kerdly 2 me. btw