#i revived this set from several months ago

[idesofrevolution]

The Architect

It was supposed to be my magnum opus. Ravenswood- my last creation and my forever home. For years I had suffered and degraded myself in firms filled with peons who wouldn't know architectural integrity if it hit them on the nose, and when I finally finished that last project, it took all of fifteen minutes for me to type up my resignation and slap it on the boss' desk. I'd gotten the severance I'd worked nearly 31 years for, and had built up the name Drake Astramore to a prominent name in the business. Finally, I was free. Free to create unrestricted by the trivial boundaries set by those beneath me.

Work was slow in the beginning, my modern designs never seemed to convey the right mood or tone which I was seeking. Completely dejected, I resorted to corresponding with a peer of my own caliber who specialized in Eastlake-Tradition Victorian revival: James Lafreniere. The man was perhaps in his late 80's, far past his prime, but I did value his insight purely to help spur some sort of creative spark. He insisted on a large, rambling estate on a large plot just outside the city. He envisioned towers, stained glass, mahogany... some vacuous opulence that did not speak to my taste whatsoever. I was unconvinced, I saw Victorian architecture as tasteless fluff and ornamentation. Though, as old Mr. Lafreniere pushed, I suppose I did cave in quite a bit. His design was based on some sort of "sacred geometry" he'd studied while in Haiti some time ago. The man was a dog with a bone, frantically trying to persuade me into confirming his "spiritualist" idea for the house. The more he pressed, the less I firmly stood my ground. After all, I was happy with the layout he'd drafted and with my final additions and perfections to his concept, I was satisfied.

Thus, on that foggy winters day, a mere week or two since old Lafreniere was dead and buried, the house was nearing completion after nearly 13 months. I was coming in to do a final inspection, specifically confirming the four crystal chandeliers that were to be placed in the ballroom. Reynolds, the contractor I had hired, went radio silent two days prior, and I was eager to give him a modicum of advice on professionalism. As I pulled up to the antique wrought iron gates, I was perturbed to see them still chained tightly with a large padlock. I had no key, and had no response from Reynolds. Just as I prepared to go to the local hardware store to purchase a pair of bolt cutters, I saw a bulldozer slowly meandering up the gravel driveway through the dense fog. Perhaps Reynolds hadn't abandoned me as I'd thought. Exiting the car, I stood behind the iron gates as the machine came to a halt just on the other side. The door opened and instead of the middle aged potbelly which I had hired, a young man with a peculiar look in his eye exited the vehicle and sat on the steps of the machine.

"Who are you?" The young man glibly chided from his perch.

"What the hell do you mean who am I? I am the owner of this property. Who are you?" He sat idly staring me up and down, some flippant smirk forming slowly on his face. He hopped down, his massive rubber boots landing in a puddle, splashing muddy water up and down his clothes.

"Mr. Astramore, I was wondering if I'd ever get to meet you in person." He sauntered over to the gates, unlocking the heavy padlock as the gates creaked open on their own. I hadn't recalled requesting hydraulic automation on the main gate, but I assumed incorrectly that it was part of the system I'd purchased. "The name is Jimmy. Reynolds proved to be... unreliable on the job. So the company sent me as a replacement. I'm surprised you hadn't heard."

"I most certainly have not heard. I should like to have known about staffing changes. He has completely ignored me for days now." The man looked down, chuckling under his breath.

"Yeah. The guy just up and left one day. Never called the company or anything. Just poof. Vanished." Contractors. The bane of every architect. Unreliable thieves, the lot of them. This young man certainly mimicked that aura of untrustworthiness, but as the job was nearly complete, I preferred at the time to simply allow him to finish. "The house is ready for you, sir. Take this, please let me know if you need anything from me, I'll be finishing the landscaping for the raingardens today." He pulled off a two-way radio from his belt, handing it to me. I could smell the putrid scent of hard labor wafting from him as I snatched the muddy radio from his sweaty hands.

"That will be fine, James." I huffed as I got back into my car, beginning the two minute trek up the driveway toward the house. As I passed him, I could see the filthy worker smile at me. There was something off about his presence, though at the time I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Again, I believe it was his eyes. So familiar, as if I'd known them myself for a time. As I left him behind in the dust of the gravel, I promised myself I would launch a complaint against these unprofessional ruffians the moment I could.

After weaving past the carefully planned and restored bayous, the white tower proudly peeked from above the tree canopy. The woodlands cleared and before me stood the massive edifice that was Ravenswood. It was primed white, awaiting the final paint job in dark greens and black which I had demanded. Yet another setback I was not looking forward to enduring. The elaborate trim graced the balconies and verandas which were perfectly calculated to receive the ideal amount of sun and shade during the hot Louisiana summers. Each glazed window was placed to maximize natural light in the house's otherwise dark confines. Perhaps Lafreniere was right- this was my masterpiece.

I put the car in park, and exited the vehicle. I stood and marveled at the house. On paper, it was grand and idyllic. In person, however, it took on a very different aura. Dark clouds and fog seemed to hang around the house, giving it a distinct sense of foreboding which I had not intended. Knowing funds were scarce as is, it was too late to change anything. This was to be my forever home, shortcomings and perfections alike. Pressing against the front doors, I entered the main hall, then aglow from the stained glass window and edison-bulb-illuminated chandelier. Lafreniere assured me that the house would be sufficiently lit, and that no dark corners would find their way into it's winding halls. I was disappointed beyond words to see that it was not the case.

The house seemed to breathe with a cold draft that whipped around the walls, just strong enough to notice, but not enough to disturb. While it was certainly built to my specifications, Ravenswood took on an identity of it's own before my eyes as it stood before me. Grumbling under my breath, I began my inspection.

Room by room, I went about with my clipboard and checklist. Bronze lightplates, check. Mahogany waiscotting, check. Brass and crystal chandeliers, check. From the library to the conservatory, the drawing room to the gallery; each room was just as I designed it, yet it seemed inundated with some indescribable weight which I had anticipated from the beginning. My modern, airy, open concept home which I had originally envisioned slowly simmered into flames before my own eyes. It was magnificent, yes. The house dripped character and ethereal essence from every nook and cranny. But was it an Astramore home? Certainly not.

Looking back, I should have left. I should have tossed the clipboard onto the dark herringbone parquet floors and stomped back to my car- back to the safety and comfort of my car. I should have driven away like a bat out of hell from this place and never returned. Yet, in my arrogance, I believed I could salvage it somehow. Thus, it was in that moment, as I was checking the finials on the grand staircase that I heard it. Groaning. Ever so quiet, yet echoing throughout the cavernous halls. I looked above me, my eyes tracking the noise further and further up the staircase onto the third floor. I assumed that it was emanating from the observatory in the main tower, though how I could have possibly known that I still do not know. I ascended the steps, slowly at first, toward the sound. Every creaking floorboard perturbed me, a new construction shouldn't behave as if it had stood for over a hundred years. This growing rage at the destruction of my vision translated directly into a quickening pace. My body seemingly did the work for me as I climbed faster, eventually skipping steps on my way to the high observatory.

Blinded by anger, I could not see the various shapes and figures which I had blown past on the landings, the dark shadows waiting in the corners and cornices. Every ounce of my being was focused entirely on releasing this pent up aggression, built within myself over decades, on whatever pathetic creature dared to whine within my walls. Arriving on the final landing, I burst through the door with the last of my strength.

The shutters in the observatory were drawn and shut, the unfinished plaster and floorboards were illuminated only by the dull light from the stairwell behind me. There, in the center of the room and crouched like a devious little gremlin was some degenerate young man. Tattoos sprawled across his lean body, and his greasy mop of hair obscured his line of sight. The man shielded his face from the gleaming light, as if burned by it's glow. His pants and shoes were weathered and well worn; scuffed, torn, and stained from what I can only assume was some ill-begotten lifestyle of antisocial youths.

"Get out!" I shouted at the boy, as he cowered on the sawdust-laden floor. His hand slowly retracted from his face, revealing what he was trying to conceal. Upon his inked face were two fully black eyes, which seemed to suck the remnants of light straight out of the room. They were empty, cold, and devious. This thing was not of this world, it was not of God, it was not of nature. I stood there, frozen in place as he stood up, easily a height of over 6 feet tall. My hairs stood on end, as he smiled down at me. I turned to run, but as I did, I was confronted by the grinning visage of Jimmy.

"Going somewhere, Astramore?" His eyes were black as night, just like the creature behind me. I couldn't speak, any word I tried to mutter was caught in my throat and merely exited as gasping utterances. Two icy cold hands slowly wrapped around my gut. I could only let out a whimper as I was sharply pulled back into the room as Jimmy leaned against the doorframe, his arms and ankles crossed comfortably as if nothing was out of place.

Tossed down onto the ground, my extremities pulled in every which direction as if bound by invisible leather straps. My clothes were ripped from my body, leaving me vulnerable and cold in the nude. The thing circled me like a predator observing it's prey. I thrashed against my constraints, spitting insults and threats with the last of my energy. I should have realized the intent of their misdeeds then and there. Blinded yet again, and for the last time by my own rage, I could not see... they were exhausting me. My strength depleted, my nerves shot, I was a mere shell of myself. This was their moment.

The thing stood above me, straddling my bony torso, as he slowly lowered himself atop me. With his cold fingers, nails black and skin dirty, he gripped the bottom of my chin, prying my mouth open. With a momentum far beyond the order of nature, his hand plowed directly into my open maw. It seemed to contract in on itself, as if he were not solid, but rather in a plasmic state of matter. As it squirmed deeper into my throat, the second hand fed itself into the orifice with ease. It felt as if I were drowning, yet could still breathe. It flowed like slime inside of me, pooling into my expanding stomach. I could hear myself gurgling and choking on him as his head squeezed into my mouth, the miasmic odor of unwashed manscent wafting from his acrid form. He slithered his entire form within me, my gut protruding more and more with his writhing shape beneath my stretching skin. As his lower half finally slid past my tongue, I could feel the rough texture of his denim pants scratch against my esophagus, I could taste the sweaty leather of his musky battered sneakers brush on my tongue until the last of the rubber sole slipped into my mouth; disappearing into my body.

Within me, I could feel him breathing. Expanding and contracting from beneath my skin. I could just barely cock my head down enough to see my grotesquely inflated midsection wriggling and pulsating. There was no pain, only tightness and fullness inside. From the doorway, Jimmy had lowered his coveralls down to his boots, pulled his rancid jockstrap to his knees, and was pleasuring himself with manic fervor. Whatever was happening to me was nothing short of pornography for him, he savored every moment with bated breath. Though I had no time to dwell on such displays of vulgarity and immorality. As quickly as the thing had entered me, it began to spread.

I cocked my head toward my arm, as I watched the protruding outline of the thing's hand slowly snake towards my own from under my skin. I could see it's added mass inflate my musculature as it slid effortlessly past my elbow and up my forearm. It's fingers pushed into mine like a hollow latex glove. His stature considerably larger than mine, I could see my entire arm stretch outward, and his own muscles falling into place within mine. In just a few seconds, my arm had grown, large biceps and colorful tattoos seeping up through my dermis until it was unrecognizable. I observed it in horror as I felt my second arm endure the same process, though my gaze was thoroughly cemented at the strong, youthful, virile arm which once was mine.

My legs soon followed suit, my thighs ballooning outward with firm slabs of muscle as the outline of the thing's massive feet barreled down toward my own. Hairs sprung up like weeds across my inflating calves and quadriceps, until I could feel the slimy pressure of his foot sliding into mine. My body again stretched to accommodate his frame, feeling the soles of my massive sweating feet slide across the hardwood floor until it was finally fully in place. My toes wriggled against my will. A stirring in my groin, and my worn hands pawing at my privates signaled his insertion there as well. Every slick sweaty pump of my member seemed to thrust his into mine further and further. It was quickly engorged, thick and dripping with pre as my balls swelled with his thick, unholy seed. The foreskin tightened around my tip, slick and dripping, and there was then only one part of me left that was untouched.

I could feel him pressing up my throat. It's head firmly making it's way up my esophagus, his face protruding from beneath my sweating skin. There was no fight left in me, all I could do was close my eyes and pray that oblivion was not as empty as I had assumed. With the very last of my strength giving way, there was no resistance as it's head shot up into my skull. Everything went dark almost immediately, there was no light, and an atonal ringing in my ears distorted the squelching and cracking noises I could faintly hear as it adjusted my face atop his. Feeling his plasmic form beneath mine, integrating itself into every possible crevice, nook, and space; it was maddening. I felt myself begin to drift away... disconnected from my corporeal tether. The last thing I could see before I finally wasted away into the unknown was my blurred reflection in the mirror, a face no longer my own, merely a shadow of who I once was. I bitterly accepted this fate. I let him have that sweaty, smelly, vulgar body... it was all his. The lights went out, and all was silent.

----

New Orleans Tribune, December 20th, 2022:

Local Architect Declared Dead After Week Long Search Efforts

Recent attempts to locate Drake Astramore (69) of Thibodaux have been called off by New Orleans authorities after a week of searching through the architect's sprawling estate. Neighbors to the gated complex reported faint screams coming from within the mansion, even from a 1/4 mile away, which led investigators to deliver a search warrant to the residence.

