haldolhs

[haldolhs]

Misha Collins is the hero we need.

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Ursula K. Le Guin

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I’m fucking trash

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dear friends of my galveston... please can you help us?

Gentle readers, I know that many of you, for whatever mystifying reason, have loved my Dean/Cas fics set in Galveston. “Crawl” was the first and best known, and I also added “Backstroke” and am nearly finished with “Freestyle”—only one more chapter left to post. I’ve been so humbled by and grateful for that interest; those two boneheads mean a lot to me, and so does East Beach, where the fics are set. Here’s the deal—that house on East Beach, where Cas lives in the fic? It doesn’t exist anymore, because that area was completely wiped out by Hurricane Ike in 2008. All the houses out there are new, built since then (and he’d never be able to afford one, they’re several million apiece). So I based the house on my childhood memories of my family’s two summer fishing camps, one in Galveston and one in Lake Charles/Holly Beach (also wiped out by Ike).

Now, Galveston is about to get pounded again. I evacuated on Wednesday and am five hours inland with my parents, totally safe—but my island’s not. If the predictions turn out to be true, Harvey is headed back to the Gulf to pick up a snack and then make landfall a second time—right over the top of my beloved island. When the storm surge combines with high tide, it fills up the ship channel behind the island, and then the only way for that water to get out is straight over the top of the island. Specifically, the east end, where I live. I walked out of my little house not knowing if I’ll ever see anything in it again. (Don’t worry: I got my guitar, my laptop, and my copy of Emily Dickinson.)

So I’m writing to ask you a favor. If you enjoyed the Galveston fics at all, and have even a smidge of feeling for that beat-up, funky, bittersweet little island, would you think about making a donation to help Houston/Gton residents right now? @randomactsorg​ has partnered with Family Business Beer Co. to set up a hurricane fundraiser and if you left a little dollar for the sake of my hometown, I’d be so grateful. Here’s the link. And if you can’t give, please reblog? That’s all. Thank you. Fandom is made of excellent humans, including you.

[haldolhs]

Hey Supernatural Fandom! Shut the Fuck Up!

Okay, gonna vent, and the haters gonna hate with all the flaming passion of the idiotic self-righteous. Go ahead and bring it the fuck on.

So I just finished watching the latest episode of #Supernatural, season 12, episode 20, titled Twigs & Twine & Tasha Banes. So far as episodes go, I thought T&T&TB was a tad above middling—preferable to the Monster of the Week episodes, as it helped to move the underlying arc of the season along and I’m an impatient, ‘hold your damned pee and lets just get to wherever the hell we’re going’ type, but I’m also one of those #notatrufan heathens who only gets really excited when Cas or Crowley  (or both, preferably) are brought out to play, so there you go.  Not that I don’t love the Winchester boys with every sodden fiber of my gushy fangirl heart, mind you, it’s just while most fangirls dream of being the gooey center of a Sam and Dean sandwich, I’d rather the Wayward Angel and the King of Hell bread my peanut butter.

Spoilers potentially ahead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anyway, so the Sam and Dean/hunter twins portion of this episode’s storyline was interesting enough. Evil witch, blah blah, big tragedy, yadda yadda, Sam and Dean drive off into that dark night like a couple of clueless idjits when they both should have damned-well known exactly what their grieving buddy was going to do the very second Baby’s taillights faded over the horizon, ‘cause it’s exactly what they would have done…well, it’s exactly what Dean would have done. Sam would have thought about it. Then he would have either damned his soul or run off and adopted a dog. 50/50 chance. Maybe 75/25, now. Sam’s a fuckton more codependent than he used to be.  So, yeah, it was entertaining enough, but watching Mary internally fight with herself, and then watching her kick Ketch’s limey, repugnant ass was the highlight of the night for me.

