WIP Wednesday

Thank you for the tag @heartstringsduet 💘

A little something from Swim Fic (unofficial title)

Carlos arches his back, swings his arms out and then draws them behind. His knotty muscles clench and ache; the weak skin of the scars that flank his spine stretch and tighten. This is not a sensation he enjoys. He tries to ignore it. He rolls his shoulders a few times, tilts his head from side to side slowly, letting the weight of it tug on the slight stiffness of his neck. He shakes his arms and opens his hands wide and then balls them into fists. Open, closed. Open, closed. He does this a few times. He lifts his goggles from where they hang securely around his neck and fixes them on, blinking as his vision adjusts to the imperfections of the plastic. Ready, he steeples his arms in front of him and springs from the edge of the pool into the water, entering the jade surface with the elegance of an experienced diver. He leaves barely a glittering splash. The water covers him like it’s been waiting for him. He disappears underneath it, traveling a couple of meters before he breaches and takes a breath. The water that felt bitter on entry is suddenly bearable, as though he is warming it.

Carlos’ head clears. He thinks of beautiful nothingness. Then, gradually, he contemplates the size of the ocean, the size of Jupiter, the edges of the universe, which he imagines to be like old photo negatives, reflecting everything that has ever happened in pale gray reverse.

Carlos takes a breath and dips his face down, wheeling his right arm and quickening his breaststroke. He turns his head to the left. A pinkish looped object flashes in the corner of his eye smacks him sharply on his cheekbone. His jaw thrums, teeth filling like hollow things with icy drips of pain. Carlos bursts up, out of the water, gasping.

“Hey, dude, what the fuck!” The man who collided with Carlos yells, his voice peculiar in Carlos’ waterlogged ears. “Watch where you’re going!”

Tagging @reyesstrand @goodways @never-blooms @chaotictarlos @lightningboltreader if you haven't already been tagged and want to share anything 💗

Hi :)

Welcome to my bullshit.

My name's Alex or Alexander but feel free to make up nicknames based on my user. I'm a trans man(he/him), and aromantic asexual who's gay but not gay. I'm dyslexic so there will be misspellings, I would apologize in advance but ehh you'll get used to it.

I like Cats, animals, museums, crime shows, FICTIONAL violence n' torture, and taxidermy. Some fandoms/media I like r SPN, Prodigal Son, (Olympic)Figure Skating, whump, thriller Books, deer, Taylor Swift (her songs not rly her(sorry swifties)) and a lot of streamers/YouTubers/content creators.

I don't know what to do with this. I made it just to see what the buzz is abt and to explore the site. Until I know what to make it about this blog is gonna be Abt anything and everything. My attempts at writing, art, fanart, text posts w/ no plot, ect. Atmosphere's the limit y'know.

I think this is sufficient as an intro post and even if it isn't idc, I need sleep. Gg I'll update this later probably

had to go back and remember my Undertale days for this one. might just dump all the old art I made for Undertale someday as well but that day is not today. instead, take some skeletons in the closet

I think I'm funny

(I'm not)

also for anyone curious, the flannels are based on some designs I cooked up last year that I liked enough to make again, though I did switch Cas up a bit

(06/15/23)

Hellooooooo pople of tumbler i'm new here so i would like to know if there's some unspoken rules i must follow

Stayed gone but vox narrates his passive aggressive insecure ass scrolling text from the bottom of his broadcast 👊💥📺

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

the snake of eden 🥰

my mom walked upstairs in her seal skin boots. Fjonka (my rabbit) came running to greet them (her seal skin boots). she sniffed them for a second. nuzzled them, before realizing they weren't breathing. horror dawned on her. she begun to understand she was dealing with something she couldn't comprehend. she backed off, without letting them out of her sight. she STOMPED to let them (the seal skin boots) know that she did NOT like this situation. my mom stomped back. Fjonka stomped harder, exhibiting a bravery and assertedness I had no idea she possessed. mom turned and went back down the stairs. Good job, Fjonk. You sure showed those undead vampire rabbits who's boss.

not exactly inktober but! i will try to draw a quick cat doodle every day of october..... i just think they're neat

i think furniture legs should be carved into little animal feet again.  i think that would solve a lot of problems. 

sometimes when the enemy is at like 1 hp, i like to hit them with some good ol vicious mockery because nothing is funnier to me than actually obliterating someone into the next life with a yo mama joke

🐣 ok we are so back………..

early morning sunlight at Bag End

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.