Upon arrival, authorities were met with the groundskeeper of the premises, James Lafreniere (25), who explained Astramore had disappeared during a routine inspection of the mansion, which was at the time nearing completion:

"He was only in there for a few hours. I wish I knew what could have happened to the guy. But I am so glad that his son has decided to take up the torch on the house. It wasn't all for nothing, then."

While Astramore had no family to speak of, the few who knew him personally described him as "difficult" and "degrading," often going to far lengths to place himself above others. In fact, a number of former coworkers at architecture firm Guillory, Darensbourg, & Combs alluded to mysterious dealings with an unidentified elderly man during the design phase of his home, described as having a "dark energy" about him. While there is no evidence to support foul play at this time, investigators have not ruled out furthering their analysis into these claims.

As for Ravenswood Estate, it has now fallen into the hands of the missing architect's son, Drake Astramore II (27). A self-proclaimed "spiritualist," the young man plans to give tours of the sprawling mansion dedicated to the mysterious and unusual process of design of Ravenswood. Joining with his partner in business and in life, James Lafreniere, the duo intend on opening a bed and breakfast type model for the horror inclined.

"I didn't know my pop all that much, he never really acknowledged me or anything. But I'm happy to show the world what he created. This place is special, it was designed to be special. There's an magnetism here that gathers together the essences of many, many of the dearly departed. If you don't believe me, come take a look. I'm happy to show you around. I guarantee you'll leave a completely changed person."

#male possession #male transformation #ghost possession #badass transformation #architect #original #gay transformation #gay possession #body horror #musky #punkification #male tf

[sleeplessdreamer14]

the sparrow and the butterfly

fandom: overwatch

relationship: (familial) genji shimada & sibling! reader

headcanons: years after your family falls apart, you’re given a chance to put it back together

contains: familial fluff, some angst, hurt/comfort, heavy plot

a/n: this is more of a fanfic I came up with like a month ago that I’m telling in the ‘you’ perspective. I might make a part 2 for hanzo if this gets enough notes.

˚˖𖤓˖˚ childhood

as the two younger siblings of the family, you and Genji were quite close

although he wasn’t initially thrilled at the idea of being a middle child, he quickly became enamored with you

you’re kind of his favorite

and you were a pretty good motivator for him to be a bit more respectful, to set a good standard for you

you had caught him sneaking out a few times, and promised not to tell on the condition he bought you lunch the next day

Genji’s not gonna let anyone slander your name btw

some of your dearest memories were made up on the roof of Shimada castle where you guys would watch fireworks together

Genji hoped that despite being born into the yakuza, you could live your life yourself when you grew up

ִ ࣪ ☾⋆ separation

anyway, as you got older, the two of you confided in each other that neither of you wanted any part in the family’s criminal empire

this became a major problem upon the untimely death of your father and responsibilities fell to you and your brothers

you still remember how sick you felt when you could overhear your brothers fighting until everything suddenly went quiet

once torn between your longing for a different life and your duty to your family, you fled that same night and left no trace

as much as you wanted to, you knew that looking back even once would making leaving even harder than it already was

so you’ve lost your family, your home, everything

words cannot describe how scary and lonely those first couple of years were for you

but after you spent enough time mourning, you got back on your feet, took time to make peace with your loss, and built a new life for yourself

after spending a couple years on your own, you embraced your newfound freedom to make your own choices and be entirely and unapologetically yourself

this involved getting a tattoo of a butterfly on your back, a sparrow on your right arm, and an arrow on your left (among other things)

you also collected about half a dozen aliases over the years

overall, you were proud of who you had become, only wishing that your family could see you

‎‧₊˚✧ meanwhile

when Angela brought Genji back, one of his first thoughts was ‘where is (name)?’

he worried that Hanzo might have killed you too which only worsened his mental health

it felt as though the sun had disappeared from the sky

once he was able to eat again, if he ever went somewhere you would have liked, he would get a second order in tribute to you and place it in front of his own

it took a long time, but he actually told Angela and Cassidy about you

whenever he saw fireworks, he took it as a good omen that you were out there somewhere, not only living, but thriving

since he was revived, he dreaded the thought that one day he might see you again and you would no longer recognize him as your brother

˚₊⋅𓅫 reunion 𐀔 ⋅₊˚

not long after the downfall of overwatch and your family’s empire, the stars aligned and lead you to your brother

Genji could not have been ready to see you again

whether he feared never seeing you again or your reaction to his new body more was anyone’s guess

and then you embraced him and sunk in that you didn’t love him any differently than you did before

that was the most vulnerable and safe he had felt in a very long time

finding no trace of disgust or malice in your eyes as you looked at him gave Genji hope

you later explained how you each spent the last several years

Genji was heartbroken to realize you were essentially alone since that tragic night, but at the same time was so proud of how well you did on your own

when you two eventually parted ways, you made sure to stay in contact this time

Zenyatta was pleased to finally meet you and mentioned that Genji spoke of you often

upon seeing your sparrow tattoo, Genji removed his mask to quickly wipe away his tears

‎‧₊˚ 𐀔 butterflies traditionally symbolize hope, faith, and change ‎𐀔 ˚₊‧

#don’t let this flop #familial #platonic #genji shimada #genji x reader #sibling! reader #long post #overwatch headcanons #overwatch fanfiction #overwatch x reader #my stuff #my writing #overwatch 2 #ow2 #ow2 x reader #ow x reader #headcanons

[samasmith23]

We need to talk about EssenceOfThought's ongoing bullying & slander campaign against Rachel Oates...

I normally don't make posts covering this kind of stuff since I mostly try to keep my Tumblr blog here relatively positive and cheerful. And I normally try to avoid YouTube drama in general. But recently I've become increasingly frustrated and angered by the behavior of a certain YouTuber whom I regrettably used to be a fan of awhile back known as "Essence Of Thought" (aka, Ethel Thurston), whom in the past 2 months has been continuously releasing multiple videos & shorts which slander and defame another YouTuber named Rachel Oates. I know that Rachel herself is currently trying to combat this situation and has even filed multiple claims against Ethel's videos, but I felt the need to try and show my support for Rachel by help signal-boost her story in response to Ethel's revived targeted harassment campaign against her.

Content Warning: Mentions of Transphobia, Cyberbullying, Self-Harm, Suicidality, and Child Abuse.

Also, while this post is going to be very critical of Ethel and her conduct, I will NOT tolerate any misgendering or deadnaming of her! Just because I think Ethel is a bad person does NOT excuse any transphobia that is directed at her, and I will immediately block and report anyone who engages in such reprehensible behavior!

Section 1: Confessions of a former fan, or my personal falling out with Essence of Thought

For those who are not aware, Ethel Thurston is a transgender atheist content creator who regularly produces video essays analyzing and criticizing TERFs and the broader far-right. This content greatly appealed to me as both a supporter of trans-rights and as someone who vocally opposes both TERFs and Neo-Nazis. However, exactly 1-year-ago I unsubscribed from Ethel's channel when she began made a series of videos accusing Lily Orchard of being a child groomer. While I do agree that Lily is an AWFUL person who has received multiple credible accusations of sexual abuse from both former partners and even her own younger sister Courtney, Ethel's videos which accused Lily of "grooming all minors in her audience" were actually heavily criticized by several former victims of Lily's abuse who have argued that the way Ethel & her editor "ABirdCalledLevi" (aka, Levi) presented their information against Lily was not only overly inflammatory, but only served to misrepresent and damage the testimonies of her other victims.

Specifically, critics like "Patchwork Heart" (aka, Shiloh Conner) took serious issue took issue with Ethel & Levi's constant liberal usage of the word "grooming" to describe Lily's actions towards individuals like Glade, who accused Lily of encouraging him on her Discord to watch a livestream where she repeatedly flashed her audience (Glade was still 17 at the time of this incident). Essentially Shiloh stated that while Lily was undeniably guilty of sexual harassment, neglectful misconduct, and indecent exposure, her behavior technically does not qualify as "grooming," since "grooming" is a term specifically meant describe the gradual breaking down of a victim's boundaries through manipulation and isolation from others (online it's usually conducted through private DMs rather than on public servers like Lily's channels). Furthermore, Shiloh and other fellow victim's of Lily's abuse also criticized Ethel & Levi's usage of the phrase "parasocial audience grooming" to argue that Lily was grooming her ENTIRE audience instead of individuals, as "parasocial audience grooming" is NOT a legally or medically recognized term, but was instead invented by the commentary YouTuber "Korviday" in 2020 to describe Shane Dawson's sexually abusive behavior towards several underage members of his audience. Essentially, it's impossible to groom an entire audience all at once since grooming is defined by the specific and deliberate targeting and manipulation of individuals in private or isolated settings with the intention of eventually sexually abusing them. But when criticized for the way they badly mishandled the testimonies of victims like Glade, Ethel & Levi instead doubled down by not only continuing to misuse the word "grooming" in their videos, but actively smeared and defamed their critics and other victims of Lily's like Shiloh as "abuse/groomer apologists.” Ethel even went as far as to compare Shiloh criticizing how she misrepresented Glade’s testimony to “defending Harvey Weinstein.”

Like... YIKES!

I'm not going to lie... when I saw the way Ethel & Levi actively bullied and slandered other victims of Lily Orchard, I was deeply disappointed and disgusted. While I was already starting to grow weary of Ethel's tendency to overly moralize in her arguments, and I knew she was unpopular in a lot of online spaces, for the longest time I tried to give both her and Levi the benefit of the doubt since I knew she had been harassed by TERFs like Graham Linehan past simply for being an outspoken non-binary trans-woman online. But the way Ethel bullied people like Shiloh Conner was simply inexcusable! And personally, I completely agree with Shiloh's criticisms against Ethel & Levi. Even though I dislike Lily Orchard and think that she's an abusive scumbag, spreading misinformation about issues as serious as CSA only serves to inflict further harm onto the people that Lily has hurt. Victims like Shiloh have very publicly stated that they either want their testimonies to be reflected as accurately as possible, or not at all. And I especially understand their concerns about misusing the word "grooming," especially because of how that word in particular has been so easily co-opted as an anti-LGBTQ+ slur by Republicans and the far-right in the past 2 years alone, which only serves to promote bigotry and obfuscate actual instances of child sexual abuse (Ethel claimed in their video that they "saw no harm in extending the definition of the word" BTW). Here's a link to Shiloh's video responding to Ethel if you want further details on the ways in which both she and Levi so badly mishandled the testimonies of Lily Orchard's victims BTW:

So how does Rachel Oates fit into all of this exactly? Well...

Section 2: Reevaluating Ethel's past conduct and the targeted bullying of Rachel Oates

Once I witnessed the ways in which EssenceOfThought bullied and smeared the victims of Lily Orchard's abuse, it honestly caused me to reevaluate and question a lot of their past content, especially because Ethel & Levi already had reputations of being overly inflammatory figures who've burned tons of bridges with lots of other leftist YouTubers. It was then that I was reminded of the biggest controversy Ethel's been involved in, and one I was only tangentially aware of before the Lily Orchard drama. That being Ethel's 4-year-long and currently ongoing defamation campaign against feminist and atheist British YouTuber, Rachel Oates.

The conflict between Ethel & Rachel all started back in 2019, when Rachel's friend and former atheist YouTuber "Rationality Rules" (aka, Steven Woodford), got into serious trouble when he posted a video arguing against the inclusion of trans-people in sports (which relied on heavily fallacious scientific data and even cited clips from Fox News, Ben Shapiro, and Joe Rogan). Unsurprisingly, the backlash against Woodford's video was enormous, and it even resulted in him being deplatformed from hosting a panel at an ACA conference in Austin, Texas that same year. However, a lot of Woodford's friends within the YouTube atheist community, including Rachel, argued that Woodford did not make his video out of intentional malice or bigotry, whilst fully agreeing that it was a terrible poorly-researched video that did serve to reinforce transphobic narratives even if it was unintentional. This led to Woodford not only delisting and demonotizing the original video, but also releasing both an apology and retraction video to try and help mitigate the damage his original video caused.

Ethel however, refused to accept Woodford's apology and retraction, and made several response videos accusing his apology of being fake and him continuing to spread transphobic misinformation. And while that's perfectly understandable if Ethel personally didn't find Woodford's apology to be adequate or genuine, where this crosses the line into unacceptable behavior is that Ethel then went onto repeatedly attack Rachel Oates simply because she was both friends with Woodford IRL and didn't want to get directly involved in the controversy. Essentially, Ethel is engaging in the "guilt by association" fallacy here. In actuality though, Rachel not only repeatedly stated that she disagreed with the content Woodford's original video and agreed that it was very bad and harmful, but that she is supportive of the trans community and felt unqualified to weigh in on the subject matter of trans-people in sports since she has barely any knowledge or interest about sports in general.

This response was not good enough for Ethel however, who instead misinterpreted Rachel's comments as a backhanded attempt at silencing Woodford's critics.

Things got even worse when a random fan messaged Rachel a screenshot taken from a private Facebook group from a trans-self-help group which compiled a list of public figures for the trans community to avoid following the Woodford controversy, and her name was included on that list. Rachel, not knowing that the list was from a private chat, immediately went on Twitter to defend herself, which led to Ethel accusing her of doxxing by publishing private information. This is in spite of the fact that not only did the screenshot already exist before Rachel discovered it, but she went out of her way to censor the names of the members of that Facebook group. Furthermore, Ethel had also blocked Rachel on Twitter which led to the latter asking some of her followers to show her what Ethel was stating about her so she could try to adequately defend herself, which in-turn resulted in Ethel accusing Rachel of sending her millions of followers to circumvent her block and harass her.