Mary Winchester is a badass motherfucker, and she’s probably the most realistically relatable female character Supernatural has ever presented, EVER, in my not so humble opinion. She’s flawed in the same ways real women are flawed. She’s not a saint. She’s not a martyr. She doesn’t have a heart of fucking  gold. But she’s fundamentally a good person with a more than decent heart and she’s just trying to do the best she fucking can while managing to hold herself together inside what must feel like the waking nightmare of a life she never fucking asked for.

This is a wildly unpopular viewpoint within the verbal SPN fandom, but I’m going to say it, and I’m going to say it loud: I LOVE MARY FUCKING WINCHESTER

So I watch this episode, and then I go on twitter like the masochist I am, and I look up #Supernatural and read the tweets . . .

Christ, WHY do I do that to myself?

What do I read? 75,000 angry tweets about how the Supernatural writers hate women, especially women of color, all they ever do is kill women, wah wah wah wah wah, why not write some strong female characters who actually LIVE, you hateful, misogynistic BIGOTS . . .and yeah, okay, so while I feel no personal need for the entertainment industry to clear every damned aspect of their storylines with the ACLU, I do understand the where the outrage comes from...women do tend to come to bad ends on Supernatural. ‘Course, men do, too. Come on, people…it’s Supernatural. EVERYBODY DIES. Women, men, black, white, gay, straight, it doesn’t fucking matter. If you’re a character on Supernatural, ain’t nobody gonna sell you a life insurance policy.

But for the sake of argument, I’ll admit I do understand the ire of the ‘BOO!! Stop killing women and making them look helpless!!!’ tweeters. I’ll admit that they have a justifiable case.  

Hey! Supernatural writers!! How come you can’t give us any strong, kickass female characters that don’t end up dead in a bathtub, huh?!!

There. See. I’m on board. I’m on your side, female freedom warriors!

But then, the very same people who are pitching a hissy fit about a black female character getting iced and Supernatural Writers’ apparent inability to write strong independent female characters are also tweeting, “God, I HATE Mary! I can’t wait ‘til she dies!!!! UGH! I’m so SICK of them taking time away from our boys to waste on Mary!! Just kill her already!!”

You know what? Y’all DON’T FUCKING DESERVE any strong, female characters who can take care of their own damned selves, because y’all are a bunch of whiny-assed HYPOCRITES, Supernatural fandom!

So why do y’all hate Mary? I can tell you why, because y’all tweet your outrage about it anytime they give this STRONG, INDEPENDENT, ASS-KICKING FEMALE character any screen time. You hate her because she’s not hanging around sucking Sam’s and Dean’s asses and making them hot fucking cocoa like a good little mommy should. No, instead, she took off and ABANDONED her poor little boys (who, by the way, are physically OLDER than she is in the timeline she was unceremoniously dropped back into). And why did she do that? Because she needed to take care of (GASP) HERSELF.

THAT BITCH!!! SHE MADE DEAN SAD. BURN HER AT THE STAKE.

So, in short, all y’all who are bitching at the writers for making women look disposable and weak with one tweet and then turning around and bitching at them for not making Mary Winchester ‘Mommy Of The Year’ with the next need to take a step back and sit the fuck down.

#supernatural #SPN #twigs & twine & tasha banes #mary winchester #season 12 #castiel #sam and dean #crowley

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#spnfamilyvalues. (via Vimeo)

#Vimeo

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THIS.

Secret admirer

SECRET ADMIRER

What do you do, when you feel something forbidden? Not just by society as a vicious, shiftless concept, but by your circle, your friends and fellow travellers? When you see her pilloried, mocked and abused by your most hated and most trusted? How do you step forward? How do you say, “I believe in her? More than him, or him, or my own feckless self, I think this woman is righteous and kind and, yes, beautiful”? Every hand holding a stone, uncertain of all but the pressing need to throw it?

A million moons ago, it was simpler: she was beautiful, not movie-star stunning but crush-worthy, wish-worthy, and more keen, focused and informed than you or I will ever bother to be. A daunting mind, behind sweet blonde bangs. Senators gushed and stammered, “She called me by my first name”. They thrilled at her understanding of our system’s laws and failings… until they realized she truly meant to change them.

