#Literary Cookbook

[stonedstud]

I’ve been trying to eat more Arab food in an effort to 1) get in touch with my heritage and 2) find the comfort of a mothers cooking without a mother so I picked up a book from the library called “Arabiyya: Recipes From the Life of an Arab in Diaspora”. To my (shortsighted) surprise, the author is Syrian/Palestinian-American, and the foreword brought me almost to tears. I hadn’t expected a cookbook to be the thing my brain would let me use to process my feelings abt my parents, and the Middle East+North Africa at large.

#bruh tell me why this cookbook is my undoing #kyro discovers a brand new literary form 😼

[theminisonproject]

We are 4 submissions away from being caught up, so if you haven't heard from us yet, you will very soon! We are very close to reaching our piece quota, and we are quickly reaching a year since we opened submissions for the recipe anthology, so the timing couldn't be more perfect!

Submit your recipes and stories here: https://theminisonproject.com/minipress

#MiniPress #RecipeAnthology #FoodWriting

#cookbook #poetry #prose #art #food writing #creative writing #writers wanted #poets wanted #artists wanted #family recipe #writeblr #bookblr #lit mag #literary magazine #submissions open #writers on tumblr #poets of tumblr

[thegirlwiththelantern]

Chinese Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook

Chinese Fairy Tale Feasts is a collection of fairytales for young readers. With bright, colourful illustrations by Shaoli Wang, it’s a joy to flick through. The stories by Paul Yee are for the most part fun. The choice to set some of these stories sometime around the last century is one that I appreciate. Fairy tales tend to feel less magical the more modern they are, but not here. As someone who…

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#Book Review #Books #Children&039;s Books #Chinese Fairy Tale Feasts #Chinese Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook #Cookbooks #Judy Chan #Paul Yee #Review #Shaoli Wang

[thatwritererinoriordan]

A Literary Holiday Cookbook: Festive Meals for the Snow Queen, Gandalf, Sherlock, Scrooge, and Book Lovers Everywhere

#a literary holiday #recipes #cookbook #literary #winter holidays

[broomsick]

List of interesting ressources pertaining to norse paganism, scandinavian folklore and history, and nordic religions in general

These are sources I have personally used in the context of my research, and which I've enjoyed and found useful. Please don’t mind if I missed this or that ressource, as for this post, I focused solely on my own preferences when it comes to research. I may add on to this list via reblog if other interesting sources come to my mind after this has been posted. Good luck on your research! And as always, my question box is open if you have any questions pertaining to my experiences and thoughts on paganism.

Mythology

The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion

Dictionnary of Northern Mythology

The Prose and Poetic Eddas (online)

Grottasöngr: The Song of Grotti (online)

The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes

The Wanderer's Hávamál

The Song of Beowulf

Rauðúlfs Þáttr

The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: Gods of the Vikings (Kevin Crossley-Holland's are my favorite retellings)

Myths of the Norsemen From the Eddas and the Sagas (online) A source that's as old as the world, but still very complete and an interesting read.

The Elder Eddas of Saemung Sigfusson

Pocket Hávamál

Myths of the Pagan North: Gods of the Norsemen

Lore of the Vanir: A Brief Overview of the Vanir Gods

Anglo-Saxon and Norse Poems

Gods of the Ancient Northmen

Gods of the Ancient Northmen (online)

Two Icelandic Stories: Hreiðars Þáttr and Orms Þáttr

Two Icelandic Stories: Hreiðars Þáttr and Orms Þáttr (online)

Sagas

Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes: Hervor and Heidrek & Hrólf Kraki and His Champions (compiling the Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks and the Hrólfs saga kraka)

Icelandic Saga Database (website)

The Saga of the Jómsvíkings

The Heimskringla or the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway (online)

Stories and Ballads of the Far Past: Icelandic and Faroese

Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway

The Saga of the Volsungs: With the Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok

The Saga of the Volsungs (online) Interesting analysis, but this is another pretty old source.

The Story of the Volsungs (online) Morris and Magnusson translation

The Vinland Sagas

Hákon the Good's Saga (online)

History of religious practices

The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia

Nordic Religions in the Viking Age

Agricola and Germania Tacitus' account of religion in nordic countries

Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe: Early Scandinavian and Celtic Religions

Tacitus on Germany (online)

Scandinavia and the Viking Age

Viking Age Iceland

Landnámabók: Book of the Settlement of Iceland (online)

The Age of the Vikings

Gesta Danorum: The Danish History (Books I-IX)

The Sea Wolves: a History of the Vikings

The Viking World

Guta Lag: The Law of the Gotlanders (online)

The Pre-Christian Religions of the North This is a four-volume series I haven't read yet, but that I wish to acquire soon! It's the next research read I have planned.

Old Norse Folklore: Tradition, Innovation, and Performance in Medieval Scandinavia

Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings by John Haywood

Landnámabók: Viking Settlers and Their Customs in Iceland

Nordic Tales: Folktales from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark For a little literary break from all the serious research! The stories are told in a way that can sometimes get repetitive, but it makes it easier to notice recurring patterns and themes within Scandinavian oral tradition.

Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction

Saga Form, Oral Prehistory, and the Icelandic Social Context

An Early Meal: A Viking Age Cookbook and Culinary Oddyssey

Runes & Old Norse language

Uppland region runestones and their translations

Viking Language 1: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas and Viking Language 2: The Old Norse Reader

Catalogue of the Manks Crosses with Runic Inscriptions

Old Norse - Old Icelandic: Concise Introduction to the Language of the Sagas

A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture

Nordic Runes: Understanding, Casting, and Interpreting the Ancient Viking Oracle 

YouTube channels

Ocean Keltoi

Arith Härger

Old Halfdan

Jackson Crawford

Wolf the Red

Sigurboði Grétarsson

Grimfrost

(Reminder! The channel "The Wisdom of Odin", aka Jacob Toddson, is a known supporter of pseudo scientific theories and of the AFA, a folkist and white-supremacist organization, and he's been known to hold cult-like, dangerous rituals, as well as to use his UPG as truth and to ask for his followers to provide money for his building some kind of "real life viking hall", as supposedly asked to him by Óðinn himself. A source to avoid. But more on that here.)

Websites

The Troth

Norse Mythology for Smart People

Voluspa.org

Icelandic Saga Database

Skaldic Project

Life in Norway This is more of a tourist's ressources, but I find they publish loads of fascinating articles pertaining to Norway's history and its traditions.

#ressources #masterpost #heathenry #research #sources #norse paganism #norse gods #spirituality #polytheism #deity work #pagan #paganism #deities #norse polytheism #mythology #eddas #sagas

[gothhabiba]

As the waves of Jewish immigration intensified and the desire (overt or covert) to become a replacement to the Arab-Palestinian people increased, the Zionist leadership advocated a policy of separation on all social, political and economic fronts. One of the most visible manifestations of this separation was the Zionist campaign for the purchasing of Jewish only goods, known in Hebrew as Totzeret Ha’aretz—literally “the produce of the land.” This resulted in a clear differentiation between the permeation of Arab-Palestinian culture into Jewish life and the barriers placed on social, economic and political integration and interaction. In the words of Zerubavel, “politically, the Zionists ignored the Arabs, but culturally, they romanticized and tried to imitate them.”

For example, Dafna Hirsch, in her biographic study of hummus, describes how it was initially considered part of the local Arab-Palestinian food culture and repertoire in the 1930s, worthy of adoption due to its nutritious value. However, in the 1950s, through the process of industrialisation, mass production and marketing, it was appropriated and nationalised, and its Arab origins were supressed. The Arab-Palestinian origins of the product were omitted and marginalized and its connection to Jewish and Jewish-Israeli traditions, especially to the Mizrahi-Jewish Diaspora, emphasized. For Jewish-Israelis, hummus became a national dish, the eating of which was part-and-parcel of daily life, either purchased from Jewish-Israeli food companies, such as Telma, or consumed at home or at Mizrahi-Jewish restaurants.

The hummus example in this regard is not unique; I will demonstrate these processes by deconstructing one of Israel’s most well known dishes, the Israeli salad. There might not be a more popular dish in Israel than the Israeli salad, sometimes also referred to as Salad Katsuts (chopped salad). The salad is based on chopped vegetables (normally tomatoes, cucumbers and onions) and fresh herbs (mostly parsley but sometimes also mint) and dressed with olive oil and lemon juice. A recent book, Fresh Flavours from Israel, by Jewish-Israelii food writer Janna Gur, states that “Israelis must have their salad at least once a day.” It is an accompaniment to every meal, whether eaten at home or outside. In fact, you would be hard pressed to have a meal anywhere in Israel without it. No Israeli cookbook from the 1960s onwards is truly complete without providing a recipe for it. This is true with regards to those written for Jewish-Israeli and foreign audiences. To the unsuspecting viewer, the Israeli salad is the epitome of Israeli food culture: it is fresh, simple, healthy and [symbolizes] the strong relationship the nation has with its agricultural produce. The salad, therefore, serves as both an internal and an external banal symbol of Jewish-Israeli identity.

What are the origins of the Israeli salad? Reading through literary accounts of growing up in Israel, the salad became a staple food product in the Kibbutzim canteens, from there it moved to the Israeli army’s mess halls and to Israeli homes. The fact that the salad is mentioned mostly as a chopped vegetable salad by Israeli authors describing living in Israel in the 1930s and 1940s demonstrates that it did not arrive with the wave of Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Arab world after the state was established in 1948. It was also not prevalent in the diet of Central and Eastern European Jewish communities, from where most immigrants came. On the other hand, there are a number of accounts, mostly by travel writers, such as Masterman and Grant in the early-1900s and that of the Mary Eliza Rogers as far back as 1865, that describe the preparation and consumption of a chopped vegetable salad in Palestine. Rogers describes the salad as accompanying most meals served by the upper and governing classes in Palestine, at the time part of the Ottoman Empire. In other words, it is either that early Zionist immigrants to Palestine independently invented the salad, or, as I argue hereafter, they imitated, adopted and later appropriated and nationalised an existing local custom.