The situation escalated even further however, when Ethel posted a now infamous tweet to one of Woodford and Oates' friends' Lizzy Lang, not only described Woodford as a "violent transphobe intent on stripping away dozens of human rights,” but called Lang and others (presumably Oates) "members of Woodford's church a transphobia" before ending the tweet with the words, "do this world a favor and exit it."

That last line in Ethel’s tweet, “do the world a favor and exit it,” got a lot of people justifiably angry since it was very easily misconstrued as Ethel advocating for Woodford's defenders to commit suicide (she claimed it was meant to say “exit Woodford’s church of transphobia”). And while EoT later apologized and clarified the incredibly poor wording of that last comment, she still refused to apologize to Rachel after several months of targeted bullying and defamation. When Rachel saw the infamous tweet, it only served to amplify her pre-existing feelings of depression since she mistaken that tweet to be directed at her instead of Lizzy Lang. And a few days later, in an act of desperation Rachel posted an impromptu unedited video begging and pleading for Ethel to stop bullying her, not realizing that she was still badly bleeding from cuts on her arm due to feeling completely hopeless and isolated (Rachel already had a history of engaging in self-harm and cutting).

But not even Rachel engaging in self-harm nor her feelings of suicidality were enough to sway Ethel, who still continued to double-down on their harassment by arguing that Rachel "weaponizing self-harm, transmisogyny, and benevolent patriarchy," and was using "upper-class cis white woman tears" (even though Rachel has openly admitted to being lower-middle class). And to this very day, Ethel still continues to slander Rachel and falsely label her as a "serial transphobe" and "abuser" all throughout her videos, even going as far as to not only claim, "Rachel Oates' [abuse] was the second most psychologically destructive thing [she's] ever suffered, only being second to being raped as a child," but that she would rather relive her trauma of "being outed as bisexual, groomed at age 15, and sexually assaulted."

Seriously... FREAKING YIKES! Those are incredibly extreme and inflammatory statements to make! I do understand that Ethel is a CSA survivor (and on that level I 100% empathize with her because that is of course absolutely terrible and is one of the absolute WORST things anyone can suffer from), but claiming that someone circumventing a Twitter Block and or begging you to stop bullying her whilst feeling suicidal is even remotely comparable to “being raped as a child"?! That is so unbelievably insensitive on so many levels that I don’t even know where to start! It’s insensitive to not only Rachel herself, but to other CSA survivors as well since it trivializes their trauma! Ethel should know better than this!

Also, that screenshot of Ethel tweeting a link to a Guardian article discussing the weaponization of white woman tears? That was literally the top pinned-tweet to her Twitter account immediately days after Rachel posted that desperate video of her pleading to Ethel to stop her harassment campaign whilst feeling suicidal. What a truly vile and unempathetic thing for Ethel to do!

Section 3: Showing support for Rachel Oates

After I did more research into the whole EssenceOfThought Vs. Rachel Oates situation, as well as hearing Rachel's side of the story, I ended up subscribing to Rachel's YouTube channel and have since become a fan of her work. Before I eventually unsubscribed from Ethel's channel due to the way she similarly bullied several of Lily Orchard’s victims, I was given the impression by her that Rachel Oates was just another garden-variety TERF YouTuber based on he way Ethel constantly talked about her. But that’s NOT accurate at all… Rachel's channel from what I’ve seen is mainly just about discussions of secularism and religion, feminism, book reviews, and cute dog videos!

Seriously, her dog Kyra is so FREAKING adorable!

Look at her! Kyra's such a good girl! She's such a cute doggy!

But yeah, this is a prime example of how Ethel’s pattern of engaging in bad-faith moral absolutism while misrepresenting events and evidence can be seriously damaging to uninitiated viewers. And I say that not only as someone who was largely unaware of the full extent of what she had done to Rachel, but also because Ethel frames her content in a very pseudo-academic/intellectual manner and uses a lot of professional sounding words to try and disguise severely misguided and inflammatory arguments. She tries to portray her YouTube videos as if they’re akin to college-level essays with lots of citations and crap, which can easily fool people into thinking that her content is well-researched and sophisticated. Except looking below the surface, in hindsight Ethel’s videos are mostly just pretentious word-salad, cherry-picking evidence, and relying heavily on academic terminology in order promote her thinly-veiled absolutist black-&-white views on morality, attacking anyone who is “not progressive enough” for her (in addition to Rachel, Ethel & Levi have also done this to other leftist YouTubers like Lindsay Ellis, Philosophy Tube, & Suris the Skeptic). According to Ethel’s logic, you’re either an entirely good or entirely bad person, and there’s zero in-between and if you dare disagree with her to even the slightest degree then she’ll automatically consider you to be just as bad as the far-right. Basically, it’s moral absolutism.

All of Ethel’s fallacious claims against Rachel Oates are textbook examples of bad-faith moral absolutism, and I deeply regret the fact that I was ever once a fan of Ethel’s content. She is a bully and a liar. And that’s a conclusion I arrived to after seeing how Rachel’s stories about being repeatedly slandered & bullied by Ethel heavily paralleled the similar experiences of individuals like Shiloh Conner, thereby revealing a pattern of toxic behavior on Ethel’s part.

Section 4: Ethel’s renewed and current bullying campaign

So why do I bring all of this stuff up?

Well, even though the worst of the harassment Rachel suffered was back in 2019 and she has since tried to move on from this whole fiasco and continues making her usual feminist book reviews and dog videos (she even deliberately avoids mentioning EssenceOfThought by name in her videos...), Ethel has not only repeatedly tried to drag all of this drama back up, but has this singleminded obsessive vendetta to defame and destroy Rachel's YouTube career at all costs. For instance, in 2022 Ethel tried to further slander Rachel by yet again engaging in "guilt by association" fallacy because notable transgender TERF YouTuber "Rose of Dawn" (aka, the British equivalent of Blaire White) once tried to befriend Rachel in 2020 after the initial harassment campaign by Ethel, and later in 2022 Rose openly defended self-confessed genocidal serial rapist Lily Cade when the latter was platformed in an infamous transphobic BBC article. What Ethel completely neglects to mention however, is that Rachel had permanently stopped interacting with Rose when several members of her audience informed her that Rose is actually a TERF (and the way Rose suddenly tried to befriend Rachel after Ethel's bullying of her strikes me as very cult-like since TERFs sadly do have a history in engaging in incredibly abusive cultish tactics to recruit new members, as many people who have escaped that disgusting hate movement have reported...) and she has since apologized for ever giving Rose any attention. Regardless, Ethel still tried to falsely implicate Rachel alongside "Rose of Dawn" in a video condemning Lily Cade & the BBC, which led to Rachel rightfully filing a defamation claim to YouTube, getting Ethel's then-latest slanderous hit-peace against Rachel blocked in the UK.

But even worse however, is that starting in August 2023 Ethel has begun releasing a constant stream of videos continuing to smear Rachel even further by both repeating all of the exact same aforementioned slanderous claims along with a whole bunch of new ones. Like, not only has Ethel already released 3 main videos out of a planned 6-part series ranting about Rachel Oates, but she has also released 24 shorts taken from the main videos!

Geez! Not only is this beyond obsessive, but this is just straight-up targeted bullying and harassment on Ethel's part! And the new claims she makes against Rachel in these videos are equally slanderous as the ones before! For just one example, Ethel & Levi’s cite a now-deleted livestream of Rachel's that they re-uploaded as a mirrored-copy to their channel, accusing Rachel of denying trans-women's existence by making the offhanded comment of, “No, the only thing a man can provide me that a woman can’t is a p*nis. Only thing.”

Except… I actually went and watched the ENTIRE 3-hour mirrored livestream myself just to see the full context of Rachel’s quote, and it turns out that Ethel took that quote completely out of context! Not only are there lots of points in the livestream wherein Rachel repeatedly states that “gender is a social construct and that trans and non-binary people exist,” but during the stream she's doing a counter-response to a Christian fundamentalist incel who once responded one of her earlier videos. And that potentially problematic quote of Rachel’s, “No, the only thing a man can provide me that a woman can’t is a p*nis. Only thing,” was actually a sarcastic response to the incel’s homophobic argument that “women don’t want to love their equals [(aka other women)] because they actually all want what only a [dominant alpha male] can provide them.”

Essentially, Rachel was criticizing the incel’s sexist & homophobic “logic” that, “all women secretly only want p*nises,” in a snarky & sarcastic manner, but Ethel took Rachel’s comment out of context to try and instead paint it as some transphobic-slip-of-the-tongue/TERF-dogwhistle, accusing Rachel of “completely ignoring the existence of non or pre-op trans women,” in order to try and support the fallacious argument that, “Rachel Oates doesn’t actually view trans women as real women, but instead as props to objectify in order to make herself look like a better ally.”

Not once does Ethel ever mention the context that Rachel was responding to & mocking a bigoted incel during the livestream... at all...

I don't have time to go into all of the other new lies that Ethel & Levi are currently spewing against Rachel Oates since this post has already gotten incredibly lengthy (for instance, Ethel also claimed that Rachel “downplayed JK Rowling’s transphobia” simply because she used the words “incredibly problematic” to describe the Queen TERF’s bigoted views; which is such a weak and pedantic argument), but it’s a whole lot…

Conclusion

Overall, I just wanted to bring attention to this situation because EssenceOfThought's harassment campaign against Rachel Oates has been ongoing since 2019 and it shows ZERO signs of stopping anytime soon. Ethel & Levi are serial bullies and liars who regularly engage in bad-faith arguments, misrepresent evidence, and engage in moral absolutism in order to paint anyone who disagrees with them or makes even the slightest mistake as the worst people imaginable. So the more people who are made aware of this mess, the better.

Please show support for Rachel, whether that be through signal-boosting this post, subscribing to her YouTube channel, or even donating to her Patreon if you so choose.

And to EssenceOfThought, aka Ethel Thurston, (along with her editor Levi...) specifically, the famed basketball player Michael Jordan would have some choice words for you:

And I mean that sincerely. Seriously... just stop this targeted bullying & slander campaign against Rachel. It's incredibly unhealthy and obsessive. Just let it go already...

#rachel oates #EssenceOfThought is a bully #EssenceOfThought is a liar #EssenceOfThought is a moral absolutist #cw: cyberbullying mention #cw: self-harm mention #cw: suicidality mention #cw: child abuse mention #lily orchard is a predator #anti lily orchard #mini essay #tangent #serious post

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Booz Allen ticketmastered America's public lands

Ticketmaster’s spectacular failure to competently sell tickets to Taylor Swift’s first concert tour in five years has revived scrutiny of the ticketing/venue/promotion/management monopoly created by Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation, especially the “junk fees” the company sucks out of fans’ pockets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfPiqgLPro8

What’s a junk fee? It’s all the crap that Ticketmaster tacks onto the cost of your ticket, like a “convenience fee” for using a credit card. Once all these fees are assessed, 78% of the price of some tickets is just fees.

https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/biden-is-coming-for-high-ticketing-fees.html

Junk fees aren’t limited to Ticketmaster, they’re everywhere: “resort fees” at hotels, bag and seat-selection fees on airlines, $35 fees for bounced checks, and on and on. Wherever a company has pricing power — because they’re the only game in town, or because you’re desperate — they rip you off with fees:

https://www.yahoo.com/video/1-biden-welcomes-crackdown-junk-161329851.html

Take cable TV. The cable operators have divided up the USA like the Pope dividing up the New World, carefully demarcating each company’s exclusive territory and ensuring that cable companies never compete with one another. That’s why cable is such a dumpster-fire of junk fees — Comcast just jacked up its nonsense “broadcast fee” to $27/month:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/comcasts-sneaky-broadcast-tv-fee-hits-27-making-a-mockery-of-advertised-rates/

OK, fine — turn off the TV and get out there and touch grass! America’s system of national parks and public lands are the jewels in the country’s crown, a remnant of those long-ago days when government could and did do stuff for the American public, an art that (to hear conservatives tell) is now lost to the ages along with the secrets of the pyramids.

Just navigate to Recreation.gov, which consolidates permitting and entry for 13 federal agencies and…

::sad trombone::

…pay your junk fees.

Want to pay your $7 to hike the prized Coyote Buttes North at Arizona’s Vermilion Cliffs National Monument? Sure, just pay a $9 “lottery application fee.” Even by junk fee standards, this is a very junky fee — it’s not a fee for paying a fee, it’s a fee for the chance to pay a fee.

Only 4–10% of lottery entrants get a permit (Coyote Buttes is a very fragile ecosystem and entrance is severely limited), which means that Recreation.gov’s rake from this junk fee is about 1,000% of what it actually makes on hiking permits.

Well, at least that money is going to Coyote Buttes, right? Preserving the petroglyphs and the dinosaur tracks and whatnot?

Nope. The Bureau of Land Management gets the $7 entry fee from the 64 daily hikers who are lucky enough to visit Coyote Buttes. The $14,400 in lottery fees that the day’s hopeful hikers pay to Recreation.gov for a shot at a permit all go to a giant military contractor: Booz Allen.