Ambition. This is a curse in a woman worse than lust, worse than cruelty. A woman who is here, where we’re observing and weighing, and wants to be there, where she might one day weigh us? Ambition and political savvy are indecent, unnatural – Abe Lincoln fell into the oval office by tripping on a log, and all the while burdened by crazy Mary Todd.

Even Lady MacBeth never vied to be King.

And Hue and Cry went out, “this woman breaks the contract, she is wriggling when we would have her still”, and so many were stirred to engage: conjuring scandals about her businesses (for what woman deals in those?), her husband (what powerful man – JFK aside, God bless and protect – would stray, and what woman would drive him to it/put up with it/ever forgive it?) (Jackie aside, God bless and protect, she took up with that Greek but she never made us think…) scandals about her… wait a minute… murders? Gosh. They pitch at her, drunk with unease.

Crying: Lo! This bitch is after something.

She makes clear what she is after: power. (SHAME!) She jockeys for power, here subtly, here publicly. She would bend the world to her will. And what is her terrible will? Her power has only been used to help, expand protections, look to the overlooked, and first and always to the children.

Which should appear maternal, but Hue and his cousin Cry are fast afoot, reminding us that she cannot be trusted. For decades they will cast about, grabbing the slightest wisp of potential smear, whimpering for a word they can couple with “gate”. They will remind, rebuke: this is a woman of ambition. That word, worthy of some dripping Draculish font. Whence this unwomanly sin?

It can’t come from the disappointment of having your heart-held initiatives squashed. It can’t come from a youth spent in advocacy and activism, pulled up hard against the cobbles and spikes of partisan ossification. It can’t be that she sees what we don’t, and will be both driven and patient enough to leave us in the wake of that seeing…

It mustn’t be rage. Above all, righteous rage cannot fuel her deliberate calm… for then what would that say about all women? Please god, let no one think on rage.

(For there are women everywhere.)

This one works, achieves, and schemes. She compromises, advances – we look at the chessboard and wonder who the hell made the queen so much cooler than the king?

She works, works, racks up victories and awful calls, endures the pecking of Hue and the needling Cry. She rises, yes, she’s a force – but she commits one more great unforgivable sin.

She ages.

Even misogyny, that great bi-partisan accord, hushes its voice – just a bit - before youth. But that’s past, and this woman, this political woman, is still much too present. Youth makes awkward adorable. Youth, vitality (that’s male youth – it lasts a lot longer) make stars out of fumbling bumpkins. Age, for a woman, offers many fine fates, but none of them is “First Among”.

More than time has aged her. But she weathers all, because of the work. The goal. To gain power, and fortune – as every man of either ever has – but above all to effect change, worthy change, where change was not in the offing, or ever to be offered. She has endured decades of unfounded slights and lynch-mob committees. (Others, whose advancement comes after, will breach the wire she laid upon and still look upon her with mistrust.) The internet has turned the damning choir into an inharmonious drone. Hue and Cry will delight in the scant scent of email trails. She will don sunglasses, and remove herself still more from our homespun expectings.

She is too cautious, too politic. She panders, she hides. She was never as ingratiating as her husband. (She wasn’t a lot of things he was, happily.) She was never the voice of change Obama would be. She’s not a star. (A STAR!) She’s a wonk, a hawk, a puppet, a liberal, a conservative, a criminal mastermind – if you have an issue with her, step on up. You can do anything but surprise her.

Head down, eyes up, she’s endured this noxious, fractious nation all this time so that she could get the job done.

But you don’t like her laugh.