– Ronald Ranta, “Re-Arabizing Israeli Food Culture.” Food, Culture & Society 18(4):611-627 (December 2015). DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2015.1088192

#food #Palestine #Israel #quote #long post /

[foolishlovers]

hii could i request some of your favoruite human au fics? nothing specific :))

ahhh always!! i have so many!! 💜

Postcards From Paris by ghostrat (12k, G) Crowley has just moved into his Mayfair apartment and finds a postcard addressed to the previous tenant. With no return address, he's left to collect and read the mysterious A.Z.F.'s adventures across Europe, where he hunts for bizarre bibles and rates ridiculously expensive wine in his free time. The question is: How will A.Z.F. react when Crowley finally gets his return address and writes back? --- It was different, he knew, to accidentally read someone else’s postcard versus intentionally perusing one in place of good newspaper over coffee. Crowley decided he was allowed that indecency, to balance out the good deed of safeguarding the mail in the first place. He kicked his feet up onto his desk, scooped up the takeaway coffee that was brought around by their newest intern, and settled in to read some of the most densely crowded handwriting he’d ever laid eyes on.

London, Libraries & Love by wolftea (13k, E, WIP) Smiling warmly at the huddles of students, Aziraphale made his way over to Crowley, who was leaning against his desk. Crowley was dressed in layers of all black (as per usual), his red hair was tied back in a loose ponytail (not as usual, he often wore it down) and he was twirling Aziraphale’s fountain pen between his fingers. “Mister Fell.” Crowley drawled, but the warmth in his amber eyes and the upward curve of his mouth betrayed any attempt at appearing nonchalant. Aziraphale found himself grinning. How on Earth had he ever disliked this man? “Crowley.” He said, eyes crinkling as he plucked the pen out of Crowley’s hands and put it back by his notebook.

New Approaches by FeralTuxedo (19k, M) Aziraphale Fell, Professor of Creative Writing at Tadfield University, welcomes the attendees of the First Conference on New Approaches to Genre Fiction. Among them is keynote speaker and best-selling thriller author Anthony J. Crowley. Aziraphale has not seen him for twenty-five years. Sometimes, he can still feel the ghost of their parting kiss on his lips. Or: Exes reunite at academic conference. A Human University Professor/Author AU.

muddle through somehow by curtaincall (27k, T) Aziraphale Fell runs a successful food blog, Celestial Comestibles, where he shares mouthwatering recipes and heartwarming stories about his happy domestic life in a cottage with his husband and son. As promotion for his upcoming cookbook, his publishers run a contest: one lucky winner will get to spend Christmas with Aziraphale and his family. What the publishers don't know is that the real Aziraphale Fell is a single city-dweller. And if he wants to keep up his happily married persona, he'll have to acquire a cottage, husband, and son before Christmas. As it happens, his friend and neighbor Anthony Crowley has his nephew staying with him for the holidays. One fake marriage proposal later, and everything seems tickety-boo--as long as Aziraphale can keep from developing inconveniently real feelings for his pretend husband…

First Class (Hons) Christmas, University of Tadfield. by heloluv (41k, M) Dr. A.Z. Fell is a renowned literature tutor at the prestigious University of Tadfield. December is upon the University, and Dr. Fell is leading the Christmas Charity Drive. He needs volunteers. Dr. A.J. Crowley is a skilled plant ecologist who recently began his tenure at UoT. He can't stand Christmas, and nothing at all could ever possibly convince him to partake in "festivities". Until a certain literary expert catches his eye. A Christmas and New Years fic, in which Aziraphale teaches Crowley how to enjoy the most wonderful time of the year.

Fledging by FeralTuxedo (53k, M) Cool Dad was at the school gate again. Clambering out of his ridiculous sports car like a great big spider, all black denim and designer sunglasses. What a prat. He made his way towards the entrance, followed by his equally lanky son. All the mums' eyes were on him. Which was fine. At least they weren't staring at Aziraphale for a change. Cool Dad high-fived his son goodbye, because of course he did, then sauntered back to his car. Making it look so bloody easy. Aziraphale Fell is much too young to be looking after eleven-year old Pepper. He barely has his life together as it is, with his minimum-wage job and a half-baked dream of trading rare books for a living. And as if adopting a recently bereaved pre-teen isn’t enough, there are some rather more adult problems to navigate: playground politics, the shadows of his own childhood, and the growing question of how Crowley, the only other dad at the school gate, feels about him. A human AU/kid fic.

Golden Handcuffs by seekwill (70k, E) Far from any city, near the Scottish coast, Tadfield College has a celebrated history, an unrivaled academic reputation, and two departments at war. When the Biology and English departments are forced to share a building, Senior Lecturer and botanist Anthony Crowley finds himself drawn into the orbit of the polite but strange English professor, Dr. Aziraphale Fell. As the new term begins, two academics navigate the politics of both their offices and academia, and try to solve the puzzle of one another.

South Downs by summerofspock (76k, E) Blackballed from the industry ten years ago, Anthony Crowley jumps at the chance to star in a new Regency romance miniseries with well-known gay actor Aziraphale Fell in the hopes that it will help him restart his career. The trouble is, Crowley has played all sorts of characters and for the life of him, he can't figure out why he's struggling to play the romantic lead opposite a man.

Or Be Nice by charlottemadison (151k, E) Crowley and Aziraphale are neighbours. And…it does not go at all well, until it does. A human AU in which Aziraphale is a bookseller, Crowley is a drummer, and they are both petty disasters in the worst/best way. +++ “So what’s your deal?” “My-my-my deal?” Aziraphale stammered. “I’m a bookseller, is my deal.” “Oh,” Crowley replied, sounding as uninterested as it was possible to sound. “It’s just, I couldn’t help overhearing, and --” Aziraphale swallowed hard. “You really are an accomplished musician. But I thought -- for after 11PM -- perhaps we could reach some arrangement?” “Arrangement?” Aziraphale felt his his smile turning forced. “Such as, perhaps, playing the drums before eleven? Instead of after?” Crowley stared blankly at him. In fact he stared for so long that Aziraphale briefly wondered if he'd lapsed into ancient Greek again, which he was known to do in bad dreams or during panic attacks.

#i could probably make another 20 parts but!! #i wanna gush about all these individually ngl sjsjsj #anon #answered #good omens #good omens fic rec #good omens fanfic #good omens human au #aziracrow #aziracrow fic #foolish recs

[havecourage-darling]

Teenage Dirtbag

Pairing: Eddie Munson x short, plus-sized, girly-ish, female reader.

WC: ~9K

Warnings: cursing, eddie being a lil bit of a horndog, unrequited but not unrequited love

A/N: This song screamed Eddie Munson to me and I had to write it, I don't know what to say for myself lmao I thought it was going to be 1K at most. Welp.

Masterlist || AO3

Eddie Munson knew he wasn’t the smartest person in town. He was far from the dumbest, Jason Carver took that title by a landslide.

In fact, Eddie would dare to say he was actually pretty intelligent. He wasn’t book smart, not with subjects he didn’t give a shit about, but he had common sense. Which, clearly, wasn’t so common – especially in Hawkins.

However, even Eddie had to admit that he was the dumbest son of a bitch on this planet sometimes.

The primary example was when he managed to fall in love with you, his English tutor. 

After Eddie had bombed the first major test – on his second go at his senior year – his teacher had assigned him a mandatory tutor.

“I know you think I don’t like you,” Ms. O'Donnell said, her sharp eyes softening when Eddie snorted, “but I want you to succeed. You’re smarter than you let on and I can see that.”

“Don’t feel bad. All teachers hate me,” Eddie joked, a thread of truth to it.

“Well not me,” she said, “and to prove it to you – I’m going to assign you a tutor.”

What? “Aw, come on,” Eddie groaned, “I’ll do better on the next one!”

Ms. O’Donnell rolled her eyes. “That’s what you said all last year. I was the one who signed off on you using my classroom for Hellfire Club you know. It’s been four years and I’ve seen some of the things you come up with. You’re good at writing, Mr. Munson. You just need to apply yourself.”

Wait, she knew about some of his campaigns? “Which I’ll do from now on!” The comical expression on her face indicated that Eddie was not getting through to her.

“Trust me,” she said, “she took my advanced placement course as a sophomore. She’s a senior, like you, and she’s willing to do it as a favor to me.”

“Is this mandatory?” Eddie winced when his teacher’s sharp gaze returned.

“Yes,” she said, her expression softening when Eddie slumped. “I’ll make you a deal, just let her tutor you for the next quiz. If you get higher than a C, with genuine effort, you can opt out.”

“Deal,” Eddie sighed.

And now here he was, four months later and definitely more than one aced quiz later, with you in your first sundress of the season. Eddie had been waiting for you at the library, the same table in the back – hidden behind the cookbook shelves – when you walked in. The thin straps drew his attention first, his eyes trailing down to the neckline which exposed the swell of your breasts in a way that had Eddie shifting nervously in his seat.

You’d apologized, sitting down hastily, your breath coming out in quick pants. Your car hadn’t started this morning so you had to ask Dustin, your neighbor, to borrow his bike to get here.

The image of you biking in that dress was something that he didn’t know he needed.

Like always, you pulled out your battered copy of The Great Gatsby and got to work. Eddie had read the book, you’d been right – he did like it – but spent most of the first hour watching you explain the chapters he’d been assigned.

There was just something about the way your eyes lit up when you started rambling about literary terms and characterization. You tended to speak with your hands, cherry-colored nails flying as you waved a hand in the air.

Oh, you were saying his name. “Are you listening Eddie?” You asked, eyes shooting him a knowing look.

“Shortcake, I always listen to every word you say,” Eddie joked, winking. A flustered expression overtook your face and Eddie watched your fingers come up to your hair, a sure sign that his comment had hit. He hated the rush of serotonin that gave him.

See? Complete dumbass behavior.

“Pay attention, you have a quiz next week and then we start working on your final paper,” you said, tapping his hand softly. The warmth of your skin sent an electric current up his arm and straight to his chest. “Here, I brought an outline of what I thought would be good topics for you to choose from. I’m partial to Shakespeare – oh don’t give me that look – but I listed other options too. Let me see if they finally got that book that I was looking for.”

Eddie nodded and failed to avert his eyes as you walked away. Your hips swayed as the black patterned dress rippled with your movement.

It wasn’t his fault, not really. Eddie glanced at the paper you’d handed him, your handwriting neat and precise. He’d been dreading meeting you when Ms. O’Donnell had mentioned your name. You weren’t a cheerleader but you basically friends with the whole squad. He’d seen you at parties when he was selling, you always seemed nice but Eddie knew from experience that the popular crowd were just vultures waiting for a sign of weakness. Eddie wasn’t going to be stupid enough to expose any.

“Oh, hey, Lucas!” Your voice carried from a few shelves away. Eddie straightened. “I haven’t seen you since the last campaign!”

Eddie couldn’t hear what Lucas answered but your quiet laughter sent the equally stupid butterflies in his ribcage into chaos. Eddie fought a groan and pinched the bridge of his nose. Honestly, he could hardly be at fault when you had the audacity to have a laugh as cute as that.