I know. What. The. Actual. Fuck. On his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller explains how a beltway bandit like Booz Allen became the Ticketmaster of America’s public lands. The deal started in 2017, when Booz got the contract to build Recreation.gov “at no cost to the federal government.”

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting-us-back

Booz Allen didn’t promise to run a government website out of an abundance of patriotic zeal. Like all public private Partnership contractors, they wanted to figure out how to scoop of gigantic amounts of public money without any public accountability:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

Booz Allen now gets to run America’s public lands like its own corporate fiefdom. At the outset of its deal, it was able to set its own prices for fees unilaterally — that is, it could simply announce that, say, everyone who wanted to visit Mount Whitney would pay a $6 fee (16,000 applicants, 5,300 of them successful, $100,000 in junk fees for Booz).

But then Thomas Kotab, an “avid hiker,” sued the BLM for the $2 junk fee tacked on top of the reservation system for Red Rock Canyon. The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (the law that allows federal agencies to charge for access to public lands) requires that agencies hold a notice-and-comment for each of these fees. The $2 fee didn’t go through this procedure.

Kotab won…sort of. The court upheld his challenge, requiring that Booz’s public lands junk fees go through public notice. But Booz didn’t refund the $2 it had illegally collected from the people it ripped off to visit Red Rock Canyon — and it figured out how to neuter the notice and comment system.

Here’s how that works: the federal agencies that Booz ticketmasters each have a Resource Advisory Council, which the agencies stack with their own cronies, who then rubber-stamp whatever the agency wants to do. RACs pretend to be accountable to the public, but boy is the pretense thin:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5442009.pdf

So now, when Booz wants to tack a junk fee onto a public space, it gets the relevant agency to do a notice-and-comment for the fee, and the RAC files comments saying that this is a great idea, and the agency throws away all the public comments that say otherwise, and voila, Booz gets another junk fee.

All of this is incredibly frustrating, not just another example of corporate looting of the public’s purse — a huge barrier to our public lands. The idea that the military industrial complex has ticketmastered Teddy Roosevelt’s public parks should shock our consciences.

But there’s something we can do about this! The part of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that authorizes agencies to assess fees runs out in Oct 2023, and when Congress renews it, they could add an amendment to block Booz’s junk fees.

Or, as Stoller notes, “Biden, through his anti-junk fee initiative could simply assert through the White House Competition Council to the 13 different agencies that they end Booz Allen’s practice of charging these kinds of fees.”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2022/10/26/the-presidents-initiative-on-junk-fees-and-related-pricing-practices/

[Image ID: A stunning view of sunrise at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. In the foreground, a cigar-chomping, top-hatted ogre stands at a podium emblazoned with the Booz Allen logo, yanking on a lever made of a golden dollar-sign. He holds aloft an inverted National Park Service arrowhead logo, pinched disdainfully between his white-gloved thumb and forefinger. Rising up from behind a mountain on the left side of the frame is trustbuster-era editorial cartoon image of Roosevelt, swinging his 'Big Stick.']

#pluralistic

[not-that-dillinger]

/* ...So... Ed's fantasy AU has consumed my brain the past... week? Less? Something like that. So... Have... A Thing. IDK what it is but it sure is words. Presenting... */

What's Past Is Prologue

Or: A prelude to Ed's Fantasy AU

Act I Scene 1

Ed curled around Eos's cold, dormant form in a bed that was barely big enough for the both of them. Pale moonlight glinted off his warforged companion's body, and Ed could almost pretend it was the glow of the Spark that gave his creation life. He lay awake, back to the wall the tiny bed was pushed against, watching the door opposite him in the dark. Eos would have told him to sleep, but fear of an attack in his sleep--from his father's forces whom he'd fled from, or from those of the Alan Bradley, Duke of Torvaldia, whose hospitality he was at the mercy of--and the unfamiliarity of his surroundings made rest difficult, despite the exhaustion. He hadn't slept much in over a month, and Ed feared what would happen when exhaustion finally won out and forced him to sleep.

His new quarters were... nice, all things considered. They were small; much smaller than what he had grown up with, smaller than the Duke's, or the young king and Duke's ward's, but he had sleeping quarters connected to another chamber for receiving guests. The sheets on his bed weren't quite as warm or soft as what he'd had before, but getting that sort of quality was difficult, even for a master weaver. He had a nearly empty set of drawers to store the single change of clothes and few possessions he came with, and a window with a view of the city. He could tell the window was magically reinforced from the slight distortion of the view. It would take the force of a heavy siege cannon to break the it. Still, his current accommodations were oddly comfortable, given his situation, and Ed couldn't be picky. It certainly beat the dungeon cell he'd been confined to the past week, or napping on the ground wherever he could find decent cover like he had for the month prior. Ed wasn't sure if his current situation was better than his previous one or not.

It was still a prison, gilded in gold, just like the one he'd fled from over a month ago.

He curled tighter around the dull metal shell that had been his friend and constant companion the past five years, and the reason he'd fled the comfort of his own home. He wouldn't mind captivity so much, or the humiliation of begging his father's enemy for asylum, only to be thrown in the dungeon, if Eos was still active and safe. Ed could, of course, revive his creation, if only he had his loom.

Except he had destroyed it before he fled, and he doubted the Duke would allow him to build a new one.

That the Duke allowed him to keep his Eos's dormant shell might have been a small kindness, but it felt like a cruel taunt. All he had was a hollow metal shell, and the fear that his warden would take that away as well.

Eventually, restlessness forced Ed out of his bed. He paced the length of the room several times, then cautiously perched on the window sill, and stared out across the city. Somewhere, out beyond the city wall, were the ruins of a tower on a small island in the middle of a lake. "A few hours' ride," the Duke had said, "though it will take a few months to make it a suitable living space."

A suitable prison to contain an artificer, Ed had no doubt.

The city was silent, only a few guards on patrol out in the streets.

...And a lone cloaked figure, hidden in the shadows of a nearby alley. Ed leaned in, intrigued. What were they up to? They were facing the mouth of the alley, face tilted up, as though watching the sky.

Not the sky, he realized, his eyes meeting the mysterious figure's. Him.

Ed threw himself backward away from the window, his heartbeat drumming rapidly in his throat. He yelped as he stumbled backward into the bed, and fell over Eos. The metallic sound of his creation's empty shell echoed through the room like that of a gong.

The door opened, and light flooded the room.

"Prince Edward?"

Ed tensed, then turned over quickly and wrapped his arms around his creation.

"Is everything alright?" Ed hesitantly looked up and squinted in the blinding light at the guard hovering over him, the hand not holding the lantern at the hilt of his sword.

Gawain, if Ed remembered correctly. He glanced back toward the window.

Gawain dimmed the light on his lantern, and furrowed his brow in confusion. "Did you see something out the window?" He hesitantly stepped toward the window to check it out. "I don't see anything out there, your highness," he said after a minute.

Ed rolled off of Eos, off of the bed and onto his feet. He hesitantly approached the window, attempting to keep his distance between himself and Gawain.

The alley where the cloaked figure had been was empty.

Ed stared out the window, frantic to find where they had went, but he couldn't find them.

"Get some rest, your highness," Gawain said. "You are perfectly safe here." He moved toward the bed, toward Eos, and Ed dived for the dormant warforged, wrapping his arms around his creation, desperate to not let anyone take Eos away from him again. Gawain froze and stared at him with a look of confusion. "Very well, Prince Edward. Sleep well." He slipped back out of the room and shut the door behind him, leaving Ed once more in darkness.

Ed climbed in bed, and curled around Eos.

Sleep, however, did not come.

#/* there will be more...*/ #/* As a note: Ed's perception of what's going on is... based on what he knows but he does not know everything about his situation*/ #prelude to ed's fantasy au #ed's fantasy au #musings: ed

[abyssal-ali]

The Best Bat (?)

R: T+

WC: 1.8k

TW: There is a discussion about death and could be seen as having suicidal undertones.

The small gathering of low-level Justice Leaguers crowded the two more magical members anxiously.

"I wish for the best Bat to come," chanted the one leading the teleportation/summoning.

"Wasn't that a little open-ended? And are you *sure* that won't summoning, like, a flying mammal?" Inquired a Leaguer nervously.

The chanter stared at the asker. "My power is luck. We will get the Bat we want," said the chanter confidently.

Several Leaguers seemed uneasy about leaving Bat-picking up to such a fickle thing as *luck*.

In a poof of smoke a tall figure appeared. Choking, the Leaguers brushed away the smoke...and groaned. "Uh, you're not a Bat...and we wanted someone useful..."

The summoned form glared around the room. "Firstly, rude. I am too a Bat," they rasped, gesturing to their chest piece. "Secondly, rude. The 'real' Bats are useful, but of course I'm Villain and only good at decapitating people and shooting my Jericho. 941's. Well lemme tell you something, 'kay? Villains are people too, and *some* of us are a little more competent than others. So why'd you summon me, I mean, a Bat?"

"We have two different species of alien warships heading for us, and we were hoping for maybe...Batman? Red Robin? *Someone* trusted their luck and asked for the 'best Bat,'" one of the Leaguers explained.

The Red Hood laughed long and loud at that, though the laugh came out rather scratchy and unsettling through the voice modulator.

"Hah, that's a good one. So you were hoping for a hacker or maybe a diplomat? This may surprise you, but I'm not always shoot first, ask questions later. I'm a tactician, and since you asked so nicely, I'll help out of the goodness of my heart."

A Leaguer snorted. "You call getting beat by Batman *tactician planning*?"

Hood fixed his stare on them. "Yes. There's a reason you can't reach any of the Bats right now, and it's because I shut down the city two days ago, the last step in my 10-month 'screw with Batman' plan."

Everyone exchanged uneasy glances and were immensely relieved when Wonder Woman walked in.

"Ah, you are...here to...help?" She asked, sizing up his defensive stance and the Leaguers who weren't terrified, if not a little wary.

"Yeah, I got summoned so I figured I may as well help. Never hurts to be in the JL's good graces," drawled Hood.

He turned to the leader of the little group of Leaguers. "So, what are the aliens and what exactly do you know about the situation?"

Wonder Woman watched carefully from her corner as Hood took charge and began commanding everyone around. He was orderly and aware of issues, he seemed to be skilled in delegating and not overwhelming his subordinates, and his diplomatic interactions interested her greatly.

As ambassador from Themiscyra, she had experience dealing with issues like these and so, once the connections between the ships and Watchtower were set up, she sat beside him to help.

Hood turned in surprise as Diana joined him, not expecting her to do anything more than watch and maybe drag him to a cell once the negotiations were over. She smiled and motioned to the setup. He nodded and they began.

●○●○●○●

Once the negotiations were completed Diana pushed her chair away and stood, extending her hand to Hood.

"Would you like a drink?"

"I wouldn't mind a stiff one, but I don't think certain people up here would appreciate seeing my helmetless face."

"...why not?"

"Well, when blood isn't getting pumped everywhere for several hours, your skin tends to get pale and your features don't look the greatest..."

"What?"

"I was recently revived from a sliced jugular just before I was yoinked here, so my circulation isn't quite back to normal yet."

"You were dead," Diana said flatly, and Hood nodded. "And now you're alive?"

He nodded again and shrugged.

"Just happens sometimes. I always come back--Death seems to enjoy flirting with me more than she should."

"You...die...regularly?" Piped up Superman, the eavesdropper.

"Not clockwork regular, but often enough that it's a mere inconvenience."

Clark and Diana exchanged looks.

"Anyways, aren't you going to haul me off to jail or Arkham or something?"

They looked back at him.

"Well, you did save the planet, so I'm sure that earns you a pass this time..." said Diana slowly, unsure of how to proceed.

"Yes, we appreciate you helping out, Hood. But, why?" Clark added.

"Contrary to what Bats would have you believe, I'm not a complete boor with no regard for human life. I simply exterminate the scum that the law lets away. In Gotham, especially, it's a problem, but I do it for the innocents and victims, for *their* lives, so they can live peacefully, or at least with closure. I'm not so uncouth and careless with life that I'd condemn the whole planet to die-- just the guilty. But I had to save the innocents."

Instead of sounding angry or even passionate, like Diana and Clark expected, Hood simply sounded...tired. Defeated, maybe? Of course, that could be after effects of dying and then being summoned and helping an organization that isn't exactly friendly with you.

"...so, what should we tell Batman about today?" Wondered Clark.

"Tell him whatever you want. Bruce will probably just believe I brainwashed you if you say something good. Say you forced me to help in exchange for looking the other way this once, or you tried to bring me to the Hall of Justice after, but I escaped. He won't believe that I helped you of my own free will. He refuses to see that I am capable of good and I'm not a complete monster."

Clark noticed that *this* rant got Hood a little worked up, and at the mention of Batman his heart rate picked up.

He looked meaningfully at Diana, hoping years of working together would help her figure out what he was trying to communicate.

Diana looked thoughtfully at Hood.

"How did you die, most recently, if I may ask?"

"My showdown with Batman. I forced Bruce to pick between me or the Joker. He picked the clown, like he always does, and he bataranged my throat."

Hood lifted his chin and tugged down the neck of his jacket and underarmour to show a thin scar neatly across his neck.

The two superheroes gasped.

"Batman killed?"

"He has no problem with it if they're already dead-- vampires and zombies are both fair game. I'm part both, I guess, so I don't count."

"I think you need a spar," suggested Diana. "Friendly."

