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dylanwritesgood · 7 months

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I'm reblogging this bc it's spooky season and I'm gonna make you all be sad with me. ✌️

Ghost of You | 1

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Part: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven

Summary: Eddie was so full of life, so full of fire, Gareth thought he was invincible—until he wasn't. After the accident, Gareth can't let go. He's determined to talk to him one last time. The universe has other ideas though. Rating: Mature (no sex, just a lot of death and heavy themes) WC: 2,142 Warnings: Death, car accidents, grief, underage drinking, the occult A/N: Your probably-not-local death witch advises you to not ouija and drink, but if you're gonna be stupid, you'd better be tough! But seriously—if you do wanna mess with occult shit this spoopy season, do your reading first.

It started with a ouija board. It was something stupid Eddie had picked up from somewhere and insisted they all try to summon a spirit in Gareth’s parents’ basement. Gareth, who was fourteen and worshipped the ground Eddie walked on, had hesitantly agreed to lay his fingers on the planchet that night at Eddie’s urging, even when Jeff and Kevin wouldn’t. Nothing had happened. The planchet hadn’t moved, the candles hadn’t flickered, and eventually, they gave up and moved on to arguing about what slasher film they were going to watch. The board had stayed in the basement ever since, forgotten.

But then Eddie died. Freak car accident, that was all. He’d seen a dog in the road, and Eddie—who couldn’t even bear to kill a fly—killed himself avoiding it. So goddamn stupid, a waste of a young life. Gareth was so angry with him for swerving. So goddamn angry with himself for letting Eddie leave his house so late when he should have just stayed over. But Eddie had been twenty and full of life and invincible. Until he wasn’t. At least angry was better than numb. Angry was familiar.

But Gareth couldn’t hang onto his anger forever. At some point, just as the numbness gave way to anger, the anger gave way to loneliness. Gareth was missing half of himself, torn asunder and bleeding scarlet and messy over everything in his life. He snapped one too many times like a scared stray dog at Jeff, and only months later—when grief finally let Gareth up for a breath of air before plunging him back into the black, tumultuous pain to drown again—did he realize he couldn’t remember the last time his friends had come around to try and drag him to the surface for a little while.

So it started with a ouija board, and Gareth stumbling down the stairs to his parents’ basement, drunk on the contents of their liquor cabinet and wanting answers. Why did Eddie insist on going home? Why did he swerve? Why did he leave Gareth? Why did he leave Gareth. Why, why, why.

His hands are trembling too hard with alcohol and grief to even attempt to light the jar candle he’d found upstairs with the lighter Eddie had forgotten in Gareth’s room some unknown day. So he sits in the darkness, fingers poised on the planchet the way Eddie had shown him and he waits.

He waits because he doesn’t know what to say. He knows he’s supposed to say something, there’s a ritual to open the session or something, but he can’t remember it. So it’ll have to do, Gareth and his grief in a dark midwestern basement, wordlessly crying out to anyone who is listening to bring Eddie back to him.

“Eddie? Are you there?” Gareth’s whisper breaks the silence, surprising him, as if he hadn’t given his tongue permission to speak.

Nothing happens. He didn’t know why he was expecting anything to happen. Nothing happens, but then Gareth swears he can feel the planchet stir beneath his fingers. It’s a subtle thing, like the way his sister’s cat stirs ever-so-slightly as it dreams before settling back into a deep sleep. He can’t even be sure he felt it.

“Eddie?” He gasps, “Eddie, is that you?”

Hesitantly, as if someone or something is struggling hard to make progress, the little piece of cheap plastic scrapes toward one corner of the board. Upper right. Gareth knows there’s something in that corner, but he can’t remember what it was and he can’t see the board in the darkness.

“Eddie—Eddie, hang on. I can’t see. I gotta let go to light this fucking candle,” Gareth says to the empty basement.

He feels sober now, hands sure as he flicks the striker and depresses the button of the white lighter. Once the candle is lit, scenting the air with warm apple spice, Gareth looks back to the board. The planchet is still resting where he’d last felt it, the tip of it pointing to a wreath-ensconced NO.

Oh. His heart crashes back to the bottom of the pit inside him. But… someone is there. Someone pushed that planchet and his shaking fingers. Gareth shakes out his hands and touches the planchet again.