“Did you look over the outline? Oh, are you okay?” You asked, eyes pinched in concern. Eddie shook his head, his hair settling around his shoulders.

“I’m fine, just a little tired,” he lied. “Was that Sinclair I heard?”

You beamed at him and Eddie swore he felt his heart stop in his chest. Jesus H. Christ, he was going to send you the bill when you sent him to the ER. “It was! I can’t believe he’s taller than me now,” you said, wrinkling your nose when Eddie laughed, “oh shut up. I meant, I used to babysit them. They were all little munchkins a few minutes ago. Now they’re freshman. That’s wild.”

“Calm down there, grandma,” Eddie retorted as you rolled your eyes, “besides, it’s not exactly hard to be taller than you nowadays shortcake.”

Eddie could tell you were trying your best to bite back a grin. “You know, I’m the one who brought your grade up from a F to a B minus, you should be nicer to me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did I offend you your highness?” Eddie swooned, hands on chest, as he leaned back in his chair. “How can I ever thank you for saving me?”

“By passing your last quiz of the year,” you said dryly, eyes lighting up, “and maybe picking Macbeth for your final essay.”

Eddie snorted. “Not likely.”

“And that’s how you treat your hero?” You asked him, batting your eyelashes.

Fuck, those should come with a goddamn warning.

“How about I make you a mixtape?” Eddie joked, chewing at the end of his pen and giving your outline another look.

Your face, however, completely lit up. “Deal!”

“What?” Eddie stammered, dropping the pen from his mouth.

“No take-backs Munson!” You laughed, shrinking when the librarian shot you a look. Eddie huffed a laugh at your contrite expression and watched you turn back to him. “You get a passing grade on these last two assignments and you make me a mixtape as a physical form of your eternal gratitude.”

“Shortcake, I don’t think we have the same music tastes,” he said, eyeing the Walkman you’d left at the corner of the table with your bag.

A haughty look cross your face and the stupid butterflies slammed into his small intestine painfully. “How would you know?” You asked. “You barely ask me anything outside of English.” The second part was quieter, almost involuntary and Eddie was suddenly struck by something.

Eddie had never pushed for anything more than you had freely given. He tried not to ask about what you were doing, what you liked, or what your weekend plans were. You’d smile to him in the hallways at school but you had completely different schedules so you rarely saw each other. Besides, Eddie had an ingrained self-preservation intuition and vehemently avoided any contact with the popular crowd.

While Eddie was not a betting man, he took calculated risks. You were – beyond the ability to analyze. But…the way your face had twisted, maybe he’d gotten his signals wrong? Had you wanted him to be your friend? He’d always assumed you were doing this to fulfill some extracurricular activity. Wouldn’t you be…embarrassed to be seen with him?

“Alright sweetheart,” Eddie said eventually, “educate me then.”

You stuck out your tongue, breaking the tension and tucked your Walkman into your bag. “Too late. You snooze you lose Munson,” you said, packing up your stuff. Eddie glanced at his watch and was once again astounded to realize two hours had flown by.

“I’ll see you next week at the same time?” You asked. “Drop your paper outline in my locker and I’ll take a look at it so we have something to cover.”

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am,” Eddie saluted.

“Oh,” you said, hand elbow deep in your bag, “you see Mike tomorrow, right? At Hellfire?”’

Eddie frowned, unsure. “Yeah?”

“Can you give him these?” You asked, dropping a set of die in his hands. “He wanted to borrow my old set.”

Glancing at the well cared for set in his hand, Eddie gaped. “Are these holographic?”

You grinned and pulled your backpack onto your shoulders. “Yeah! Dustin got them for me for my birthday a while ago. They’re custom! He painted them for me.”

Eddie felt his throat dry up and was almost positive he’d floated up into the stratosphere. Seriously, a semitruck could’ve trampled him and he would’ve been less surprised.

“You coming?” You asked, totally unaware of how close Eddie was to offering you his heart on a platter.

Spurred into action, Eddie pocketed the set carefully and grabbed his bag. “Yeah, I- I’m coming.” He took in your carefully stacked bracelets and dainty necklace. Your pink sandals echoed in the hallway as you made your way to the familiar bike chained outside. How did someone like you play dnd?

“Dustin taught me,” you said as you walked the bike next to his van.

“What?”

You laughed, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear and squinting a little at the sun in your eyes. The air in his lungs caught at the sight of your skin in the light. Were you holographic? “Dustin and the other kids I babysat taught me how to play. I’m not very good,” you admitted sheepishly, “that’s why I never told you.”

“Oh,” he said, because his brain still wasn’t totally back from its trip into space.

“I’m an elf rogue,” you said, shrugging, “Will said it suits me since I used to practice archery.”

Eddie bit down on his cheek hard enough to almost draw blood. He fought every nerve in his body to not glare at the sky. Really universe? Really? Was his daily pining not enough?

“You’re a box of surprises, aren’t you, shortcake?” Eddie said, rocking on his heels.

You grinned. “I’m rusty at that too. My aunt lives in Indianapolis and she’s won a few competitions in archery. I’d stay with her over the summer breaks and she taught me. It was fun to run around thinking I was some kind of mini-Hawkeye or something.”

At that, he couldn’t hide his surprise. “Marvel?”

“I told you,” you said, looking incredibly flustered, as your eyes went down to your feet, “I babysat Dustin. For years. Some of it stuck.”

Say something, he urged, voice stuck in his throat.

“Uh, so I’m going to go,” you said, bright smile back on your face.

Eddie scratched the back of his neck. “Do you want a ride?” He asked, gesturing to his van. Great, that’s the best he could come up with?

You turned your smile in his direction and Eddie almost stumbled at the power of it. Jesus, he really needed to get a grip on himself. This couldn’t be healthy.

Nodding, you’d taken a step towards him when a loud honk popped the bubble you both were tucked into. Eddie glanced over your shoulder and felt reality sucker punch him in the throat.

“Hey baby!” Nick shouted, torso almost hanging out that stupid Camaro window. “I’ve been looking for you. Your sister said you’d be here.”

Aaaand that was the second reason he was a complete dumbass.

“Sorry,” you mumbled, looking embarrassed. “Thanks for the offer.”

“Mhmm, see ya,” Eddie said, darting towards his van and completely missing your look.

Eddie started his van and shot out of the parking lot. He risked a glance in his rearview mirror and immediately regretted it. You were tucked into the quarterback’s arms, his face ducking down to yours, and Eddie tightened his hold on the steering wheel.

You had a boyfriend – a jock no less – because of course you did, since when did life ever like to be fair to him? Why would it ever start now? Eddie scrambled for the cigarette carton in his passenger’s seat and lit one up. Nick Jackson had been the one who almost broke Gareth’s nose last year in gym class. Nick Jackson would absolutely kick his ass if he knew how gone he was on his girlfriend.

What type of asshole had two first names anyway? And how the hell had he managed to land someone like you?

He knew the answer, obviously, but he was still in shock despite the fact that Eddie had seen you two together for the past month.

Whatever. Fuck high school. The second he had that diploma in his hands he was driving out of here and not looking back.

Eddie was over school. He’d finally gotten the news that he’d been given the green light to graduate and the first person he wanted to tell was you.

So, to mediate that, he decided to skip his last two classes and gone out to the picnic table in the woods behind the school to smoke. Taking another drag, Eddie leaned back onto the rough wood table and snorted. Who would’ve thought? He’d known ’86 was going to be his year.

Although it was in no small part thanks to you. Eddie had seen you this morning – dressed in a blue ruffled skirt, with a cardigan and a shirt that hid absolutely none of your curves. He’d felt like someone had slammed a locker door in his face, blood rushing to the bottom half of his body.

The sound of a branch snapping had Eddie jumping up, instinctively flinging the joint off towards the trees. He turned towards the sound, excuse on the tip of his tongue, when his throat closed. You stood there, shy smile on your face, hands gripping your bags strap tightly.

“Hey Munson,” you said, motioning to the table. “Can I join you?”

“Uh, yeah shortcake, please,” he gestured grandly to the old, rusted table like it was worth a million bucks. “Welcome to my hide out. Uh, sorry for the smell and the smoke.”

You laughed, eyes wrinkling and mouth turning up like he was hilarious. “I actually wanted to ask if I could buy some off of you,” you scrunched your nose and Eddie felt his heart stop. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“What?” Eddie smacked his hand to his chest exaggeratedly. “Me? Make fun? Of you? I’m insulted.”

“Ah yes, because you’re so friendly,” you joked. “I’ve never smoked before so could you sell me something already rolled?”

Eddie grinned. “You’re in luck shortcake,” he said, patting his denim vest for the bag he knew was keeping for later, “I’ve got some for you right here.”

“How much?” You asked, searching for your wallet.

Waving off your offer, Eddie dropped it onto your bag. “Consider it a thank you for helping me get to graduation.”

You froze, eyes darting up to his and Eddie couldn’t help the grin that grew on his face. “Oh my God, Eddie, don’t joke with me about this.”

“I’m not!” He laughed, opening his arms and throwing his head back. “I’m finally fucking out of here!”

Without warning, you threw your arms around him. Eddie stumbled, more than a little surprised, and stilled for a second. His arms, however, were much smarter and quicker than the rest of him because they settled immediately on the curves of your hips. You squeezed him tightly, your fingers scratching almost subconsciously at his back in soothing circles. “I’m so proud of you! I knew you could do it Eddie, I knew it.”

Eddie leaned back to see that you were beaming, eyes bright and smile so wide it looked like it could crack your face in two. The sun pierced through the shade of the trees, landing on you like a natural spotlight – because of course it did. “Well, it’s mostly thanks to you. I couldn’t have done it without you,” he said. Which, was a hundred percent true.

He watched your eyes drift down his face, and for a millisecond he could’ve sworn they landed on his lips, but before he could confirm – you’d darted away. Hands fluttering down your pink cardigan, you soothed out the non-existent wrinkles and frowned.

“I’m sorry,” you mumbled, “I didn’t mean – I know people hate when I – I’m sorry.”

“When you what?” Eddie furrowed his brows, confused. “Don’t be sorry.”

You wrung your hands together and Eddie hated how small you tried to become. “I – uh, Nick hated when I just hugged him out of nowhere,” you sighed, “I’m sorry.”

Reason number one that jock was a dumbass. If Eddie had the chance, he’d cling to you like a goddamn koala.

“Hey, what’d I say? We’re friends, right?” Eddie asked, ducking to try and catch your eyes.