Hood led the way to the empty training room, strangely quite familiar with the Watchtower's layout.

Diana and Hood squared off and they began, after agreeing to no weapons or powers. Finally, Hood pinned Diana, using an Amazonian technique with ease.

Clark announced Hood the winner and Hood got up, offering Diana a helping hand.

"Good spar," she commented. "How did you know that move?"

He shrugged dismissively. "I've had many teachers, so I know many groups' styles and moves."

"You trained for a long time before baiting Batman. Why?"

"I needed time to plan, to research, to prepare. I needed to be better than the Bat. And now that I have broken him, my work is done. I'm not sure if I'll wear this again," he looked down at his getup for a minute, "but if I do, I will only be the Red Hood to protect the innocent and avenge the victims, not play with Bruce. I may have taken his old alias, but I will *never* be like him," he muttered the last part, but both heroes still caught it.

"What did Batman do to make you hate him?" Asked Diana compassionately.

Hood laughed shortly, startled. "Hate? No, I don't hate him. I thought I did, but I don't, at least not anymore. The problem is that I loved him. He doesn't deserve any of my attention anymore, so I have relegated him to my 'indifference' list. It's pathetic to waste your life over a man who will never change. Now that I've made my point and accomplished my goal, I'm done with him."

"I'm sorry," Diana said slowly, not quite knowing what she was apologizing for, but Hood seemed to know and understand.

"It's okay. I'm going to my mom's island soon for some R+R. It'll be good to see her and the twerp. Sometimes I think he's a demon brat, but then I remember a lot...I'll raise him okay, though."

Drawn out of her memories of how a curly-haired boy in bright colors would chatter away about anything and everything like Hood seemed to be doing, Diana looked at him in surprise. He was younger than she'd thought. She changed her mental estimate of late 20's/early 30's to early 20's.

Then Hood took his helmet off and kissed her cheek.

"Goodbye, Aunt Di. You were always my favourite."

In shock, Diana let him disappear.

"Jason?" She whispered to the air.

●○●○●○●

Five years later, Robin came onto the Watchtower, insulting everyone and everything quite creatively.

Wonder Woman came to greet the poky child. He deigned to let her hug him and in her ear he whispered, "My brother says to treat you well, for you are a true queen and his aunt. He told me to tell you he is happy and to call him. Here is his number," in Ancient Greek, which Diana was pretty sure even Batman didn't know.

The spiky child slipped a paper into her pocket, then proceeded to detatch himself with colorful insults.

Diana smiled fondly at her nephew's brother and left to make a call.

Over the years she had received packages randomly, with letters, new baking, books (self-annotated), random objects/weapons from around the globe, all signed, "With love from your favorite nephew to his favorite aunt."

The last one had been two months ago and held a patch for a lab coat which said "Dr. J. Todd".

The short note with it said he'd graduated medical school and was helping treat trauma/trafficking victims.

Enclosed was a glossy 3x5" grad photo, which she promptly framed and put by her bed.

Bruce had never been able to figure out why Diana and Clark treated him colder. All of the Leaguers around that day had been sworn to secrecy even though it was likely they knew nothing, but the big two were concerningly different around him. He never figured out why.

#ali writes #the best bat (?) #immortal jason #good aunt diana #bad dad bruce

[multidimensionalmusicalmess]

A bunch of praise of Olivia Barnett-Legh's performance of one specific scene, and of the west end revival's version of Heather Chandler in general

(This post is copied over from Reddit; I wrote it there originally because I was shadowbanned here.)

Disclaimer: I've never seen a portrayal of Chandler I didn't enjoy, and each actor brings at least one unique and brilliant thing to the role. While Olivia is my personal favorite for the reasons below, I don't mean by comparing her to other actors to in any way disparage those other actors, and this post is obviously my opinion, not fact. Also, I am very gay, and am biased towards any version of the show that makes it easier to read things in a gay manner.

Additional disclaimer: I will be extrapolating way too much from small details in this post. But isn't that the grand tradition of musical theater fandom?

Okay! So, despite being in the Heathers fandom for... way, way too long, to the point that I named myself Heather after Chandler a few years ago, I only got to see the show live for the first time a couple months ago in August. I was lucky enough to see the last West End revival cast with Miracle Chance, George Renshaw, and Olivia Barnet-Legh, and I adored Olivia's portrayal in particular so much that it singlehandedly got me back into the fandom and inspired a (so far) 50k word fic I've been writing ever since.

To preface, I'll talk a bit about what this particular production of the show does for Heather Chandler—if nothing else, because a lot of people seem unfamiliar with it, and it's worth being familiar with. Generally speaking, while the 2014 off-Broadway production made Chandler an entirely villainous and external presence, the latest version of the show has done a lot to bring the story a bit more in line with the movie, in which Veronica and Chandler were close friends before the story even began. In the 2014 production, Chandler's death is barely a tragic event, and it certainly isn't seen as one by the other characters (except perhaps McNamara). Veronica says after Blue that she doesn't feel as bad about Chandler's death as she should, and they share little chemistry other than that of enemies. It makes the line "I just killed my best friend" ring very hollow, for all the other merits of the original show.

This is radically changed in the latest production. Listing all of the ways the two characters have been made closer would take too long, so I'll just go over the big ones. Firstly, the line about not feeling guilty is cut, and replaced with an earlier and much more sincere "I feel bad. Heather was a human being, and we killed her" right after The Me Inside of Me. The croquet scene is made longer and changed from awkward and tense to playful and relatively friendly (except, obviously, Chandler's interaction with Duke). Several of Chandler's more confrontational lines with Veronica are cut (such as "You're doing it wrong!"). 'Ghost Heather' is given significantly more stage time, and, most importantly, shares a genuine rapport with Veronica. The two talk together in the background of multiple scenes (such as during Martha's added conversation with Fleming before Shine A Light) in what looks like an amicable way, and—my personal favorite—after the new conversation between Chandler and Veronica after You're Welcome (formerly Blue), rather than delighting in Veronica's suffering at the hands of Duke, Kurt, and Ram, Chandler actively gets between Duke and Veronica, in what (in most performances I've seen) reads as an attempt to protect her, or at least possessive jealousy. Granted, she does eventually give up and join in the song, but, well, she's still Heather Chandler.

(As a side note, all of these scenes between Veronica and Ghost Heather have an enormous amount of visible dialogue that isn't audible to the audience, and while I know that there probably aren't set lines in the script there, I would kill to hear what the characters are saying to each other)

All this sets the stage, so to speak: The most recent version of musical Heather Chandler is, while still arrogant and mean, much less cruel, and seems to share a mutual affection with Veronica. So, where does Olivia come into this?

First off, I'm incredibly biased towards her performance because she's gorgeous, has a ridiculous and entertaining voice, is a head taller than Veronica, and plays the gayest version of Chandler I've ever seen. But that goes without saying, and this production was really gay for plenty of other reasons anyway (particularly at the show I saw, where Veronica sang "A hot girl smiled at me" in Big Fun).

What stuck out to me most, though, and the reason I love her performance, is how she plays Heather after her death, especially the part of The Me Inside of Me clipped above.

It's long been a subject of speculation whether Heather Chandler's appearances after she dies are her literal ghost, or a figment of Veronica's imagination. Generally, I think it ends up largely down to acting decisions, and most actors make it pretty ambiguous (though there's been a shift towards the ghost end of the spectrum in later productions when compared to the 2014 one; Olivia, for instance, is far from the only actor to physically drag Veronica around during Never Shut Up Again).

Olivia, though, leans harder into the ghost interpretation than anyone else I've seen. I won't say she confirms it—that's impossible without script changes—but she heavily implies it, most notably in the above scene.

There are a few ways actors tend to play this part of The Me Inside of Me (the section most open to individual interpretation). Some, like Charissa Hogeland from the famous 2014 bootleg, Maddison Firth from the proshot, or Jodie Steele from the first West End run, mostly stand around being indignant and smug, which does undeniably work for the character. Others, like Emma Kingston (also from this revival), plays it very contemplatively, which I also like.

But Olivia panics. Her Chandler reacts exactly as I'd expect her to react to as if she were actually a ghost and had actually just discovered that nobody at the school who used to worship her could see her anymore, and I adore this for several reasons.

The first and most subjective reason is that it's extremely angsty. I read a lot of fanfiction, and seeing someone play Chandler in a way that felt like it stretches the boundaries of what the script allows for is brilliant. It makes the scene very sad in a satisfying way.

More importantly, this sadness radically alters the tone of the song, and by extension a large part of the show, in a way that I'd argue improves it. In most performances, The Me Inside of Me is a comic song. It's darkly comic, of course—this is Heathers—but the complete misunderstanding of Chandler's character, and Chandler's reaction to it, is mostly just funny.

Olivia's running around and trying to get people to notice her during the second chorus changes (a large part of) the song from darkly funny to outright eerie. Her escalating panic and terrified expression, plus her horrified reaction to the suicide note, suck most of the positivity out of the scene. Of course, it does still end with her being overjoyed at the attention, because that's how the show goes—but the influence of this part stays there, and its influence is apparent in every other scene she has as a ghost.

It impacts more than just her, though. Frequently, I've seen people criticize the musical for making JD seem too justified in his actions. Some dislike the addition of You're Welcome because they feel it casts Kurt and Ram as people who deserved to die; some dislike the emphasis on his tragic backstory in general. I don't agree with this critique, personally; I love sad, sympathetic JD. However, I do agree that the musical has often suffered from not showing negative consequences of the murders. Sure, Veronica says she regrets Chandler's death, but besides Duke's coup, it can be hard to see why her death or those of Kurt and Ram are really so bad. Olivia's performance during The Me Inside of Me, and to a lesser extent later on, makes immediately clear the tragedy of Chandler's death; it's obvious to the audience that, despite how united the school suddenly is, nothing good is happening here.

The biggest influence all of this has on the show, though, is how it changes Veronica's relationship with Chandler. Of course, no matter how you interpret things, they were clearly some degree of close in this version of the story; even if Chandler is a hallucination, Veronica cares about her enough to hallucinate everyday conversations with her. If Chandler isn't, though, and is really there—as Olivia's performance implies at every turn—then those interactions mean so much more. They mean that Chandler values Veronica enough to spend time talking to and in physical contact with the person who indirectly killed her, and, though we don't see much of their dynamic together before Heather's death, they imply that they really were close; or, alternatively, that Chandler is spending time with the person she condemned to social execution because nobody can see her anymore and she feels like it. It means, in short, that everything she does after her death can be taken as evidence about Heather Chandler, rather than about Veronica's stressed-out mind.

Now, obviously, I'm extrapolating a lot of meaning from a very short scene. I'm also praising Olivia's performance specifically when many of the elements that contribute to the ghost interpretation of Chandler are scripted, and thus shared by everyone who plays her in this production.

But, honestly, I'd just never seen anyone play Chandler's realization that she's dead remotely like this before, and I was really excited by it when I saw the show; I figured I might as well share some of that excitement with other fans. Hopefully the more fandom-minded among you (that is, people inclined to engage with fics) can see why I find this version of the character so fascinating, and those who aren’t can at least be amused by my extremely long post.

#Heather chandler #olivia barnett-legh #I've since been informed that Maddison Firth also does something like this #and that she just doesn't in the proshot #which is a shame #heathers #west end heathers

[belit0]

Aniki!

The real reason for Madara’s madness. Also, he's not the only crazy one.

Characters: Uchiha Madara - Uchiha Izuna - Senju Tobirama - Senju Hashirama

We love some good Uchiha bros bonding don't we

Tobirama focuses on Sasuke's speech while inwardly feeling completely repulsed by the young man's impudence. It seems like over the years, the Uchihas just got worse.

How can it be that the Senjus are no more, but these idiots, according to what the teenager relates to his older brother, are?

Unbelievable.

"Madara..."

Tobi sighs wearily. Brought was him to the world of the living only months ago, and now he's being dragged back here, interrupting his eternal rest to fight the world's worst pain in the ass.

The cursed Uchiha Madara is alive and kicking, threatening the entire planet in his wake.

But as his older brother recounts his childhood and the times the old Uchiha leader was a considerably decent person, Tobirama knows what he must do.

It's not about fighting and fighting foolishly on a brutish base like in the old days. It is not about Hashirama tirelessly facing off against that beastly power until one of the two falls down in defeat again, as in the past. It is not about uniting everyone to overcome him.

It is a matter of correcting the one mistake Tobirama dares to admit he made in his life.

"While you continue to debate the concept of village and shinobi, I would rather amend the world I do not belong to and prevent more innocent lives from continuing to join us in the afterlife. Anija, take your time if you wish."

Before he could hear a reaction from the other Hokages or the Uchiha boy, he disappears with his Hiraishin and moves to a safe distance from where he spotted Madara's chakra signature.

It is easy to identify him, considering that his power glows monstrously reddish amidst a sea of weak and some stubborn marks.

Taking refuge behind a rock, he watches in the distance as the resurrected Uchiha faces off against the current Kages. With pride, he sees Tsnuade's golden hair flying furiously from one side of the battlefield to the other.

A shinobi corpse lies at his feet, and swiftly, the Nidaime picks it up and claims it, determined to use it as a vessel for his technique.

Tobirama forces himself to concentrate and performs the hand seals that will bring the only workable solution to this war. A strange nostalgia appears in his chest when the image of his former rival, the one he mercilessly eliminated, appears before his eyes.