“Okay, I’m listening. Who are you?”

Gareth painstakingly follows the gentle nudge of the plastic pointer against his fingers. He can’t explain the sensation but it feels… alive. Weak, but alive and struggling against the tips of his fingers to herd them in a direction. So he lets it. It crosses the board and wavers between A and B as if it can’t pick one. It finally jogs right, then left, before setting off across the board again. The journey ends back at the B. Gareth’s waiting for it to continue, but it feels like the life’s gone out of the planchet. He plays back the letters in his mind, pushing their shapes into phonemes his mouth knows.

“Barb? Is your name Barb?” Gareth asks softly.

He knew a Barb. She’d been close to Eddie’s age. She drowned, back in Gareth’s freshman year. Her mom had called her Barbie, and she’d liked pink, and Gareth would never forget her mother’s horrible scream when the first clods of dirt bounced off the lid of Barb’s coffin as they buried her.

The planchet feels alive again beneath his fingers, the subtle, electric feeling is back as it inches its way to the upper left corner. Gareth doesn’t even need to look to know what it says. YES.

“Are you… is your name Barb Holland?”

The planchet starts its journey towards the other corner, but it stalls somewhere midway between the two, wavering. It starts back towards YES before pausing, and then dragging towards NO, only to freeze again. Gareth watches it sympathetically.

“You don’t know, do you?” He whispers, heart breaking all over again for this person who’s lost who they were. The planchet flinches towards YES, so he takes it as an answer. It must be hard to move it.

“It’s okay. Do you know if you… did you drown? Is that how you got here?”

Again, the planchet wavers midway between answers, trembling as if distressed. Gareth eyes the candle from the corner of his eye, observing quietly as the flame flutters. Don’t know.

“You’re okay. It doesn’t matter, Barb.” He murmurs, looking around the darkness of the basement as if he could see who was there with him.

“I’m trying to find my friend, Eddie. He’s… I don’t know how this works—if you can see him, I mean. But he’s an idiot with long, dark, curly hair and a stupid smile and he’s my best friend and he left me.” Gareth wasn’t sure when the tears started, but they were coursing down his face now as he blathered on to a dark and empty basement. He chokes on a sob, “You haven’t seen him, have you?”

The pointer slides slowly to NO, but continues on to spell out S-O-R-Y, which gets the point across. It’s a little hard to indicate a repeated letter this way.

“If you see him, will you tell him Gareth is looking for him?” He pleads. He should feel silly, asking a dead girl for a favor but Gareth will do anything, no matter how silly, just to talk to Eddie one last time. The planchet slides to YES, but it’s slowing. Gareth can feel the heaviness of it.

“You can’t stay, can you? You’re getting tired,” he realizes aloud. The pointer weakly stirs over YES again. “Okay. Okay. Um, I’ll let you go.”

He winces at himself. I’ll let you go, as if it’s a phone call.

“Goodbye, Barb.”

Gareth waits for the planchet to move again, but it doesn’t. He’s left sitting there, the candlelight holding back the darkness, staring at a piece of dead plastic. Reluctantly, he folds the board back into its box and snuffs out the candle. He doesn’t quite know what to make of what he accomplished tonight, but he feels… a little less alone.

It takes Gareth another few days to gather up the courage to try again. In the moment, he’d felt calm, but as soon as he’d packed away the board, blown out the candle, and crawled into his own bed, Gareth had a panic attack. He’d talked to a dead person. He doesn’t really know how it all works—if he can only contact spirits who died nearby or if it’s kind of a generalized pool of dead people waiting to answer like some great spectral call center sort of thing, but Gareth thinks he was talking to Barb Holland. He has no evidence that it was her, but he can just feel it. Gareth had talked to a girl that’s been dead for three years. That was worth panicking over.

This time, he lights the candle first, then sits cross-legged on the floor with a bottle of vodka and takes a pull from it as he finds his courage. He thinks maybe being drunk had helped before, so he’s just trying to replicate what he did last time. Science is about being able to get the same results the same way twice, right? He also thinks that someone told him that one needs to take notes for it to be science, but he doesn’t dare write down what happened to him a few nights ago. It takes him another drink and a few more minutes to finally psych himself up enough to lay his fingers on the planchet again, but he does. And then he waits.