“Are we?” You said, surprised.

Eddie clutched his heart, looking down at his hands as if there were blood, and blinked at you. “I didn’t know you came here to shoot me straight through the heart.”

A beat of silence echoed in the clearing before you laughed, delighted by his antics. Eddie smiled at your joy; you were one of the only people in his life that never complained about his general over the top flair. “I’m sorry,” you said, tone adorably earnest. “I didn’t mean it like that – I thought, well, I thought you didn’t want to be friends with me.”

He couldn’t help it, he really couldn’t but he let out an unattractive laugh and shot you a look. “Shortcake, if anyone was embarrassed to be seen with the other it’s definitely not me.”

An indignant sort of expression settled in your entire body. Eddie watched you, fascinated. He’d never seen you be anything but a human personification of a sunbeam.

“I’m not embarrassed to be seen with you,” you huffed, crossing your arms and Eddie’s eyes darted to the top of your head. Jesus Christ. He was not going to stare at your chest like a fucking pervert. He was not. Completely oblivious to his plight, you continued huffing. “I’ve tried to say hi to you like three times since I started tutoring you. You always looked like I was a lion who’d caught a mouse.”

“Because popular kids don’t talk to the outcasts, sweetheart. Don’t take it personally,” he sighed, “it’s a self-preservation tactic.”

You blinked at him. Eddie cringed internally – of course he fucked this up not even two minutes in. He scrambled to think of a way to rectify it when you sighed.

“Nick said he didn’t want me tutoring you anymore,” you said quietly.

Eddie didn’t know he could hear a heart shatter but he was positive that his just fell to the floor beneath him. That asshole. Didn’t he have enough? Thanks a lot universe.

“He said it wasn’t becoming of me to keep doing this so he wanted me to stop. I knew it was because he didn’t like you though,” you admitted.

Sighing, Eddie sat back down onto the table and pulled out another joint. Lighting it up he took a drag and blew the smoke towards his left. “So, I guess this is goodbye?”

A bird nearby sang, as if knowing he needed a soundtrack for this car crash waiting to happen. “No, you idiot,” you snapped, “I broke up with him.”

Everything tilted sideways and Eddie was sure someone had smacked him in the head with something. Maybe his hearing was off? “I’m sorry, I think I had a small seizure. Did you say you broke up with him?”

You nodded, coming over to sit across from him. “I never really liked him that much anyway. Chrissy thought we’d be cute together but I’m pretty sure I’m not his ideal type.”

“What, why is perfect too intimidating for him?” Eddie asked, the words out of his mouth before he could stop them. Jesus fucking – just take him out. Universe? You can take me out now! He screamed internally.

“Shut up,” you mumbled, ducking your head. Eddie saw the pleased smile on your face before you hid it away and it sent a stupidly happy pang through his body. “I meant, well – you know.”

“I really don’t.”

Sighing, you motioned to your body. “You know, someone skinny enough to be a flier on the cheerleading team.”

Eddie felt his spine solidify. “Did he…did he say that to you?” He asked, his vision darkening. “That absolute fucking shithead.” What an asshole. Not only did he have the hottest girl in the entire fucking town but he was taking jabs at you? Eddie wanted to punch something.

“Wait!” Your cool hand wrapped around his wrist and Eddie hadn’t even realized he’d stood and walked in the direction of the school. “Munson! It’s okay – he didn’t say it out loud! Holy shit you’re a lot stronger than you look.”

Eddie felt you wrap your torso around his arm in an attempt to stop him. Your chest pressed against his bicep and Eddie had to close his eyes and think of his great-aunt. A soft poke to his cheek had him looking down at you, amused. You looked like a squirrel clinging to a tree. With a slow nod, he let you walk him to the bench.

“Was that a dig at my body?” He asked. “Do I look weak?”

A mortified expression settled on your face and you immediately shook your head. “That’s not what I meant at all! I just – I meant, I’m – oh, you’re teasing me,” you said, exhaling a loud breath. “I hate you.”

Smiling, Eddie bumped your shoulder with his. “No, you don’t.”

“There’s no hurt feelings, I promise,” you told him, referring to Nick, “I wasn’t what he wanted and he wasn’t what I wanted.”

“Yeah?” Eddie took another drag of his discarded joint. “What’s your type? Swim team? Basketball team? Wait, soccer player.”

You rolled your eyes and bumped his shoulder again. “No,” you said, crossly. “I don’t know. For starters maybe someone who doesn’t think Metallica is just random noise.”

Eddie sighed. He looked up at the sky, a common occurrence at this point, and wondered if whoever was up there was having fun torturing him. You played dnd and you liked Metallica. Sure. Why not? He hoped Mother Nature or God, or whoever, was having a great laugh at his expense.

“I had you pinned for a Madonna girl,” he said eventually, reeling in the affection that seemed to be pouring off him in waves.

“I am, I like a ton of music,” you said, “I’m not condescending with my music tastes.”

Gaping, Eddie shot you a look and fought his smile at your mischievous look. You were going to be the death of him.

“Hi Wayne!” Your voice floated through the front door. Eddie straightened, eyes darting around the room to make sure anything embarrassing was hidden away.

“Hi honey. You know you don’t have to bring me something every time you come over,” he said, sounding pleased. Eddie rolled his eyes. In the past two months, you and Eddie had become fast friends. In fact, Eddie didn’t know how he’d gone almost the entire second half of the school year without bombarding you with questions.

He wanted to know everything about you – he’d take any crumble you’d give him. You’d shown up to Hellfire a few times, went to movies together, and religiously showed up to the Hideout to see him play. Eddie wasn’t sure he remembered his life before you. So, obviously, like nephew like uncle and Wayne had instantly loved you the way Eddie had.

“Munson, you better be decent,” you said, not waiting for an answer and kicking the door down.

“If you really want to see me in a state of undress so badly, all you have to do is ask shortcake,” he said, loving the flustered expression he could draw out of you so quickly.

“I hate you,” you said, daintily sitting on his bed and handing him a napkin full of cookies. You’d made it a habit of baking on the days you were coming over and while Eddie definitely appreciated it – he knew you were bringing them to Wayne. Who, like Eddie, completely fell for your sincerity.

“Whatever you need to tell yourself to get to sleep at night is fine with me,” Eddie said, eagerly throwing half the cookie into his mouth. “Denial isn’t healthy though.” He winked.

“Jesus, does this have an off button?” You grumbled, flopping down onto his bed.

Eddie gave himself five seconds to appreciate the way your skirt hitched up higher on your thighs as you laid down, the bright purple material easily the most colorful thing in his room. He felt his eyes glaze over a little, imagining his teeth sinking into the meaty part of your inner thigh, the noises you’d made. Suddenly, you shot up, and Eddie tried his best to look like he wasn’t just being a goddamn pervert.

“Oh, I love this song!” You said, eyes lighting up.

His heart tripped over itself at the sight but he tilted his head and realized he’d left his stereo on as he was stitching a new patch, one you’d gotten him last week onto his vest.

When you know that your time is close at hand

Maybe then you'll begin to understand

Life down here is just a strange illusion

“That’s Iron Maiden,” Eddie said, stupidly.

You rolled your eyes. “I know, shithead,” you joked and Eddie blinked – he didn’t know why the way you cursed like a sailor was still so strange to him. Someone who wore pastels, bright colors, was in track to be valedictorian, and had a smile that rivaled the sun wasn’t someone who he’d thought would be ready to swing at the first sight of conflict. “We’ve been over your music superiority complex already, remember? I’m a woman of many interests.”

Eddie grumbled. You were right – you’d been the one who had bought him Metallica’s new album at the record store downtown when it’d just released. He thought he’d have to fight his way into getting his hands on it but, like always, you were there.

“So, do you remember how much you love me?” You asked, teasing. Eddie’s pathetic heart thumped against his ribcage and he glanced up at you.

“Why does that sound like the prelude to something I’m going to hate?”

You smiled, batting your eyelashes, and pressing your folded hands under your chin. “I need someone to go to the mall with me on Saturday. Pretty, pretty, please? I’ll do anything you want!”

Eddie’s brain short circuited for brief moment, imagining the list of things he’d both dreamed and would trade his soul to be able to do to you before he realized you were waiting for an answer. “Shortcake, I treasure our friendship but there are some things my fading sanity can’t take.”

You quirked a brow and Eddie had to fight not to visible react to your pout. He often wondered how it’d feel if he bit down on it. “Eddie?”

“Sorry, what?” He shook his head, returning back to the present.

“I said, and the mall would zap the last bit of sanity you had?”

Eddie nodded emphatically. “I’m not that strong.”

“Well, despite your complete betrayal,” Eddie rolled his eyes, “Nancy said she’d go with me and helped me find a dress. I just wanted to see if you’d come with.”

“A dress?” Eddie asked. “You going somewhere fancy?”

Laughing, you shot him an incredulous look. “Wait, are you serious?”

“Yeah, where are you going?”

“Prom, Eddie,” you said with a weird look on your face, “aren’t you going?”

At that, Eddie snorted. “Me? At prom?”

“I mean, I’ll be there – so will Robin and Nancy. Gareth and Jeff told me they’re going too,” you mumbled.

“I – do you want me to go?” Eddie asked, confused. “I can drop you off and pick you up if you want. My chariot is your chariot.”

Something flashed across your face but it was gone before Eddie could decipher it.

“Oh, no, thanks. I think Robin’s getting a ride from Harrington and they’ll give me a lift,” you said.

Eddie hated how well you and Steve got along. He shouldn’t have been surprised, considering he ran in the circle you did, but when he introduced you to his friends, he hadn’t expected how quickly you bonded. It’d taken him four and half months to hurl himself out of the acquaintance zone and Steve did it in five minutes.

“Sure,” Eddie said, going back to sewing a new patch onto his vest and trying not to stab himself.

“Would you go if I asked?” You said after a beat of silence.

He was almost sure he’d snapped something important in his neck with the speed in which he turned to you. At his expression, you straightened. “I mean, like would you go to prom and hang out with us? You don’t need to go with me.”

Deflating, Eddie tried not to let it show. Of course, you hadn’t asked him to go with you. You probably had a date or at the very least someone interested. Even then, he didn’t want to lie to you.

“Yeah, shortcake, I’d go if you asked me to.”

The smile on your face was small and grew gradually into something blinding. His heart flipped, the butterflies yawned awake, and Eddie sighed. He was pathetic.