So what do I do, surrounded by largely like-minded friends with no patience for this patient creature? With no passion for this known quantity, this raven of age, this politician – “go to the polls, clothespin on nose”, they say, nodding in unhappy accord. I’m at odds with her on issues enough to nod with them, unhappier still that I don’t know how say what’s beneath, what’s unearthed from the muck so well raked…

I can’t say “I’m with her”, because it sounds rehearsed, after so much rehearsal. I can’t say “she’s better than the other”, even though it’s true beyond any human description of truth. I can’t because it’s too awkward to tell my truth, my forbidden opinion on the issue of Hillary Clinton…

All those years. Those Hues, Cries… All that work.

I love her. I’m not “with”, or “okay with”, or anything but dazzled and devout, because this woman has done what none of us could and will do so much more before she’s through. She loves us, you see, and all her awkward obfuscation can’t hide it. She endures, and Spite itself can’t outlast whatever fuel she uses. I think it’s love. I expect some of it is rage, but they’re meant to mingle. I truly hope, for the sake of every woman I know or will, that it’s ambition. Ambition gets shit done.

I love her. Throw your stones.

-joss whedon 8/23/16

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It's this kind of photography, created by someone with the skill and talent and heart to capture her subject's essence and personality, that turns actors into movie stars.

Misha Collins, Vancouver 2016 

Photography by Stardust & Melancholy

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Kuro Drabble Fundraising for Silverwing26!

Dear Kuro fandom,

I’m opening up my inbox for 100-word drabble prompts. Challenge me with:

1. A Kuro pairing, manga or anime, as canon or as cracky as you wish. Ciel/Lizzie? Sebastian/Angela? Bard/Drocell? Give me anything– I’ll do backflips to write it. 2 (optional). Your universe preference– either “Canon” or “AU.” 3 (optional). Your relationship-type preference(s)– “friendship,” “romantic,” or “sexual” (with the caveat that I do not write explicit smut). 4 (optional). Any additional requests, though I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to fulfill them.

If you request a pairing, I ask you to please consider donating to @silverwing26, a magnificent Sebaciel writer who is currently facing serious financial trouble. Drabbles take me anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours to write; I suggest a donation of 5+ dollars. You can message @silverwing26​ for his Paypal info.

In case you need more info to make a decision, you can find over twenty of my previous 100-word fics on AO3 (Sebastian/Everyone, Fallen Angel, and Fanfic is Necromancy), and you can see silverwing26′s brilliant writing here.

Thanks for reading. Reblogs will be thoroughly appreciated.

P.S.- If drabbles aren’t your thing, you can support silverwing26​ by donating anyway, or perhaps by purchasing the lovely jewelry he’s crafted by hand!

[haldolhs]

Drabble Fundraiser

Friendly reminder that @thaliaarche and I are doing drabbles for suggested donations of $5+ to @silverwing26

Here is the original post.

Thalia and I will write pretty much anything (except Thalia will not do explicit smut) for $5+ to Silver. Silver is in dire straits financially and could really use your help.

If you’d be so kind, please reblog the original post above so we can get the word out.

[haldolhs]

I adore you, too, @thaliaarche. Not only are you one of the best writers in this fandom, you're one of the best writers I've come across, period. And I read. A lot. ❤️

Kuro Fic Appreciation Post

In honor of Fanfiction Appreciation Day, I’d like to shout out to my most favorite Kuro fic writers who I know are on tumblr. This is a long list, of course, because this fandom is chock-full of talent. I’ve got even more favorites in yet unknown corners of tumblr, as well as many who (gasp!) have escaped the vortex of this site entirely.

Dear @xabjectlessonsx, I fall at your feet in adoration. “Stain the Water Clear” had me whimpering aloud over your exquisite imagery.

Dear @jaena-eowyn​, “Death Watch” is a massive undertaking, bursting with creativity and innovative plot twists, and I can’t wait to see where you go with it!

Dear @silverwing26​ and @2oulle22-lover, you are fandom legends, and rightfully so. Professor Michaelis makes me laugh so much.

Dear @spillingashes​, your fics can be so short and deceptively simple, and yet they break me.