Once again, nothing happens. Gareth is annoyed before he remembers what he did last time. His whisper is still shaky as he addresses the darkness just outside the ring of light cast by his lone candle.

“Eddie, it’s Gareth. Are you there?”

It’s an agonizing few moments before Gareth can feel the planchet come to life under his fingertips. He bites back a sob when the pointer slides to the upper right corner of the board. He wills down the tears, though, and clears his throat.

“Okay, who’s here, then?”

Once again, the plastic piece struggles across the surface of the board, but Gareth is trying so hard to make sure he doesn’t interfere. B… A… B... A... It lingers for a moment and Gareth can practically feel it trying to make a decision. It must, because it slips to R and then goes still. Gareth waits politely to see if there’s anything else they want to say before speaking.

“Barb? Is that you?”

The planchet staggers like a drunk, weaving its way towards YES. It feels like there’s a question mark that’s unspoken, though. Before he can say anything else, it makes a firm little circle around YES and then starts to spell again. B-A-R-B-M-E-B-A-R-B-M-E-B-A—

“Whoa, whoa whoa. It’s okay,” Gareth murmurs, applying just enough pressure to still the pointer, “You’re Barb. Got it. Hi, Barb.”

The pointer hesitates, before slipping to HELLO. Then it moves to the G and hovers there expectantly.

“Yeah, it’s Gareth again. You remember me?”

It doesn’t move. Then, it gets caught, jerking somewhere between YES and NO. She doesn’t know.

“Okay,” he soothes, “It’s okay. We talked a little a few nights ago, but we didn’t say much.”

E-D…Y. Gareth perks up, his heart leaping to his throat. Did Barb find Eddie? Was that Eddie? Did she bring Eddie to him?

“Eddie? Yeah, we talked about Eddie. I asked you to tell him I… I needed him if you saw him. Did you? See him, I mean.”

NO. S-O-R-Y. Gareth deflates. The pointer begins to spell again. S-O-R-Y-S-O-R-Y-S-O-R-Y-S—

“No, no, no. It’s okay, Barb. It’s okay. I’m… I just miss him. I’m sorry,” Gareth says softly, “That was a lot to ask.”

The pointer rattles a little under his touch, but it isn’t him that’s moving it. Suddenly, it’s practically yanked out of his hands as it zips across the board, spelling out her message.

H-E-L-P-M-E-H-E-L-P-M-E-H-E-L-P-M-E-H-E-L—

Just as suddenly as it started, it stops. The pointer feels abandoned, like he’s the only one there now.

“Barb? Are you okay? How can I help?” Gareth asks in a worried voice. His palms are clammy and he can feel goosebumps rising on his skin. He hates how it feels. “Barb? Are you there?”

He waits a painfully long time before he realizes she’s gone. That burst of frenetic energy must’ve burned her out. He slides the planchet to GOODBYE.

“Bye, Barb,” he whispers into the night.

Back in his bed, Gareth still can’t shake the fearful twisting in his gut. He tries the techniques Ms. Kelly taught him to deal with the panic attacks, to no avail. Finally, it hits him—he’s not afraid for himself, he’s frightened for Barb.

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dylanwritesgood · 7 months

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Y'all. This spring, my water heater went out, so I had to scramble to clean the garage so we could replace it, which meant I had to tackle my room boxes of shit I've been lugging around for years without time to properly pack them. I had about two dozen dump boxes of just.... everything in my childhood bedroom I wanted to keep when I was disowned. I haven't looked in these boxes since I was 19 and sobbing as I tried to just like.... get it all dealt with. Anyways. Doom boxes. I didn't have time to really go through them bc as I said, I had no hot water, but I made some snap judgements on stuff like hard drives and photos.

I just found my high school iTunes library on one. All of it. Every photo I took in high school. A photoshoot one friend staged for her class that was an "engagement" shoot between two more friends who ended up getting married a few years later. Homework. The website files from the site I built for my band. My senior photos. Songs I wrote.

Half a decade of material I thought went the way of MySpace. It's my own lil time capsule!

#anyways this is why i harp on personal digital archiving even though ain't none of this shit been stored correctly.

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dylanwritesgood · 7 months

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Reblogging this again bc why not.