Eddie knew his strengths and weaknesses. Thanks to Wayne, he was pretty decent at fixing cars. He knew more about music than most people he’d come across. And when it came to guitar? He wasn’t humble enough to deny how good he was. However, he was blatantly aware that math and science were subjects from the depth of hell. His driving had been criticized once or twice, and, he wasn’t that great at sounding particularly eloquent.

He'd never been more aware of that than in this exact moment. Eddie was leaning against Steve’s car. His red BMW was recently cleaned and Steve was hanging out the driver’s window, telling him about his most recent date. The tie around his neck felt like it was choking him but he wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t due to the anticipation.

Wheeler and Byers stood by their car, fumbling with her corsage and his tie. Robin’s front door opened and she came bounding out, her suit a bright blue that fit her perfectly. Her hair had been curled and she only seemed to wobble once on her heels as she made her way to the car.

“Man, if I don’t break my ankle before the end of the night,” she muttered, leaning on Eddie for support. He helped her catch her balance and smiled when she flushed at the compliments from everyone.

“You look good Buckley,” he told her, nudging her with his elbow.

Robin beamed. “You clean up well too,” she said, pulling at the suit he’d borrowed from Wayne. It was a little too big but Nancy had assured him no one would be able to tell. “I see you couldn’t resist,” she said bumping his converse with her pointy heel. “Why do you get to wear comfy shoes? She wouldn’t let me go in mine!”

“Because it ruins the look, Rob!” Your voice said from the front steps. Eddie glanced up and immediately felt the world freeze. Your dress was…molded onto your body. It was a long, lavender, flowy thing. It dipped low in the back and Eddie sighed. If the neckline was enough to give him a stroke, the back was going to have him flatlining. Your heels clicked against the stone as you hugged Robin’s parents goodbye.

“For fuck’s sake,” Eddie said under his breath, “that’s just not fair.”

Robin and Harrington, clearly heard him, snorted. “Careful there Munson, you’ll drop too much of a hint of how deeply in love with her you are if you keep that up.”

Eddie’s jaw snapped and he turned to glare at Robin. “What?” She said after Harrington snorted. “It’s true. They’re idiots.”

“Let them figure it out themselves,” Steve said. “We promised.”

“It’s infuriating,” Robin said, narrowing her eyes. “You’re both infuriating.”

“Alright, I’m all set,” you said, leaning forward to squeeze Steve’s hand. “Thanks for the ride, Steve.”

“No problem, you wanna ride with me or Byers?” Steve asked, settling into the seat.

Turning to him, he saw the question in your eyes and he cleared his throat. “Uh, wherever you want to,” he croaked.

Robin snickered and headed towards the passenger seat. Eddie shot her a glare but was interrupted by your hand on his arm. “You look great,” you said quietly as you waved to Jonathan. They honked at you as they took off down the street. “Thank you for coming.”

“For you? Anything,” he said, his tone a little too sincere than what he meant it to be. The blinding smile on your face after though, made it worth it. “You look…incredible,” he finished lamely. He heard hushed laughter from the car and fought the urge to scratch the back of his neck.

“Thanks,” you said, picking up the bottom of your dress in one hand. “I was worried I’d look dumb but Nancy was adamant this was my dress.”

Eddie needed to get Wheeler a gift. “Remind me to thank her because, shortcake?” You glanced up at him. “That dress was made for you.”

With a shy and pleased smile, you slid into the backseat and settled close to Eddie. Holy shit, you smelled amazing. Eddie barely managed to keep from dropping his nose to the crook of your neck. He slowly dropped his arm over your shoulders and grinned when you leaned into him.

Grabbing a parking spot near the entrance, Steve pulled into the school. Hopping out, he offered his arm to Robin who took it gladly.

“Are you guys ready for the last night of your high school career?” Steve asked, eyes on the doors.

“Yeah,” Robin said, “fuck this place.”

Eddie bumped her fist and you grinned. “After party at your house, Harrington?” You asked.

He knew you had to have been invited to a few afterparties – Robin had promised to make an appearance at the house of some kid from band. He’d heard you tell Nancy that you’d be going with Robin. Steve had assured him that they’d tag along too.

“More like the after after party when you two are drunk off shitty vodka,” Steve said motioning to Robin, who rolled her eyes and made a silly face.

“It happens one time…”

Nancy waved a hand in the air before disappearing through the doors. “Come on!” She shouted over her shoulder. You huffed a laugh and linked your arm through his.

“Ready?”

“Not really, but I’ll follow you into hell apparently.”

“You say the sweetest things,” you told him, deadpan. He snorted, other hand coming to squeeze the one you were resting on his forearm.

Eddie immediately squinted in the cloak of darkness that was the gym – he had to give it to the committee, he hardly recognized the place. A ridiculous pop song came on just as you waved to a few of your friends. “Look, Nancy found a table. Want to drop off our stuff and dance?” You asked the group. Robin nodded, already making her way towards the table and Eddie had to admit he felt a little out of place.

The itch under his skin yelled at him to run but the happy smile on your face when you patted the empty seat next to you kept him tethered to you – because how could it not? Eddie was sure you could ask for the disco ball and he’d risk his diploma to get it for you. 

“Drinks?” Eddie asked, overwhelmed by the five nodding heads. Byers, with a small smile, got up and offered his help.

While Eddie had grown, no matter how reluctantly, close to Robin and her sidekick Harrington. Jonathan had only recently become a new addition. His family had just moved back and he seemed too quiet to really like the chaos that Eddie knew he tended to attract. His kid brother however, Will, was one of his favorites. Not that he’d ever tell Dustin that. The kid had a jealousy streak a mile long.

They had both just settled into their seats, everyone with a drink in hand, when another pop mess song came on. Robin and you straightened, eyes going to each other before you scrambled to your feet. “I’ll be right back,” you said, dropping a kiss to his cheek that had him stunned for a moment. Robin grabbed your hand and you both ran towards the dance floor.

“It’s their favorite song,” Steve explained, watching them wave over a reluctant Nancy. You both bounced around, heads shaking, and zero care that a few people were shooting you looks. “You gonna ask her to dance tonight?”

Eddie shot Steve a look and hated that Steve felt comfortable enough now to ignore him.

“Don’t give me that look man,” Steve laughed, “you came together! You can’t not ask her to dance.”

“We didn’t come together,” Eddie muttered, taking a sip of the disgustingly sweet punch, “she made that pretty clear.”

“Or you heard what you wanted to,” Nancy said, finally standing with Jonathan’s and in hers. “Because from what I know, she thinks you’re here together.”

“Wait, what?” Eddie shouted at Nancy’s retreating back. He turned to Steve, who looked like he was hiding a laugh, “What the hell does that mean?”

“That you both have your heads stuck in the grass,” Steve sighed. “I promised Dustin that I’d let you two figure this shit out on your own but I’m giving you a needed shove. Come on Munson, we’re going to dance.”

He opened his mouth to protest but Steve put a hand under his arm and all but shoved him in your direction. Robin cheered when she saw him, her head bobbling wildly. You beamed, hands coming up to his and twirling prettily around him. His eyes were drawn to you like magnets, he couldn’t help it. You danced with abandon, graceful but chaotically at the same time. Eddie shouldn’t have been surprised but, he really wasn’t sure how much more in love with you he could get.

“I’m thirsty!” Robin shouted, pointing back to the table. Steve let her take his hand and dragged him off towards the sides.

You turned to Eddie, smile wide, and he watched it falter when the faintly familiar pop song turned slow. His feet froze and he glanced towards Wheeler – finding her arms around Jonathan’s as they swayed slowly. She widened her eyes and looked pointedly towards you.

Alright, he could take a hint. He wasn’t that stupid.

With a flourish, he bowed deeply and outstretched his hand. “Can I have this dance milady?”

Your laugh was muffled by the music but the electricity across his skin crackled as you took his warm hand with your cool one. How were you always so cold? He pulled your hands between his and tried to let some of his heat sink in. You grinned up at him, eyes soft, and he placed his own at your waist. “Okay?” He asked.

“More than,” you said, leaning your head onto his chest. He was worried you’d hear how fast his heart was racing but by the small, happy, sigh you let out – he didn’t think you’d mind.

“If you would’ve told me last year that I’d end up graduating this year, with a grade higher than a C, and that I’d be at prom with you – I would’ve laughed,” Eddie said.

You wrinkled your nose at him. “Am I that bad of a date?”

Date? Holy shit, was Wheeler being honest?

“Shortcake, you’re the best date. I just didn’t think you’d want to hang out with the likes of me,” he clarified, “I’m either invisible or a cult leader. Take your pick.” He tried to play it off as a joke but he knew you’d hear it.

“I’ve always noticed you, Eddie. You’re not invisible to me,” you said quietly, your big eyes looking up at him beneath your lashes. Jesus Christ, how much more of this could he take? For once, you seemed to share his sentiment because you took a step back, out of his arms and excused yourself. He watched you dart across the gym, grab a bewildered Robin, and pulled her into a solitary corner.

Mystified, Eddie walked back to the table and Steve raised one of his brows. “What’s happening? We’ve only been here for like an hour.”

“I have no idea,” Eddie admitted. He started to worry when he saw your purple nails from the distance flailing left and right as Robin’s hands came down on your shoulders. She said something that clearly stunned you. After a beat both of you turned towards him and he darted his eyes away to act like he wasn’t being nosey.

“Uh, that doesn’t look good,” Steve muttered. Eddie glanced back up and watched as you made your way quickly over to him. A determined expression was etched onto your face and Robin followed at a slower pace, a smug look on hers.

Without a word, you grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into the hallway when a teacher had their back turned. “Uh, shortcake?”

“Shh!” You admonished, still leading him down the hall. You don’t stop until you find an empty classroom, the lights were on and door unlocked but it was clearly deserted.

He watched your chest rise and fall quickly, like you’d run a mile, and before Eddie could ask you what was wrong – you all but chucked an envelope at him. He’d almost ducked instinctively but he managed to catch it in his hands. Where the hell had that even come from?

“What’s happening right now?” He asked, holding the envelope in his right hand. “What’s wrong?”

“Open it,” you said, your fingers went up to tug at a lock of your hair – a telltale sign that you were nervous.

“Sweetheart-”

“Eddie, open the envelope,” you stressed.

With a wary glance towards you, Eddie flipped the hastily taped tab and slid out a pair of tickets.

IRON MAIDEN, JULY 1ST INDIANNAPOLIS, IN.

“Holy shit, are these floor tickets?” He squawked, hands shaking. You had Iron Maiden tickets! How the hell had you managed that? “Shortcake, where did you get these? I thought they were all sold out.”