Often, after Izuna's death, he thought about him without noticing it. It only aggravated his guilt as he became Kagami's Sensei. Although it was their destiny to destroy each other, Tobirama never believed it would happen.

He foolishly hoped their eternal battle would end when their older brothers' dream came true, for he trusted in Hashirama's persistence and his influence over Madara, and perhaps then, he could even tolerate Izuna.

But when his Katana pierced him that day, the Senju's mixed feelings only mutated. What at first felt like a sense of victory eventually turned into disappointment at himself.

And when Madara left the village to-then explode against everyone to destroy everything they had built, he knew it was because of his little brother's death.

He himself had changed since he killed his rival. He couldn't even imagine how that event must have affected his older brother's best friend. Could he blame him for starting another war? Not really.

Maybe he would have done the same.

So Tobirama set out to repay Izuna for everything he stole from him. But even though his experiments were successful and several of his test subjects came back to life in front of him, he could not find the courage to summon the younger Uchiha.

Madara had fallen at the hands of Hashirama after going insane. What would be Tobi's excuse to revive Izuna?

However now, in front of the maniacal former Uchiha leader trying to destroy everything again because of his ancient and legendary pain, it was the perfect time to do it.

"Izuna...?"

The voice comes out as a choked whisper, even as the rumble of war and death cries ring out all around them.

Before he can explain anything, severed from his neck is Tobirama's head, causing thousands of papers to fly into the air and his eyes black with red go out for a moment.

The newly revived one attacked as if both of them continued to be in the same place where he lost his life. It is understandable, given the context that surrounds them is similar but even worse. In the past, Madara was not a lunatic.

After a few seconds, the Senju's head grows back from his neck, on the body that fell motionless on the ground. Izuna watches in horror, without understanding what is wrong, without stopping to-seriously analyze what is occurring.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd stay still and quiet before I have to send you to death again, Uchiha." Tobirama's irritation is real and tinges his voice as he rejoins, but he doesn't really speak his words with intent. He is secretly happy to see his old rival again after so many years.

"What..."

"There's no time, Izuna. You must stop your brother."

"Don't talk about my brother and fight!"

The Uchiha rushes at him again, but this turn it is not the white-haired man who loses his head. With an accurate blow, Tobi lets the papers fly in the air and waits for his rival to get up from the ground exactly as he did seconds ago.

How ridiculous must that scene look from afar? He can't help but ask himself.

While the red eyes of the Uchiha widen again, he shifts them in terror to all sides, looking around in shock for the first time.

"BUT..."

"We're dead, Izuna. There's no point in fighting me anymore."

"Madara..."

"You must stop him. Unfortunately, you're the only one who can after all. Otherwise, I wouldn't have brought you here."

"Here...? Where is this... here? Exactly?"

"A thousand years after your death. Future."

"Good... good, it's time to wake up Izuna... come on you useless little wimp wake up wake up!"

"What are you doing?"

Tobirama asks as he witnesses the Uchiha hit his head and pinch his arms.

"This is a nightmare that I'm unintentionally controlling again! Madara said no more sweets before bed and I should have listened but-"

"YOUR BROTHER IS ABOUT TO DESTROY THE WORLD BECAUSE I ASSASSINATED YOU, YOU FOOL!"

Silence falls over them both as he points to that spot on the battlefield where the five Kages fight against the older brother.

"But... my eyes... I have my eyes... I gave them to him before I..."

"I assumed I had them back after Madara's presumed death in the past... I wanted to apologize to you when seeing you again, to both of you, I mean. But now you must go over there and stop that lunatic, Izuna."

Without taking his gaze from where Madara mercilessly beats the presumed most powerful of the current world, the Uchiha stands up on shaky legs and walks over there, ignoring the people fighting around him and death painting the place. Splashes of blood reach his blue robe and he swears he can almost feel at home, having in front of him the huge, imposing back of his older brother who still does not notice his presence.

"Would you like these clones to use Susanoo? Or not?"

Izuna hears that sentence and can't help but smile with mouth hidden in the high collar of his shirt. His brother hasn't changed a bit.

And as he gets closer and closer, Madara speaks again, making him stop almost just as he is about to join him.

"Using my younger brother's chakra signature is both a poor and filthy move as an attempt of distraction, Shinobi alliance."

But just as the blue arm of Madara's Susanoo blindly reaches out to strike him, Izuna speaks up, finding his voice devoid of courage. He has seen so many enemies get killed by said technique flying mercilessly at him, yet his older brother never used it against him.

"Aniki!"

When he should have flown away and turned into papers in the air, nothing affected him. His eyes reflexively closed, but his feet refused to move from the place, showing determination.

"Otouto...?"

Peering around again, Madara's back is still there, showing that he didn't budge either, but his arm is outstretched to the side of his body. In front of him, the five Kages lie clenched by the clones he summoned previously, forcing them to remain paralyzed while he processes that voice, that sensation.

In the blink of an eye, the battlefield disappears, the screaming stops, and gone are all the surrounding people. His Aniki must have become much faster and skillful thanks to his eyes because Izuna did not even notice when being lifted into the air and transported away from the war by the Susanoo.

In his face, for the first time, Madara's features glow. Lines and cracks adorn his factions, while a violet eye makes a presence where his characteristic Sharingan should shine.

"Izuna... Izuna..."

Repeated are the words as two gloved hands caress his cheeks, brush his bangs and touch his eyelashes.

"This is real..."

"So it is, Aniki. I'm here."

"They... they killed you Otouto... they took you from my arms... your eyes... oh your beautiful eyes..."

"Aniki, no more. My eyes are back, I am back. Aniki... we must finish this..."

"We must end this Otouto..."

"We must kill them all..."

#uchiha madara #madara uchiha #senju tobirama #tobirama senju #senju hashirama #hashirama senju #madara #tobirama #hashirama #izuna uchiha #naruto #uchiha izuna #izuna #naruto founders

[agena87]

The Judith Ward brainrot is real. I spent the last two days thinking about her and playing with her in CAS/Blender/Photoshop.

I started developing a HC about her years ago, but I never really took time to write it (at least, until an hour ago - then I accidentally deleted my draft and since tumblr sucks, I can't recover it). So here we go (again).

-

Her official bio says this:

Judith Ward is a legend in the acting community. She has starred in everything from comedies to dramas. You name it, Judith has played the role. [...] Her mentality is to get rich at all costs. [...] She has been married several times, but all of her partners have only slowed her down. [...]

My HC is sorta the same, except... not.

Judith is a legend, alright. But in a more underground fashion. She did play about any kind of role, in any kind of film. As long as it was low-budget, mediocre (except a few surprisingly good movies), and cliché; she's a B-movie (scream) queen. The B-movie Queen. She has a very loyal following, verging on being a cult.

She started her career in a no-budget short film at the very end of the 70s, when she was only barely 18. Her sweet and innocent looks, coupled with a body that men couldn't resist, got her to immediately become the to-go actress when directors needed a final girl - and in those days, they needed a new one every couple months.

After just a few years, she already had starred in more than twenty movies, all in leading roles, and was married to her second husband, a man forty years her elder. It was her golden age. She was the star of every giallo or horror movie made in Del Sol Valley, plus a few sci-fi low-budget films. It's also when she started to get plastic surgery, the most noticeable, being her breasts which gained a few cups in a day.

The 90s were a more difficult time, but she still got a few major roles in some slashers, though less and less, she played a lead character.

The 2000s were when Del Sol's directors forgot about her, preferring to cast younger, prettier, girls. Her fifth husband, a producer of a different kind of films, convinced her to give it a try; that's how she started her career as a porn star. She didn't mind, after all, she was used to being naked on screen, and more than a few of her past roles had involved some erotism that verged on being pornographic (there is still some discussion today, to know if the sex scenes in two of her films were simulated or real - the answer was 'both'; actually, neither should have been real, but the sexual tension with her partner on the set of Die My Bride was so intense that they ended up not faking it).

Finally, in the middle of the 2010s, a couple of new horror movie directors, who grew up watching her exploitation films, offered her a major - though not the lead - role in their successful debut movie, reviving her cult. Since then, she starred in a few more films, often getting the lead role.

She divorced her seventh husband a few months back, and is now dating a 21 years old actor she met on the set of her latest movie. She's thinking about getting a new breast expansion surgery, and still stars in a few pornos here and there.

#ts4 #the sims 4 #ts4 headcanon #townie headcanon #sim: judith ward #i actually ended writing more (and adding more details) than in my lost draft so i guess it's cool #now i have a render to finish and edit

[ariadnew]

CTJL 2021, ROUND 7: PARIS

PARIS, FRANCE

These are the last CTJL Paris pictures you’ll see from me. Promise. Cross my heart, hope to die, et cetera et cetera.

Competition day might’ve been at the mercy of a dark and threatening sky, but the team’s trip to Paris wasn’t all misery! Both Agatha and Archie won their respective classes, and the sun even popped out during down time- a nice reward for Poquelin and Zee, who got to spend an afternoon relaxing in the Champs de Mars. Archie was happy to be back in Paris, a place which harbours fond memories of youth; Dot was happy to be in Paris for the first time, let alone at the side of one of her idols. Even Agatha was happy*! She managed to get away from the pair of them for a day.

Travelling with the same two people for several months on end isn’t great when one is an introvert.

(That’s why she’s missing in the last picture, FYI. She’s probably off raiding used-book stores in search of more beautifully bound early editions to add to her collection, or at the Louvre falling in love with the statue of Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, or sitting incognito with a book at a bistro in Montparnasse simply enjoying some alone time. In case you were wondering.)

*Possibly? It’s Agatha. Can one really be sure?

- - - - -

Continuing on my quest to finish photo sets + subsequently delete folders + clean out my Tumblr drafts.

Yes yes yes, I do know the relevant event ended literally more than a year ago and you’ve forgotten about it and don’t care anyway. I swear I am sufficiently ashamed of myself. But not enough ashamed of myself to delete it all and forget about it!! My need for closure >>>>> my shame. Always.

#The Sims 3 #TS3 #Simblr #Equus-Sims #Lowmax Stud #Competition #CTJL #Show Jumping #Agatha Foskett #Poquelin #Archie Vandover #Speakeasy LX #Dorothy Lawley #On Location #Paris #France #Scenic #I never remember my tagging system #Why #Cleaning out my drafts

[memento-morri-writes]

Happy WBW! 📜 - What things can magic not do in your world?

Hello! Thanks for the ask!

I'm gonna talk about High Fantasy WIP, because it's been on my brain since last night.

Since the world and vibes of High Fantasy WIP is largely based on a D&D-type setting, there's obviously healing magic. It can do some powerful things, from mending broken bones to even bringing people back to life. But even the most powerful healers have their limits.

One example of this is scars. Healing magic can't heal pre-existing scars, like from old wounds. Wounds left to heal naturally in the past will leave a scar that cannot be healed by magic. Also, depending on the severity of a wound, even if it's healed almost immediately, it might still leave some kind of scar. (Fatal wounds almost always leave a scar, even if the person is revived immediately after death.)

Additionally, magic can't replace severed limbs, or "fix" conditions that a person was born with, or other significantly damaging conditions. Basically, while magic might be able to help a person cope with their disability, it cannot "cure" disabilities.

Also, there are certain kinds of magical injuries that are resistant or even immune to magical healing. Certain kinds of cursed blades might resist magical healing, or powerful curses might cause magical healing to hurt rather than help. But those kinds of magic are very powerful, and very rare. They're generally considered taboo, if not illegal.

(The scar thing in particular was based off of a headcanon I had for one of my actual d&d characters, Rook, to explain why he had prominent scars, despite having been magically healed many times. The reasoning I came up with is that at the time he received the wounds, they were left to heal on their own, and as such healed to a scar. Magic can't undo that, since it happened years or months ago.)

#pluttskutt #wbw #wbw asks #Morrigan replies #high fantasy wip #high fantasy wip: worldbuilding #worldbuilding wednesday #worldbuilding

[sterlingarcher23]

Elumax will happen...

Elmax will happen. Lumax will happen. Elumax will happen... Just not the way most imagine or would like.

They showed us how it will be made reality or better where: ElMax will happen in the mind. Lumax in reality.

El fought the monsters in the mind and revived her - Lucas fought the monsters in reality and caught her.

Elmax isn't one sided nor fan fiction, it's real believed to be fan fiction... Korrasami was fan fiction made reality:

Korrasami... (Or better: Korraava?) - They flipped the concept and made it look like ElMax is just a fan fiction thing.

On her heart. That description alone is telling. El revived her and then sent her mind into another dimension over a rainbow bridge. The script does not leave much room for interpretation here. Body goes to body (the UD is technically one huge organism), mind goes to mind. So this is a dimension of mind, of dreams and thought - the antithesis to the UD.

This is where Max's consciousness is now and needs to be send back/replaced and a connection to a healthy mind guarantees that she can feel and see. (see also links at the end of this post)

El and Max are made as exact mirrors, connected through their accessories and hearts.

But they are never alone.

There's always space for a third person, the lover who isn't there.

"Without heart we'd all fall apart. Even El. Especially El."

Max is the heart. She is literally the answer to a neverending story. And the very life of Lucas. Both are focus points in Max's heart and she does love both of them.