Dear @queenswatchcatt​ and @sondermichaelis​, the entire time I read “Pygmalion,” I was bouncing up and down in my chair. The premise is sheer brilliance, and so is the execution. Sci-fi fans, check this one out!

Dear @thesightlesssniper​, you’re a true master of writing shippy fluff, and I’m also loving your foray into angst-land with Vignettes. Also … “You’re not my mother, my lord!” (Incidentally, have I mentioned you are the sweetest friend? Thank you for putting with  my stream of consciousness fandom flailing and increasingly implausible headcanons!)

Dear @unholity​, your work is dark and occasionally frightening, and I love it. You also occasionally bring the fluff, and I love that too!

Dear @lizmidford​, your fics are the sweetest things on the planet. Also, omg omg omg Demonology omg. So excited to see where that goes.

Dear @piscaria​, I just love the way you craft your prose. More specifically, I find “Centuries and Seconds,” your meditation on Sebastian’s perception of time, fascinating.

Dearest @aroturier​, @eglentyne-mcqueen​, @haldolhs​– I’ve got you grouped together in my mind as “the first three people who commented on Finis,” which is how I met two of you. Also as “3 of the most remarkable people I’ve met in this fandom,” and also as “3 of my favorite writers ever.” Over the past year, seeing your work has inspired me to explore far more in my fic than I ever expected. I am truly grateful.

Roturier, I’m a huge fan of your clever premises and snappy style– seriously, nobody puts together a sentence like you do.

Eglentyne, I love the psychological drama you weave into your works– “Gnossienne” comes to mind here– and I admire the complex, detailed worlds you create. I can’t wait to learn more about Sebastian Michaelis, “one hell of a barista.”

Haldolhs– I adore you. I just re-read “Like a Sunless Garden,” btw, and am simultaneously terrified and in love (rather like Ciel, hm?). And really, I don’t know if I’d still be in this fandom if not for your kindness and encouragement.

Thank you to you all. Please, continue blessing this fandom with your magnificent fic :-)

[haldolhs]

OMG it's so PRETTY!!!😍

#kuroshitsuji #black butler #book of atlantic

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I have no words, but yours speak to me. Thank you.

It's...

I wish I could just say, “It’s hard,” without shame.

It’s hard.

It’s hard breathing in a world that closes around your throat. It’s hard looking up when all the weight pushes down. It’s hard loving people who don’t do what they’re supposed to do in SPITE of the mental memos, psychic scripts, and telepathic instructions that start off reading FOUR AM, MOMMY SLEEPS and turn into FOUR AM, MOMMY HEARS HER CONTACT LENSES FLUSHED DOWN THE TOILET.

It’s hard knowing the ship you want to sail is moving and your feet are still firmly on the dock. It’s hard not knowing what’s scary so you don’t know how to be brave when everything is scary. It’s hard crying in your car for no reason and it’s hard saying you’ve been crying in your car for no reason. And it’s hard if there’s a reason.

It’s harder when I think there’s something wrong with me if it’s hard. It’s hard not wrapping a bow around this to make it okay for you that it’s hard for either of us.

But my pixie angel muse sent this:

…it seems like the world has determined it’s really going to make you work to get by, just to live and i don’t know how real that is, or what many of the details of it may be, but from over here, i just see “that chick is all lean muscle. that’s somebody who fights for every day. being fierce as fuck is this person’s primary activity”

So if today is hard for you, you’re not alone. And somebody probably sees you the same way.

Okay, fuck it, here’s the bow: it will pass. It’s MIGHT be that there is no sun… or maybe it’s just midnight right now.

#soul bearing #kim rhodes

[haldolhs]

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Google translator throws up “When I grow” at toboso’s caption for this picture. C-ute.

© Yana Toboso (x)

[haldolhs]

There are two kinds of fans

Fan #1: That's a nice character. I wonder what they would be like if they lost everything that ever made them happy and also the world ended.

Fan #2: That's a nice character. I wonder what they're like with five different toys up their ass.

#because I'm trash

[haldolhs]

#that's good funny