“My dad knows someone,” you said waving a hand like it wasn’t important. Like you hadn’t just handed him a priceless gift. “I got VIP passes too.”

Eddie’s soul was gone. That’s it, it was back up on the moon, throwing a party.

“It’s not my birthday, you know,” he said, barely containing his excitement. He rocked back and forth on his heels. Holy shit, he was going to see Iron Maiden! With you!

“I know,” you said, biting your bottom lip. Eddie’s soul slammed back into his body and he realized you were wringing your hands again.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

“These are for us,” you said, pointing at the tickets.

“I assumed so,” he joked.

You closed your eyes, shoulders tense. “No, like… a date.”

Eddie snorted and immediately regretted it when he saw your head duck down. Shit, you’d been serious? You couldn’t have been serious. He knew Steve and Robin gave you both shit for it these past few months but there was no way in hell that you’d ever want to go on a date with him. He would’ve noticed. He absolutely would’ve noticed the signs.

“Oh,” you said, you voice incredibly sad, and Eddie wanted to slap himself. Okay, maybe he wouldn’t have noticed.

Eddie scrambled forward; tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “No, wait – I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quickly, words jumbling together. “I didn’t realize you were serious. I thought – I thought you were joking.”

You winced. “I get it. I’m not…your type, we’re friends, it’s fine. You can take both tickets and take one of the guys.” The expression on your face was enough to make him want to face plant. You turned on your heel and walked to the door.

Eddie’s heart dropped to his feet and he lurched forward, hands reaching for you. “Wait, wait, that’s not what – please. Shortcake, let me speak. I just need a moment to process.” You tried to wrestle your wrist out his grip but Eddie clung on for his life. You were not just going to turn and run after dropping a bomb like that on him.

“It’s fine, Eddie. I promise I’m not – I’ll get over it.”

“I didn’t even know you liked me!” You shot him a contemptuous look and he refused to cower back. You were scary when cornered but he knew you had a soft, gooey center. Whatever he said now was important. He had to get this right.

“Sweetheart. Look at me,” he said, pulling you away from the door. “I swear, I didn’t think you felt like that towards me.”

Your hardened look softened a little when he ducked down to catch your gaze. Blinking, you frowned a little and straightened. “You’re not joking?”

“I have never in my life been more serious,” he huffed, “and I really mean that.”

Exploding, you waved your animated hands in the air and Eddie jerked back to avoid being smacked by one. “How the hell did you not notice? Everyone noticed! Even the cheer squad knew. I asked you to go with me to prom!”

“What?” Eddie’s voice cracked. “You said not with you – to hang out or something!”

“Yeah, I only said that after you looked like I had smacked you over the head!”

Eddie groaned. “Because I didn’t think you’d ever want to go with me!”

You crossed your arms and rubbed one of your temples. “It’s against school policy to tutor a student for longer than a month or two. It’s not fair to the program so we swap consistently. It’s a way to make sure everyone gets the coverage they need from the different tutors. Didn’t you question why we went from meeting at the school to the public library?”

“Uh, no?”

“Well,” you huffed, looking a little embarrassed, “I liked you from like the first session. You, obviously, looked more interested in watching paint dry so I thought I could win you over. After the month I told Ms. O’Donnell that you just needed some guidance and I’d sign off on your paperwork. I told you that we needed to start meeting at the public library instead.”

“But, what about Nick?” Eddie was so confused. Had he entered an alternate dimension again? He glanced around for any sight of the dust. “You had a boyfriend up until like three months ago!”

“Because I thought it would make you jealous!” You huffed, exasperated.

What.

“Well, it did!” Eddie shouted back, the words falling before he could stop them. “I wanted to punch his goddamn face in.”

You blinked. “But…you didn’t seem all that eager to be my friend. You barely asked me about my weekend plans. I couldn’t have dropped more hints!”

“Shortcake, you’re not only out of my league – you’re in a different dimension. I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable!”

“Well, you didn’t!”

“Great!”

“Perfect!”

“Amazing.”

“Stupendous.”

“Are you going to keep trying to have the last word?” Eddie snorted.

You rolled your eyes but he saw your hands reach up for your hair. “I know I don’t dress like those girls at the hideout and wear too much yellow and pink and you think I’m popular and that my taste in music is overrated – which really proves my point that you’re pretentious – but –”

Eddie barely heard a word you were saying, his eyes watched your hands dance in the air, and your eyes dimming the more you spoke. How the fuck could you have ever believed that he wouldn’t like you? You still believed that, his mind supplied helpfully, anxiety evident in the rigid set of your shoulders. He knew from experience that if he let you keep going, you’d go on for hours. So, he grabbed your arms and pulled you into his chest. Startled, you stumbled and glared up at him.

“Shortcake?”

“What?”

“Please stop talking,” he said and dropped his lips to yours. Without hesitation, you wrapped your arms the best you could around his neck and pressed your body against his. Your cool fingers tangled themselves in his hair and he shuddered when your nails dragged along his scalp. Eddie, finally, bit down on your bottom lip and the low groan you let out shot straight to his dick.

Shit, even after imagining this moment for months – it really couldn’t compare. You tasted like punch, strawberries, and faintly of candy. He pulled back for air, your breath coming out in quick huffs. Eddie smiled, his heart racing at the sight of your dazed look. He did that. You liked him. He’d shared his life with you and you still liked him. Did shit like this really happen?

“So, you want to go to the concert with me?” You asked lightly, smile twisting your mouth.

Eddie threw his head back and laughed. “I want to go everywhere with you, shortcake.”

“Everywhere is good, I like everywhere,” you babbled, “...well, Steve’s house has a lot of rooms. Maybe everywhere can include that at the end of the night?”

Shutting his eyes, he valiantly tried to exercise self-control and not imagine you naked on a bed squirming beneath him. Failing, just a little, he nodded enthusiastically. “Should we go right now? Because I’ll grab Steve if we need to.”

You laughed, the sound warming him even further. “We still need to go with Robin to that afterparty.”

Eddie let his head loll as he groaned. “Conformity is so much work.”

“I’m sure you’ll be okay,” you teased, kissing him again. “Come on, someone’s going to catch us if we stay away too long.” Honestly, Eddie was willing to risk it but he knew you didn’t want to miss this.  

As you both crept back towards the gym, your hand tucked in his, Eddie wondered if he was dreaming. He passed one of the wide windows in the hallway, the gym only a few yards away, and he pulled you to a stop.

“What?” You asked, peeking out through it.

Eddie ducked to look out the glass and caught sight of the dark sky and the full moon. He winked and pointed up at it. “You had me going there for a while, but this makes up for it. We’re even!”

“Who are you talking to?” You asked, glancing around.

“The moon. Or God. Maybe the universe?”

You nodded. “Okay,” you said, shrugging like it was completely normal.

Jesus Christ, he loved you.

The familiar chords of Kiss floated out of the open doors to the gym and Eddie perked up. “Is that…”

Tonight, I want to give it all to you

In the darkness, there's so much I want to do

“Kiss?” You asked, grinning. “Yeah, I promised the DJ half a gram from you if he’d play a few songs you like.”

Yeah, he was gone for you. Totally gone. If he had any dignity or pride left, he’d be a little embarrassed but he really couldn’t work up the energy.

“Come on!” You said, tugging him back into the gym and onto the dance floor. A few jocks looked disgruntled at the change of music but Robin and Nancy were out on the dance floor, so were a few others. You immediately jumped around, eyes bright, hips swaying, and Eddie’s heart felt like it’d jump out his chest at any moment.

“And I can't get enough of you, baby. Can you get enough of me?” You sang, turning to wink at him. Steve and Robin waggled their eyebrows, shooting him knowing looks and he shook his head. Nancy laughed, offering up her fist and Eddie couldn’t help but bump it.

Alright universe, he thought, you win, you totally win. I owe you for the rest of my life.

Eddie wrapped an arm around your waist and beamed when you leaned into his touch. Your lips came up to his jaw and he sighed. Maybe the shit show that was the entirety of high school was worth it if you were waiting for him at the end.

I was made for lovin' you, baby

You were made for lovin' me

#eddie munson x reader #eddie munson x you #eddie munson

[intheticklecloset]

Hi! I hope you are doing well! For headcanons, maybe some modern (or just general if you want) SenGen headcanons, please. Of course only if you want to!!! Remember to hydrate and take care of yourself! Have a nice day/night!

SenGen!! Let's go! Thank you for the request, anon! ^^

Trying to find a gif for these two is so hard 😭

SenGen Fluff Headcanons (Modern AU)

Senku listens to audiobooks while he works. Mostly it's what you'd expect - science books, the latest research in a particular field, theories about things, etc. - but every once in a while he changes it up and listens to fiction as well. He's really picky about science fiction, so he doesn't bother with that. He tends to gravitate towards literary fiction and even mystery/thrillers. He's no Sherlock, but he does enjoy trying to figure out who the culprit is, and is pleasantly surprised on the rare occasion he has no idea. (Gen even caught him listening to James Patterson once and teased him mercilessly for it for days on end.)

Gen usually cooks for them both since Senku is so busy he'd forget to eat otherwise, but he actually secretly enjoys it. He has a few cookbooks hidden in one of the cupboards Senku never goes into and references them sometimes to surprise him with something new. Senku has asked where he gets the inspiration (and the time), but Gen remains stubbornly silent on the subject.

Movie nights are a total disaster. Their tastes are so different they can rarely agree on something, nevermind the fact that Senku is a nitpicker and tears apart every inaccuracy in what they watch. They usually play video games or logic puzzles together instead.

Gen - of course - practices his magic tricks in the house all the time. He tries to get Senku involved enough to at least watch, which is a struggle in itself, but then of course Senku is Senku and goes on his whole "magic is just an illusion" speech most every time. Gen has learned he doesn't mean to be hurtful by it or anything, so he lets it slide, but every once in a while he just HAS to retaliate. Kissing or tickling Senku into a flustered mess usually does the trick in getting him to "change his mind" until the next time.

Despite his protests, Senku watches every single magic program Gen participates in, whether it's in person or seeing it on TV. He's never missed a single one.

@skribblz

#headcanons #dr stone #dcst #ishigami senku #asagiri gen #sengen #modern au #fluff #cute #boyfriends #they have my heart #tagging my buddy bc ofc I must

[dostoyevsky-official]

How Merve Emre became the hottest — and most divisive — name in literary criticism

Wherever Emre goes, for better or worse, she tends to turn heads. "Merve is the kind of literary 'it girl' of the moment," the senior editor, who's worked with Emre, said. "Everyone's jealous of her because she's extremely prolific, extremely productive, extremely beautiful. And she also is very polarizing. And I think that she is polarizing in great part because she is so prolific and so beautiful." 