There were love confessions in Season 4 without using "ILY" at all.

Elumax will happen. They even made a poem consistent of two separate ones for them:

It's not a matter of chances but of what's there in the show. It will be unusual, it will be heart wrenching and heartbreaking but it will happen. It will be "quite moving and beautiful." as David Harbor put it, who pieced together what's gonna happen because he knows his characters arc, having a theoretical idea about this. (He stated this in an interview with Jimmy Kimmel recently). And Hopper's story is about El. So, it's about Max too.

My advice is to forget thinking of Elumax as a "traditional" relationship even for a poly: it won't be.

If you would have asked me months ago, I wouldn't even have seen Elmax as a real thing, not to speak of Elumax. I wasn't even a hardcore fan of the show. Weeks and months of looking at the pure evidence itself, thinking about it, coming from the point of view of the general audience because that's what I was, just GA (important imo because you tend to look at things from a different perspective).

As someone who didn't ship them then, even when I found Elmax I rejected them because it was to painful as my findings how they would solve that coma problem hurt to much but then I can't denie them either because it would be a lie... for all those reasons I can tell you: Elmax will happen. Lumax will happen. Both are set in stone. It will hurt, it will make you cry but it will happen.

I started with a simple question: How they would solve the Max problem because that's what this is about. I basically solved this after a few days. Then I found Elmax as a romantic couple and the rest is history.

They intended this to be: they can make it happen. They will make it work. And it will blow your mind.

Not going to put everything about how El and Max will happen in this post, only the links. But to give you an idea:

#max mayfield #elmax #elmax nation #stranger things #elmax supremacy #elmax my beloved #el hopper #elmax is real #elumax #lumax #lucas sinclair

[aesop-and-fiends]

I’ve decided to use this partially as something to get something off my chest, because for some reason it won’t climb off. I really need some advice.

About a year or so ago, there was an incident involving a friend of mine and myself. I’ll call this person Garret. Garret and I were at a friend’s (calling them Jamie) 17th birthday party. We had been friends for a long time, since primary school, and had recently reconnected after time apart due to myself moving house and schools. So, it was myself, Garret and Jamie, roleplaying together like old times. It was good. For context, I had been roleplaying separately with Garret for several years prior, and we had come to get to know each-other’s characters rather well. However, I always felt an odd dependence in our relationship, which was validated one day when Garret randomly blocked Jamie and I in a discord server we shared. When I tried to contact Garret through their phone number, they confessed that they were in love with me and had been for a very long time. At the time, I was in a relationship that I had been in for 2 years prior to this message, with a person I am still very much in love with, so the message hit me as quite a shock. Nonetheless, I tried to be as understanding as I could. We talked, and Garret later revealed that some of the ways in which I described certain aspects of my character’s deeds were too graphic and made them deeply uncomfortable (I am a horror writer at heart). I understood this and apologised for upsetting them, we set boundaries and moved on. However, not without an air of confusion between us, and a degree of discomfort on my part. Over the next few months (for which Garret was in a relationship) Garret began discussing the idea of polyamory and platonic friendships with me. I should have told them to speak to their partner rather than asking me, but I was 16 and very naive. Back to the birthday party. It was myself, Garret and Jamie in their caravan, drinking, being silly and roleplaying. This is a good time to mention that Jamie unfortunately was pushed to the side in a lot of our role plays due to the fact Garret and I role played separately and tended to have lengthier answers than that which Jamie liked to write. For the first couple hours, things were going really well. However, after involving a plot in which my character died on the shoulder of Garret’s character and was miraculously revived, I realised I was no longer comfortable and tried to remove myself from the situation discreetly by checking my phone, so as to not make either Jamie or Garret uncomfortable. It was Jamie’s 17th after all. My partner was anxious about me being so far away, so I was texting them. Meanwhile, Garret was eager to get back to a plot, which I understood, but tried to reaffirm to them that they had their own partner so they should understand why I was texting mine (not in those specific terms, but rather more a nudge). I do not believe Garret is a bad person, however they did not ask for my consent for what is to follow. The next scene they wanted to do involved their character turning into a dog and whimpering in pain, and required me to scratch their hair. (Important to note here that Garret LOVED touching my hair and would often be quite touchy with me in public, which seemed innocent enough until their confession). They did not ask for my consent in any of these occasions, as far as I remember. This was a year ago, but I remember these instances being quite sudden. This scene involving Garret the dog made me extremely uncomfortable, to the point where I couldn’t move. However, I said nothing. I didn’t want to upset Jamie and ruin the night for Garret, so I played along. The next morning, Garret joked about how in the night I had apparently cuddled up to them in my sleep. Considering everything, I went into a trauma response (I am an SA survivor and was SA’d in my sleep as a child so the mentioning of this was VERY triggering for me.) I discussed my discomforts with Jamie after Garret had been picked up (I have been friends with Jamie since I was 2, whereas I had been friends with Garret since I was 12), and Jamie urged me to discuss things with them. I did.

It was a normal conversation, and I asked if we could not do that again because it made me uncomfortable. I have since deleted all the screenshots unfortunately, all I have is my word, however I would say this went well. After telling my partner about what happened, they were furious and wanted to meet Garret, so I added them to a server under the guise of us roleplaying all four of us (myself, Jamie, Garret, and my partner who I’ll call Lucian). The server was silent. Then, when I asked if anyone wanted to roleplay, after many ‘college is hard and I’m busy’ comments, the flood gates opened and Jamie and Garret went into a full war. There had always been conflict between the two, and I admit, there were some things that Garret raised against Jamie that I had to agree with, but in the end I chose Jamie over Garret as my friend, because they have been for me through thick and thin. I also later discovered that Garret had been being odd towards his at the time partner who i’ll call Bea. They broke up, as per Garret’s request. After this, I lost my shit. All that pain and confusion and anger came spilling out in a very ugly way. Garret blocked me again on discord, so I texted their number to ask what was happening, to which they blocked me again (a year ago, can’t remember exactly, but I suspect this is the case). I then found them on Tumblr. They blocked me before I could have my say in the argument, and I was furious. So, we argued, and they later blocked me, after blaming me for their suicidal thoughts and intent to hurt themselves (I am also a suicide survivor). This was the end of it for a while. I still don’t understand how it escalated from us sorting the problem to resolving it. A year later, I saw Garret in a hot chocolate shop in the city near where I used to live. They entered after me, and upon seeing me, immediately left. I sent them a message (on my new tumblr account) to apologise for making them uncomfortable and that I was now out of the shop if they wanted to go and get one. They then called me a variety of horrible names, blamed me for all of their trauma, and compared me to Mr. Hyde from Jekyll and Hyde. They also said I was cruel even as a child and that they were a fool for ever trusting me because myself and Jamie are just as bad as each-other and are both horrible people. I was shocked by this. I did not wish to be made into a punching bag, however I also did not want to escalate the situation. I appreciate the friendship we had, and while I understand it had to end, I do not believe I am an evil person. I tried to explain I would be in the city (which has quite a small city centre) A LOT over the next few weeks so they should be prepared to see me. I also told them that if it was triggering for them to see me, that I would be in a set of specific locations on specific days, and thus to avoid those locations if they did not want to see me. More horrible names, more comments about me being an abuser and a manipulator. I didn’t want to upset them, I just wanted to be helpful and prevent further upset. I understand perhaps I was the fool in that situation. After discussing this with Bea however, with whom I have found a strong friendship, apparently this was not out of character for Garret, and they often showed this behaviour in their relationship. I understand love is a hard thing to deal with, but I still don’t understand. I know I should have set boundaries, and regret not doing so, but I had never expected them to not ask for consent and brag about the unconscious returning of their affections, which I was deeply uncomfortable with, especially when they knew I was in a committed relationship.

I can’t help feeling as though I can’t now move on, and am weighed down significantly by this (this is not to say I deny that Garret went through a hard time, I believe they did). I understand I wasn’t perfect and could have dealt with things better and more logically but I was distraught and dealing with my hog of fair other things at the time. This is not to say I have not apologised for where I went wrong, I have. However they have yet to apologise for what they did. Am I wrong for wanting them to apologise? How do I move on from this?

#i need advice #am i the asshole #what do i do #aita

[i-mybrunettelady]

Boldness alone among the wreck

Preface: So, I wrote this 2 months ago and just. Forgot to post. But I’m in a bit of an El mood and it’s a very good El angst fic, exploring his mindset as he’s trying to revive Trahearne. It’s, understandably, not a period I like writing a lot of about, just as I don’t write Nyra between Trahearne’s death and her attempt to take her own life. El’s a little easier to tap into, though, so this happened. It’s got a happy end, vaguely! That’s something!

Title from Mumford and sons’ Little lion man, one of the most El songs I’ve found to date.

Content warning: angst, grief, HoT spoilers.

--- Durmand Priory, 1328 AE

He’s writing with ash, and not very convincingly, if the large, finger-sized dot on the wall is any indication. What is a dot supposed to mean? Vague ramblings of some fucker who liked hearing their own voice far too much suggests eternity. It is dark and uneven and he wants to press his finger harder to make it fill out, but his hands are entirely too shaky for that. The glow of his hair makes every paler spot visible, makes his belly twist and turn and makes him want to just give up. 

But no, he keeps the finger pressed there, shaking, determined to make it. What was it even supposed to be? Why is he writing on walls at all? Why the fucking dot not even? Why can’t he target these specific holes and fill them up, why is his hand not working with him? Would it not be nicer if he just got rid of it, given it bothers him so much? 

It’s his hand, though. The charred bark there speaks of past successes. He’s one of the best elementalists alive. He can do whatever it is he set out to do in writing on the walls. 

It’s supposed to be a number, his brain catches up. Slow, he thinks, entirely too slow. He’d burned the pen hours ago and is now writing with its ashes. The warmth of the fire felt comforting, like an old friend, a dagger, but his throat closes up when he realises he doesn’t trust himself with either fire or daggers right now. 

It remains painfully tight as he sets the hand down in defeat. His head’s been heavy for months now, bleeding madness he can’t get rid of. A leaf lost in the wind, his body feels uncomfortable as it’s dragged between the helplessness, the severed bond in his head, the tormenting itch of his Wyld Hunt, and the heavy presence of Trahearne’s corpse on the table nearby. 

So he curls in on himself, wishing to make himself as small as possible, but there’s no escaping his head. There’s no escaping his body. There’s no escape. Trapped in a Wyld Hunt of grief, he coils tighter, trying to make his throat work, to call out, but who would he call for anyway? Trahearne, somewhere in the Mists? Firstborn, in the Grove? Liv, who leaves him feeling both grounded and torn whenever he just places a paw around his shoulders, brings him a warm meal and puts him to bed? Liv, who makes him want to both bury his head in his chest and run away, who can pick him up with ease, with whom his voice is lost and replaced with big-eyed stares he’s later embarrassed of, who’s made him feel dependent on his presence and his touch and his gentle words and the mere fact that he’s alive and warm? 

Yes, him, a part of him says. He untangles, limbs heavy and weary as he tries standing up. He’s dusting the series of numbers on the wall with ash. He stares at them, breathing deeply, trying to summon anything but this exhaustion and uncertainty. His stomach drops further when nothing shows up, crawling up his spine, beating against his brain, against the gaping hole in it, and his legs shake but he’s up, he’s up, and suddenly he finds himself running out of the workshop, shaking like a leaf, tears burn his eyes but he runs, doesn’t know where, doesn’t know how. 

He has no fire, no daggers, and more importantly, no anger. What does he have then? Did Mordremoth take that too? 

He knocks at someone’s door, weak and small and frightened like a sapling, and if he had anything left but this all-consuming terror (and an anchor, a small, mad voice in him suggests and he stomps on it like it’s the Nightmare itself) he’d have kicked himself in the belly, once, twice, laughing to the backdrop of his own whimpers. His anger wouldn’t let him be like this, stripped raw, stripped bare, bark and little else, a clown for all to see, but there’s no hope left but his anchor. His anchor. His anchor. 

That thought frightens him above all else. 

Liv opens the door, rubbing his eyes. He looks around and then down. 

“El?” he whispers, worry painting his voice. 

“I’m scared,” El says and his own voice sounds foreign to him. Of you, I’m scared of you because you disarm me, I’m scared of myself, I’m scared of the night and of death and of Mordremoth, I’m scared of my head, I’m scared of the uneven dot on the walls, of numbers, of people, and I’m scared of you because you make me come to you when I’m scared and I don’t know what you want in return. 

I’m terrified, actually. 

“Need company?” Liv offers and El hates how easily he surrenders to Liv’s hug, how quickly he lets himself get picked up, how fast he is to bury his head in Liv’s neck and above all else, he hates the little sobs that leave him and the desperate tears that now wet the golden mane. 

He may hate that the most, actually. 

#gw2 #inspo birb has come to town #gw2 fic #gw2 writing #elandrin aien #elion #vague livion stormbreath #gw2 sylvari #vague trahearne #what are these tags omg #anyway i felt like we needed some el on our dashes #so have an el <3

[partydown]

‘Party Down’ Is Back. Did You R.S.V.P.?

New York Times article by Alexis Soloski

The invitations have been sent, the appetizers plated, the bottles opened. Rows of glasses gleam like baby stars. And somewhere, on the fringes of the celebration, a cater waiter is about to do something very wrong.