Side note, is anyone interested in more content like this? Maybe like, personal archiving tutorials? Topical resources lists? My elevator pitch for why you should preserve your personal archive even if you're "boring" (especially if you're "boring")? Alternatively, my not-sober special interest rant on the same topic?

How To Save Your Old Shit After Floods

Hi, Tumblr. My reach is small and I am but a poor archivist who can't afford Blaze, so please boost this.

Author's note: I hate to have to add this, but cultural heritage is inherently political and this made it to TERFblr somehow so... The author is transmasc. Go get your own archivist to teach you if you're gonna be like that.

The west coast of the US is flooding, and while it might seem unimportant in the face of people dying, getting stranded, and being without power, a lot of people are also going to lose personal history to flooding. This gets talked about a lot in the context of hurricanes, but we should all know what to do to save our pictures and documents, too.

FEMA has a good cultural heritage rescue guide here: https://www.fema.gov/disaster/recover/save-family-treasures

You can contact emergency conservators for advice here: [email protected]

The Northeast Document Conservation Center is also invaluable: https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/overview (check out the Emergency Management section)

Knowing what to do before it happens is crucial to actually saving things. Read this stuff now! Like to save! Bookmark it! Screen cap it! Idc but keep it handy (and remember you might not have online access when you need it)!

The FEMA guide does a really good job at explaining how to dry things, but the basics are:

Separate, separate, separate. While it's still wet if you can do so without causing further damage. Salvage color photos before black and white, paper backing before plastic film. Pre-gelatin silver (black and white on paper) photographs (collodion, ambrotype, cyanotype, etc.) get priority, but most people don't have those. Remove items from frames of they show signs of water damage. Take off dust jackets, unfolder documents, etc.

Rinse with clean, bottled water if there is mud or other debris. Use a dish pan, fill it with a little water, and slip photos in carefully for a short little bath. Dip, dip, dip if you need a little agitation to remove mud, but don't wipe or swish (unless it's REALLY stuck and you're okay with the possibility of damage). Change your water often, and try to avoid agitating things or touching the image side. It is recommended to hold books closed to protect the textblock from more water when you rinse. Obviously, don't soak things. Photos are probably your most fragile material and can be submerged for up to 48 hours before it gets really hard to save them, so you don't want to add to that time.

Spread it all out. Get creative with how you keep things apart. Hang things if they can take the strain, but remember that the corners are the weakest points of paper and photos. Books can be tented on clotheslines if the binding is still sturdy (pages aren't coming loose. If they are, see the next point)

Interleave books with paper towels every 1/4 inch of pages or so. If you can, fan them out and stand them upright. Change the paper towels as they get damp (and idk, use them for cleaning tasks. Shit's expensive)

Get air moving. Indirect airflow from a fan is best. Avoid fluttering. I face my fan into a wall or upwards to diffuse the air flow.

Some staining is likely. Dried mud can be brushed from paper like book textblocks but shouldn't be brushed from photographs, so rinse photos first.

Photograph materials while they're wet and still intact. If you should lose something while salvaging, at least you have a photograph of it so it's not lost forever.

If you cannot dry things immediately, wrap individual items or small clumps that are stuck together in wax paper (ideally. Parchment can work, plastic wrap or ziplocs if you have to) and PUT IT IN A FREEZER. Not an ice chest. The goal is to freeze the water, and ice chests will soak it. Freezing buys you time. It halts water damage until you can deal with things. When it's time to dry, unwrap your items and allow them to fully thaw before even thinking about separating them.

If you find mold, quarantine those materials in sealed plastic bags and freeze. You need professional help. It is not worth getting sick because you tried to clean mold without appropriate protection!

ETA: These techniques also work on that book you dropped in the bathtub or spilled a soda on, just sayin'.

Again please feel free to share this! Fellow conservators, GLAM professionals, or those who have been there, done that, feel free to add to this! Thank you!

Edits:

This was hiding in the tags and is also a good practice! Preparation is key to reducing damage. Which reminds me--store the good stuff on your highest shelves. It won't help in cases like Hurricane Katrina, but a minor-to-medium flood probably won't reach!