[...] "She's somebody who shows you why you might really love something rather than show why you shouldn't love it at all," Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, said. Reading Emre on an author she loves is like listening to someone describe the honeymoon phase of a new relationship — her criticism has an erotic charge to it.

[...] Over the past few years, Emre's reach has grown such that she has the power to represent her field in the public imagination much the way Alison Roman has become shorthand for "cookbook author" or Frank Gehry for "architect." It leaves her in both a prestigious and precarious position, with seemingly as many people in the cutthroat literary world cheering her on as rooting for her to fail. "Academics can't bear it when someone does popular work," her friend the philosopher Jason Stanley said. The stench of misogyny, too, is hard to ignore. As trite as it is to dismiss someone's haters by saying "they're just jealous," her friend Anna Shechtman, the writer and crossword designer, noted, "it may actually be true when it comes to Merve."   

Courting an audience and wearing one's ambition as openly as Emre does is "a complicated variable for a lot of academics," one Ivy League professor noted. "It's a moment where your weird little closed world suddenly gets cool on the outside, and is it gonna get cool in a way that ruins what you love about it?"   

[...] Emre sees her role as part of a larger mission to democratize criticism beyond the walls of the academy. She wants to be "the Avon Lady of criticism," she joked.

[...] Emre is the eldest of three girls born in Adana, Turkey, to two doctor parents who emigrated to the US when she was 3. [...] In 2007, she graduated from Harvard and went to work as a management consultant at Bain & Company in New York. She made a lot of money and was "very, very, very bad at it," she said. 

Her ex-colleagues remember it differently. "Of all the people I've recruited to Bain in the 30 years, and this is in the thousands, she is one of the brightest," said Chris Bierly, her mentor at Bain, who called her "other-level intelligent." Still, he said, "she was impatient with learning the job from the bottom up." When she was toying with leaving the industry a few years later, he asked her why. "She said, 'I want to do your job. I just don't wanna do all the jobs in between,'" he recalled.

After a year and a half, Emre fled the consulting world and applied for a Ph.D. in English at Yale. "Going to graduate school in literary studies was a form of rebellion," she said. "I suspect I got as much pleasure from it as I would have been if I'd been getting wasted in high school." [...] It was there she developed the sociological approach to criticism that informs much of her work; her thesis, "Paraliterary," was about the idea of "good" and "bad" readers and how literary critics need to draw the circle wider in order to keep their field relevant.  

[...] She reads as many as two books a day. For every book she writes, she gets a tattoo of its call number in the Library of Congress on her side. 

[...] She moved to Montreal to teach at McGill in 2016, with Nakarado and 1-year-old Aydin in tow. "The students loved her. She had a line outside her office door," her former colleague Ara Osterweil said, recalling the excitement that surrounded her glamorous, brilliant colleague who wore stilettos to her lectures.

She also rubbed some people the wrong way. "She thought she was Beyoncé coming into the department," one former colleague said. "She didn't want colleagues or students. She wanted an audience."

Even more so than in consulting, there is a fixation in academia on bureaucratic rank that Emre has little patience for. "I was never someone who was going to be comfortable with highly hierarchical and patriarchal institutions," she said, explaining that one of the reasons she never learned to drive was because she couldn't tolerate being taught by her father. "So now my husband drives me," she noted with irony. 

[...] "She should not be in academia because there is a measure of burying your own opinion in order to mentor, and she does not have that capacity," the colleague who thought she acted like Beyoncé said. "She liked to talk about the money she was getting for the book on personality traits, and that was just so hilarious to everyone, because she was so un-self-aware of her own personality."

[...] But not everyone liked Emre's way of doing things. Last year, someone sent an anonymous note about Emre to half a dozen professors around the US with no return address. It's titled "ME, a short biography" and reads: "Daughter of rich doctors with vacation homes in different countries claiming poor immigrant status tears through Ivies like the Ivy pricks she denounces finds tall, useless pretty boy husband to have some children to lie about." Typed out in flowery word-processor cursive, it continues: "Lives eats breathes shits on social media for a decade, wanted by no university in the United States, writes click bait books to become filthy rich to buy followers and bribe half her profession to pretend the emperor has clothes on, badmouths every place she's worked" and "still cannot shake the absolute thirst." 

[...] "People in this business can be really weird," [Michael Berube, a professor of English at Penn State] said, though he noted that they generally don't resort to real violence. "They just tend to be sort of textually obsessed."

Emre was shaken by the incident. "It was hard for me to imagine how thwarted" someone must feel to send something like that, she said. Still, she tried to have a sense of humor about it. "The author probably meant to use the word 'slake,' not 'shake,' since thirst is not something you shake." She has no idea who's responsible. "My sense is that only an academic could imagine that essays on James Joyce or Simone de Beauvoir were driving The New Yorker's advertising revenue," she remarked, noting that the postmark on the envelope suggests it was mailed from near Fordham University. At least, as one of her friends noted upon receiving the letter, "even your haters can't deny that your man is hot."

[...] As Emre became increasingly frustrated with academia, she began pouring herself into her writing career. "When I imagine the way that Merve thinks, it's like the spreading branches of a tree — everything can take you somewhere," her friend the writer Sarah Chihaya said. "She's not always interested in getting from point A to point B but rather in helping to open up all these expanding questions." She did the edits for her first New Yorker web piece in the hospital the day after giving birth to Altan back in 2017. Other academics resented seeing Emre's byline everywhere. There was a bit of a feeling, like, "Why does she get to write for The New Yorker?" her friend Anna Shechtman said.

The media world first really started paying attention to Emre after she panned writer Durga Chew-Bose's 2017 essay collection, "Too Much and Not the Mood." That piece "put her on everybody's radar," said the critic Christian Lorentzen, which is "rare for something in the Boston Review." In it, she laid out her concern that today's personal essayists are concerned not with judgments about "the formal or stylistic features of prose" but with "pretty phrases that mean nothing and teach nothing," whose only purpose is to confirm the "author's status as a beacon of complex selfhood."

Emre was blasted for being anti-feminist; Lena Dunham, a friend of Chew-Bose, tweeted that the review was "rude, patronizing bullshit." Nowadays, Emre is trying to move away from writing about books she doesn't like. "The easiest way to get attention is to have a kind of contrarian take about another female writer," she said. "It is not challenging to get people not to read something. People are not reading things all the time."

[...] The discussion segued to her Twitter presence. Did she feel there was any tension between her philosophy of criticism, which encourages the evacuation of the personal, and her more confessional use of social media? "These are two totally different genres that we're talking about," she said, as we scaled the steps outside the Yale Science Building. The idea that "high-quality criticism" and "canny self-promotion" are trade-offs "seems to rely on an error, which is the belief that just because something is popular, or is marketed well, it can't also be good."

"But the other thing is like, I don't actually think that the work relies on the evacuation of subjectivity," she continued. "It is impossible. So then I think the question becomes, what does it mean to make style charismatic through an act of withholding access to the personal in one genre, and then giving or creating the appearance of giving people access to the personal in another kind of genre?"

"So are you saying this is all a calculated dance?" I asked.

"Everything's a calculated dance," she shot back. "It would be foolish for anyone to think that what happens in a form of writing, whether it's a long-form magazine piece or 140 characters, isn't in some way calculated. I wonder what pure authenticity would even be."

[...] Emre's calling, as she sees it, is no less than the wholesale reform of higher education from the ground up. She is preoccupied with two interconnected crises. The first is an economic crisis of the humanities: Higher education is overpriced yet underfunded, there aren't enough jobs, and college degrees are increasingly devalued. The second is what her friend John Guillory has dubbed a crisis of legitimation within the profession: that literary criticism has become trapped in English departments, talking only to itself, rendered useless and separate from the reading public. Her goal is to make the practice of teaching criticism, which she sees as a public good, accessible to the wider world.

"I understand the purpose of literature as a kind of meeting place between reader and writer. It's the romance of that imagined meeting place, and it's the romance of all of the possibility that still lives there," Emre said. "One very cynical way to think about life is that it's a series of reducing possibilities. And one way to think about what criticism does is that it's a place where possibility is left really open-ended."

[...] These grand ambitions, she suggested, are why she has let herself be profiled, despite her distaste for the endeavor; she's savvy enough to know that building a brand is necessary to her larger mission. Twitter, for instance, "is a way of addressing a very different kind of public" than one gets to address at Yale or Wesleyan or The New Yorker. "We are people who are supposed to be preservers and disseminators of literature or literary culture, and we're not actually engaging people to read," she said. "If you're not trying to get people excited about it, then why are you doing it?"

#emre #this is the profile #the new editor makes it difficult to post these

[davidarc]

TCL's #6Degrees of Separation for November 5, 2022.

TCL's #6Degrees of Separation for November 5, 2022. This month I go from “The Naked Chef” by Jamie Oliver @jamieoliver to “The Chef's Secret” by Crystal King @crystallyn. Check out my #bookblog to find out how I built this chain!

From “The Naked Chef” by Jamie Oliver to “The Chef’s Secret” by Crystal King. This is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain. The rules are: Link the books…

View On WordPress

#6Degrees of Separation #Adapted for TV #author #authors #blogging #book bloggers #book blogging #books #Commentary #cookbook #cooking #culinary #female writers #Literary Musings #Memes #Six Degrees of Separation

[notanothersongaboutlovebracket]

HIIIII!

Warning! This was a lot of work so sorry for any errors and I do know that many songs could be moved to other categories, but I tried to balance everything and that's why the list looks like that!