This was the template of “Party Down,” a Starz comedy that ran for two 10-episode seasons, debuting in the spring of 2009. Canceled just as critics and niche audiences were beginning to catch on, the show followed the disaffected employees of a mid-tier catering company as they moved from party to party, one per episode, filching booze, seducing guests, snorting coke, flirting with Nazism and accidentally poisoning George Takei.

The original 20 episodes never included a surprise party. But get your streamers and party blowers ready. Because in a surprise to just about everyone — most likely including the folks at Nielsen, who once awarded the show’s finale a 0.0 rating among 18- to 49-year-olds — “Party Down” is back. A six-episode revival will premiere on Starz on Feb. 24, with new episodes arriving weekly.

Martin Starr, a returning cast member, seemed to genuinely marvel at the development.

“This was the only show I’ve worked on where people came to work when they weren’t working,” he said in a group video call. “It’s crazy that we get to come back and do it again.”

“Truth be told,” his co-star Ken Marino said, “the reason I came back to set when I wasn’t working is I was between homes.”

Starr: “I do remember you were finding places to go to the bathroom that maybe didn’t have your name.”

Marino: “I still do. I’m going to the bathroom right now.”

Is this the same “Party Down” that failed to dominate cable television over a dozen years ago? Mostly. The show’s original creators, John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, Rob Thomas and Paul Rudd, remain, as executive producers, and Enbom oversees a small staff of writers. The party-a-week structure also endures, as does the original cast — with the exception, based on the five episodes provided in advance, of Lizzy Caplan.

“All of us, for the entire 13 years since we stopped shooting the show, all we wanted to do is make more ‘Party Down,’” the show’s lead, Adam Scott (“Parks and Recreation,” “Severance”), said in a separate interview last month. “We all would have been there for free.”

But the world has changed in the dozen or so years since the original run was canceled. So have the actors. Unknowns or barely knowns when the show debuted, most have since become household names. (The others? Depends on the household.) And they’ve all seen the current crop of disappointing reboots and reprises. “Party Down” could just be the rare show to get it right, mixing the perfect cocktail of star power, nostalgia, growth and gags.

Then again, the characters never put a lot of muscle into bartending. So here’s a Zen koan for a deeply un-Zen show: Can you throw the same party twice?

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Are we having fun yet?

The first run of “Party Down” was both structural marvel and joke spectacular. Each episode was simultaneously a workplace comedy, a hangout comedy and a procedural — a sitcom that never sat down. The celebrations it featured — birthdays, after parties — typically bordered the entertainment industry and nearly all of the cater waiters harbored industry dreams of their own.

Those dreams eluded them, which fueled the philosophical inquiry at the show’s center.

“What we were asking was: How long do you chase the dream?” Thomas, one of the creators, said. “When do you grow up? When do you quit banging your head against the wall?”

The “Party Down” staff are all trying to make it, as actors, screenwriters and comedians. (Marino’s Ron, the manager, has a different dream: a Soup ’R Crackers franchise.) Only Henry (Scott), who has traded beer-commercial celebrity for free-floating despair, has opted out. The actors were trying back then to make it, too. None of the original cast — Caplan, Ryan Hansen, Jane Lynch, Marino, Scott, Starr — were anything like famous when the show began. Acting in a comedy about the entertainment industry’s has-beens, also-rans and never-wills resonated with the cast, sometimes uncomfortably.

“It felt so close to home, this show, because I felt like I could be a caterer the next day easily,” Hansen said.

Scott, who at the time had yet to play a lead, then shared that sense of career tenuousness. The cast felt deeply connected to the show in those first seasons, he said, and protective of it. “We just wanted to do it forever, because it made us feel better,” he said. “It really did.”

The salaries, though small, kept a few of the actors on the sunny side of financial precarity. The camaraderie helped, too. (That camaraderie remains; I had four of the actors together on a video call, and I have never heard grown men exchange so many “Love yous.”) Several actors separately compared the original shoot to summer camp.

That genuine affection altered the show’s tone. Some first season episodes included “edgy” humor — gay jokes, post-racial jokes. (“It’s cringey, yeah,” Starr said.) But the creators quickly realized they didn’t need that edge. The show was sadder than that. Funnier, too. The characters are screw-ups, sure, but the show suggests that everyone is a screw-up, especially after an hour at an open bar. So maybe the best thing is to find common cause as you pass the hors d’oeuvres.

“It’s about people who think that they’re going to find happiness in something out there,” Lynch said. “But what they have right in front of them is really quite sweet.”

Lynch shot the first eight episodes. Then she had to leave for the Fox show “Glee.” Marino hired a stripper for her wrap party. The stripper, Lynch recalled, smelled of French fries. The show went on, with Jennifer Coolidge replacing Lynch for two episodes and Megan Mullally, the only actor who was already well-known, coming in for the final 10.

The creators believed that it would keep going, even though, according to Nielsen, the Season 2 finale attracted only 74,000 viewers. Starz had other plans. Those plans didn’t involve letting the creators take the show elsewhere. “Party Down” languished.

One decade, zero dinners

If the original run argued that it’s healthier to let some dreams die, the creators and the cast could never quite manage that. There were talks, every year or so, of getting the crew back together — for a special, for a movie, for a move to another network. Friends and fans often asked Marino about it.

“I was like, ‘They’re working on it,’” he said. “‘It’s going to happen! Right around the corner!’” It took him eight or nine years to accept that maybe that corner wasn’t coming.

Then in 2019, Starz appointed Jeffrey Hirsch as its new president and chief executive. Thomas reached out to Hirsch and began pitching the show again. Hard. This time, Starz said yes.

That was only the first hurdle. The actors had conflicts and prior commitments now. The revival was approved in the summer of 2021, with production scheduled for early 2022. Lynch was to begin rehearsing a Broadway musical. Scott was making the Apple TV+ show “Severance.” Mullally had booked a movie being shot in Idaho.

Somehow a six-week window was found, even though that window involved flying Mullally to Los Angeles every weekend and back to Sun Valley by Monday.

“We could never get together for dinner for a decade,” Etheridge, a creator, said. “But when we came to shoot the show, everybody was there.”

Everybody except for Caplan, who had signed onto the FX series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” (Asked whether Caplan might make a surprise appearance in Episode 6, Starz declined to comment.) Enbom had originally structured this new season around the on-again-off-again relationship between Henry and Caplan’s Casey. He had to restructure it, adding a new character, a studio executive played by Jennifer Garner. The revival’s first episode takes time out to heckle Caplan: Casey, now a successful comedian, can’t make a crew reunion.

“She’s shooting in New York,” Starr’s Roman, still an aspiring “hard sci-fi” writer, says. “Too big time for the likes of us.”

There were fewer jokes in real life. Hansen tried to make light of the situation. “Listen, we get it,” he said. “She had a job, whatever. I mean, I personally turned down a Marvel movie to do ‘Party Down.’”

“Tell that to everybody,” he added.

But just about everyone described themselves as heartbroken, including Caplan. “If I think about it for too long, I start to cry,” she wrote in an email. She sent cupcakes to the shoot.

The bow tie abides

Hollywood has transformed in the years since “Party Down” first concluded, and in some ways the show has, too. Gratuitous boobs are gone now. And the catering crew, once blindingly white, has become more diverse with the inclusion of two new regulars: Sackson, a YouTube-style content creator played by Tyrel Jackson Williams, and Lucy, a chef played by Zoë Chao who styles herself as a “food artist.”

Yet, the sweet-sour, slightly funky flavor of “Party Down” — like a margarita made with off-brand liquor — is mostly unaltered. This seems to be the rare revival that understands what made the original work, yet can still move (or move just enough to include the occasional TikTok dance challenge) with the times.

“We kept doing what we’d always been doing, just with new details,” Enbom said. “Because society certainly has not changed into a more wholesome place.”

Have the returning characters changed? That depends on how much you and your therapist believe that change is possible. “They’re still the same lovable knuckleheads,” Mullally said. “Most of these people haven’t really moved on, or they haven’t really become any happier, or more fulfilled in their lives.”

Slinging hors d’oeuvres hits different and more darkly in midlife. Still, the creators and the cast didn’t want the revival to feel like a bummer.

“It’s going to be fun watching the characters try to claw their way toward something other than their current circumstances,” Scott promised.

And if not exactly “fun,” then certainly relatable. “Really who gets what they want in this life?” Lynch said.

She probably meant that rhetorically. But the “Party Down” die-hards, Lynch included, did get what they wanted, a third season. And they seem to have delighted in making it, though Marino joked that he’d had to slim down before he could fit into his signature pink bow tie.

“Had to work off that neck fat,” he said. “Got my neck nice and lean.”

Slipping on that outfit was a little more stressful for Chao, a newcomer. She had watched the show, years after its debut, while working a food-service survival job herself. “Party Down” had made her feel less alone. She didn’t want to ruin it. “I whispered to myself every day, going onto set, ‘Be the least funny, but by as little as possible,’” she said.

Williams expressed similar gratitude and anxiety. “Everyone was so sweet and welcoming from the very beginning,” he said. “It never felt like an intimidating environment.” And yet, he added, “there was still like this insane fear.”

The returning cast faced related, if less acute, worries. They have been in the business long enough to understand how revivals can go wrong. (A few of them had even appeared in revivals that flopped.) But they were reassured by the scripts, written by Enbom and a small staff, which suggested a continuity of character and tone and food-poisoning-induced body horror. There was also the pleasure of being together again — a little older, a little grayer, but still able to drop a tray on cue.

Will the ratings for this coming season be better? Comfortingly, they can’t get much worse. But the cast and creative team are counting on the show’s turning enough heads that Starz will greenlight a fourth season. (“You better believe I’m not missing that one,” Caplan wrote.)

Though Starr is inclined to cynicism, he sounded only mildly sardonic in discussing this ambition. “I really do hope we’re allowed to come back and do it again and keep up this little charade we’ve got going,” he said.

Hansen put it a bit more pragmatically. “In 12 years, people are going to love Season 3.”

#party down #party down starz #article #cast #s3

[marvellousstawler]

So, months ago, I found my old writing, wrote a post after getting inspired, forgot that I had saved the draft of that post, found the same old writing again (having forgotten that I had found it earlier in the year), got inspired by it again, went to write a new post about it, and found the draft of the old post. Thanks amnesia!

Thus, instead of posting a journal this week because I haven't written it yet and don't really want to do it this evening on account of being inspired, you're getting this draft I made from literally several months ago that I never actually posted. Enjoy?

Oh wait no. Holy crap, I just reread this post before posting it and realised it was a completely different draft from months ago, after getting inspired by my old writing, that I never actually posted. So maybe you'll get that one next week or maybe you'll get it another time anyway who cares read my drivel.

---

So. I found my old writing!

I say “old.” It’s probably from about three or four years ago, I definitely remember showing it to some people at Uni. And I say “found,” I opened my backup folder on my Google Drive. But! The improvement in my understanding of writing and story construction (as well as my capacity to set achievable goals) is so noticeable, that it *feels* old.

As such I spent most of my workday yesterday checking out my old writing on company time. Most people who do this go off about how their writing is “cringe,” but my writing isn’t yet old enough to have achieved cringe. (And the stuff that would be old enough was all lost in the iPad Pages Purge Of ‘16, RIP). But no, in my case, the worst thing I can say about my writing was that it was boring and uninspired. Most of it was more telling than showing because I had SO much to cover, because I started with way too much on my plate.

But beneath the boring stuff there were some genuinely inspiring concepts buried in there, which is good, because the work I’m currently doing is built on the corpse’s corpse’s corpse of a story that started when I was 12. Nisa, my current antagonist, is an explicitly Mary-Sue villain built from my unwittingly Mary-Sue protagonist from back in the day. Typically the compelling stuff is not about Nisa, in fact most of the stuff from the backup folder that could feasibly called cringe is about her. I still wasn’t fully comfortable being gay, so nearly every chapter is someone else talking about how great Nisa is, while still having this half-hearted “but she’s like, still really clumsy and stupid ok” air about it.

But!! It was the chapters who weren’t about Nisa at all who had the interesting concepts in them. Most notably, I had a prequel for a pair of “reformed villains” (they were just heroes the whole time because I don’t know how to not make everyone a protagonist), and in this prequel, Sorrel (who you will recognise as a protagonist for the current prologue when TDD actually gets posted) has been dead for nine years before coming back to life because of primordial god shenanigans. She died a martyr, having left a set of instructions for how to build a government for her murderer to follow and ratify out of guilt (i don’t have time to explain the context and it was never concrete, but it did make a modicum of sense at the time). When she revives, the country she left behind HAS been rebuilt, but clearly her brutish murderer fudged the instructions. And is also nowhere to be found, which is important because she was supposed to be running the place.

And that’s a cool concept! Showing up and realising that while you’ve been gone the political and social structure of the world you left behind is BONKERS. And the good news is, I have an organic way to introduce it into TDD. Nisa and She-Bear spend like 20 years being trapped in a moon and holding the moon together respectively, meaning that when the pressure builds and the moon explodes (they’ll be fine) they’ll be yeeted onto a planet they used to lead which now has like, shopping malls and toll roads.

I accidentally typed “shopping mauls” initially and that is an idea that people are welcome to take further.

#drivel #writing #writeblr #creative writing #marvomakesathing #old writing #inspiration #whoops #writing progress #progress