#spoiler.... the reason you should preserve your own legacy is bc poor people and people of color often lose their stories #and only exist in institutional records after theyre gone. you deserve the right to tell your story in your own words #not as a bunch of completed government forms

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dylanwritesgood · 7 months

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listen i understand this is my fault for reading stranger things fanfiction in the first place but the amount of times i will see ppl put the most anachronistic shit in there is insane like on a short list of insane things i have seen in stranger things fanfiction

steve harrington using a keurig machine in the 80s

steve got a tattoo and the recommended aftercare was SECONDSKIN.... IN THE 80S

someone mentioned the ring. which came out in 2002.

the amount of fics where they will just be queer walking around holding hands in RURAL INDIANA. IN THE 80S. that shit does not even fly in 2023 in rural indiana.

someone talked about a character's dvd collection. in the 80s.

any singular time someone talks about modern queer identities and explains it to another character. what the fuck do you MEAN this person is a demiboy THAT WORD ISN'T A THING YET. they would call themselves queers and fags and dykes and maybe ftm/mtf or transsexual they aren't calling themselves nonbinary sapphics/achilleans or a nonbinary homoromantic asexual im going to cry it is the 1980s

#Google is 25 years old. which means it wasn't around in the 80s. but it is around today and you too can use it!#looking at you stranger things fandom

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dylanwritesgood · 7 months

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mourning is weird when you know the person who died was disgusted by you but they didn't used to be and they formed huge swaths of who you are. I know I lost him years ago when I came out, but I still use the shitty wrench he loaned me and now I can't ever give it back. But also it's a relief because he'll never talk about the little girl I used to be.

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dylanwritesgood · 7 months

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Is it me or can I barely see any artists on the internet anymore?

As an artist myself, it saddens me how the internet (specially social media) has become so hostile towards creatives, and so I decided to take matters into my own hands and create the Ars Mundi Project.

• What is this project?

This project is made by artists, for artists as a way for you to share your creations in one single place (as of now it will be a google doc, but in the future I intend on making a directory website that looks well, prettier) so other people can find their perfect match and fall in love with stores from all over the world!

It will also help other creatives to find each other better and find people that share the same interests!

• How does it work?

You can send your information over this form (don't worry, it won't save your email) and then I'll add it up on the document! It's just that simple!

However, I won't be able to share the document until I have at least three stores for every letter of the alphabet, so I really need your help to keep this going!

And in case you want to delete your store from the doc, don't worries! I have another form for that! (Once again, it won't save your email)

• What can I do to help the cause?

Share!!!! You can share either this post (over here or other social media, even at your uni or friend group!) or the form in itself, although I would prefer if it was the first option. This can't keep going unless we work as a community!

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

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dylanwritesgood · 7 months

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fun fact!! it turns out that now when u make a new blog, tumblr forces you to follow 3-4 people before you can change your icon or modify your blog in any way!! this, of course, means that, yes, some of the "potential bots" many of us have been automatically blocking could have possibly been genuine new users who were only just seconds in to having an account!!! tumblr is literally screwing new users over!!!!

#.....oops. not that you'll see this but.... sorry.

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dylanwritesgood · 7 months

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i really like hearing people's cat names can you guys tag this post with your cat's name and a fun fact about them. i'll start i live with a cat named scissors and she is a geriatric half-deaf lesbian

#Wednesday Cattams is the best nurse you've ever met and will lovingly clean you and purr but also force you to get up sometimes. Balance.#Pugsley Cattams gets two scoops of food to his sister's one scoop and always reminds you as he spews bits of kibble to meow at you.

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dylanwritesgood · 8 months

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i love when people go through and like all my smut and none of the non-spicy fics. i see you. you know what's good.

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dylanwritesgood · 8 months

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I forgot about this post and feel like it's a good time to come back to it and say that it was a knife. They gave me a knife. Honestly a terrible idea on their part but I'm thrilled.

my hyper conservative and bigoted mom wants to know what I want for my birthday and I can't think of anything to tell her besides like "basic human rights" or "for you to quit pretending I'm cis-het" or "a house"... "a functional economy"... "to not live on a dying planet"... "you to vote blue"...

but apparently my partner collaborated with finding something and so I don't have to answer that question, I just have to put up with more crap in my house probably.

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dylanwritesgood · 9 months

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With the first tropical storm set to make landfall in LA since 1939, it's time to bring this back.