No pics yet, but here are songs that:

Automatically go into The Ultimate NOT Another Song About Love Bracket (44 songs):

100 Gecs - I got my tooth removed (aka Dental Work Song)

Ado - Usseewa (aka Shut Up Song)

Bill Wurtz - At The Corner Store (aka Corner Store Song)

Bryant Oden - The Duck Song (aka Prank Song)

Danny Gonzalez - Bag Tho (aka Youtubers Song)

Maxwell Anthony - Aromantic moodboard (aka Aromantic Song)

Joan Jett - Bad Reputation (aka Bad Reputation Song)

Paul McCartney - Band On The Run (aka Band Break-Up Song)

Cavetown - Boys will be bugs (aka Boyhood Song)

ERA - Ameno (aka Dog Latin Song)

The Academic - Not Your Summer (aka Summer Song)

Dropkick Murphys - Rose Tattoo (aka Tattoo Song)

Psychostick - We Ran out of CD Space (aka What if? Song)

The Eagles - Hotel California (aka American Culture Song)

Kero Kero Bonito - It's Bugsnax! (aka Bugsnax Song)

Saint Motel - Honest Feedback (aka Criticism Song)

Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil (aka The Devil Song)

Johnny Manchild and the Poor Bastards - Gestapo (aka Fuck Donald Trump Song)

Owl City - Fireflies (aka Insomnia Song)

Bo Burnham - Welcome to the Internet (aka The Internet Song)

They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople) (aka Istanbul Song)

Tom Cardy - Hey, I don't work here (aka Sudden Alien Invasion Song)

Lemon Demon - Spiral of Ants (aka Animal Metaphor Song)

Satellite High - The Bus Is Late (Waiting For The Bus In The Rain) (aka Late Bus song)

The Beatles - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (aka Lucy Song)

sidney gish - persephone (aka Mispronunciation Song)

Jorge Velosa - La cucharita (aka Spoon Song)

Jhariah - DEBT COLLECTOR (aka Problems Song)

jimmy dean - big bad john (aka Sacrifice Song)

Johnny Cash - Folsom Prison Blues (aka Regret Song)

The Narcissist Cookbook - Sugar In My Coffee (aka Food Metaphor Song)

Echosmith - Cool Kids (aka High School Song)

Car Seat Headrest - It's Only Sex (aka Asexuality Song)

Lemon Demon - Amnesia was her name (aka Amnesia Song)

The Doors - People Are Strange (aka Alienation Song)

Tally Hall - Banana Man (aka Food Song)

Jessica Law - This is Not a Place of Honour (aka Devastation song)

Mermaid Sisters - Galactic mermaid (aka Frustration song)

Pinnochiop - God-ish (aka Modern Culture Critic Song)

Owl City - Peppermint Winter (aka Christmas Song)

Green Day - Longview (aka Boredom Song)

Bastille - Daniel in the Den (aka Betrayal Song)

AsapScience - Periodic Table Song (... you get that one, I think)

Pete Seegar - Oh Freedom (aka Freedom Song)

Are part of Mental issues Song Bracket (8 from 75):

AJJ - Body Terror Song

AJR - Karma

Ashnikko - Panic Attacks in Paradise

awfultune - Redesign

Cg5 - Freak Out

Cg5 and The Living Tombstone - 4get

Chameleon Circuit - Nightmares

Creep-P - Exorcism

Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppe, Jack White - Two Against One

Eden Epinosa - Waiting in the Wings

Eve - Dramaturgy; Literary Nonsense; Tokyo Ghetto; How to Eat Life

Fin Argus - Ship in a bottle

Fish in a Birdcage - Fish in a birdcage

Florence + the machine - free; falling

Gabby Young and Other Animals - In Your Head

grandson - In Over My Head; Despicable; Identity

Green Day - Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Guchiry - Abnormality Dancing Girl

inabakumori - Lagtrain

Jack stauber - Dinner is not over

Jamie Christopherson - Only Thing I Know for Real

Jhariah - Flight of the Crows

Jhariah, Luis Chavez - These 4 Walls

Junie & TheHutFriends - The Consequence Of Imagination Is Fear

Kero KERO boni - toId rather sleep

Lemon Demon - I’ve got some falling to do

MGK - 9 lives

Miracle Musical - Labyrinth

mitski - a burning hill

Neru - Lost One's Weeping

Pale Waves - Noises

Patrick Stump - Explode

Qbomb - Everything is fine

Raghd - Pressure

Rainbow Kitten Surprise - It's Called: Freefall

Red Vox - In the Garden

Shayfer James - Your Father's Son

sidney gish - sin triangle

Simple Plan - Welcome to my life

Sufjan Stevens - I Want to Be Well

syudou - Bitter Choco Decoration

The Arcadian Wild - Tell It Like It Is

The cast of Next to Normal - Wish I were here

the crane wives - hollow moon; nothing at all

The Eagles - Desperado

the mountain goats - up the wolves

The score - Strange

This Could Be On Broadway - Just My Luck

Toh Kay - With Any Sort of Certainty

TUYU - I'm getting on the bus to the other world, see ya!

wilbur soot - since I saw vienna

Will Wood - Marsha, Thankk You for the Dialectics, but I Need You to Leave; BlackBoxWarrior

will wood and the tapeworms - red moon

half alive - What's Wrong

Wowaka - Rolling Girl

The Weakerthans - Plea from a Cat Named Virtute

Cavetown - Home

Marina and the Diamonds - Are You Satisfied?

The Amazing Devil - The Old Witch Sleep and The Good Man Grace

the police - synchronicity ii

Eminem - Stan

Tears For Fears - Mad World

Gary Jules - Mad World

Jessica Darrow - Surface Pressure

Katherine Lynn-Rose - Price of Perfection; Top of my school

Kimya Dawson - Tree Hugger

Are part of War/History Song Bracket (2 from 24):

10000 Maniacs - Gun shy

Don Mclean - The Grave

Dropkick Murphys - Green Fields of France

Sting - The Russians

The Amazing Devil - Elsa's Song

The Cranberries - Zombie

The Mechanisms - Rose Red; Our Boy Jack; No Happy Ending

U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday

Thirty Seconds to Mars - This is War

Nena - 99 Luftballons

My Chemical Romance - Mama

Bastille - Pompeii

pigwiththefaceofaboy - Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris

the buttress - brutus

Ghost and Pals - Aura

Weezer - The British Are Coming

The Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star

Jayli Wolf - Child of the Government

Gordon Lightfoot - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Paul Brady - Arthur McBride, or The Recruiting Seargent

Sabaton - The Attack of the Dead Men

Charming Disaster - Radium Girls

Are part of Revenge/Confrontation Song Bracket (4 from 36):

100 Gecs - Sympathy 4 The Grinch

Alice Francis - Shoot Him Down!

The Decemberists - Mariner's Revenge Song

Ryan Scott Oliver - Leave, Luanne

Aviators - Red Water Dreams

Bring Me The Horizon - medicine

Da games - Moving up in the world

Dalton Deschain & the Traveling Show - Devil's Night

Death Note the Musical - Playing His Game

Fish in a Birdcage - Four Aces

grandson - Bury Me Face Down

dead end paranormal park - My Frankenstein

I don’t know how but they found me - Choke

Jeremy Irons - Be Prepared

Jhariah - Whose Eye Is It Anyway???

Miles Luna and Benjamin Zecker - Better Than You

Naethan Apollo - You’re Not Welcome

Nightmare Time - Yellow Jacket

Olivia Olsen and Ashley Tisdale - Busted

Poor Man's Poison - Hell's Coming with Me

Queen - Death on Two Legs

Scene queen - The rapture (but it's pink)

steampianist - black hole

The Crane Wives - Take Me to War

the living tombstone, eliemonty - die in a fire

Vane Lilly - Perfectly Sweet

Warren Zevon - Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner

StarKid (Twisted Musical) - No One Remembers Achmed

Lord Huronthe - World Ender

Lestat the Musical - After All This Time

ponyphonic - the moon rises

Schell Games - I Expect You To Die

Set It Off - Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

Martina McBride - Independence Day

Bruce Springsteen - Death to My Hometown

Gaelic Storm - The Night that I Punched Russel Crowe

Are part of Animal Song Mini Bracket (1 from 12):

DaniwellP - Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!

Djjack - Pink Elephants on Parade

GWSNRecipe ~ For Simon

Hullabaloo - Mama Llama

Kila - Howls the wolf

Subwolfer - Give that wolf a banana

Nickel Creek - The Fox

Lemon Demon - Jaws

Thurl Ravenscroft - Everybody Wants to Be a Cat

Jonti Picking - Owls

Will Wood - Tomcat Disposables

mewithoutYou - The Fox, The Crow And The Cookie

Are part of Family Song Bracket (4 from 40):

ABBA - Slipping Through my Fingers

AJR - Dear Winter

Alex Benjamin - If We Have Each Other

The Crane Wives - Never Love an Anchor

Belle - Gales of Song

birds of tokyo - my darling, my son

Brotherhood of man - Save your kisses for me

Cat Stevens - Father and son

Clyde Rabatel (from No Straight Roads Soundtrack) - DK West Encounter 3

Conan Gray - Family Line

Daði freyr - Think about things

Evelyn Evelyn - Evelyn Evelyn

Gregory & The Hawk - Boats & Birds

Johnny Cash - Boy Named Sue

Kacey Musgraves - Mother

Kodaline - Brother

lucy dacus - my mother & I

Of monsters and men - King and Lionheart

Starkid - When the World’s at Stake; The Power in Me

Passion Pit - Take a Walk

Phineas and Ferb Cast - Us Against the Universe

Radical Face - Always Gold

Set It Off - Dad's Song

Stromae - Papaoutai

Tayc - Qui

beetlejuice the musical - dead mom

twenty øne piløts - My Blood

MGK - Last November

Jessie Shelton (36 Questions Musical) - Our Word

Sasha Alex Sloan - Older

Marina and the Diamonds - The Family Jewels

Mitski - Class of 2013

The Amazing Devil - Welly Boots

Laura Shigihara - Jump

The Mechanisms - Once and Future King

Vienna Teng - Grandmother Song

Sleeping at last - Heirloom

surfjan stevens - should have known better

Rammstein - Dalai Lama

Are part of Friendship Song Bracket (2 from 28):

ABBA - Chiquitita Ross Lynch - Can't Do it Without You

BB Bean - Two Best Friends

Bears in Trees - Little Cellist

Beetlebug - Overgrown Garden

Catherine Warwick - Bein' Friends

Cavetown - Lemon Boy

Conan Gray - Best Friend

concrete blonde - take me home

harumaki gohan - cobalt memories

Julie and the Phantoms cast - Flying Solo

Kimya Dawson - Loose Lips

Louie Zong and Brian David Gilbert - Breezy Slide

Madison Reyes, Jadah Marie - Main Thing

Peach Pit - Tommys Party

Radical Face - Summer Skeletons

Sea Wolf - Old Friend

Taylor Swift - seven

The Scary Jokes - Friends With You

Toby Fox - His Theme

Varsity - Krissy

Wicked - Defying Gravity

Laufey - Best friend

depeche mode - never let me down again

Ghost Mice - Free Pizza For Life

Taylor Swift and HAIM - No body, no crime

The Chicks - Goodbye Earl

Gang of Youths - Achilles, Come Down

Are part of Crime Song Bracket (2 from 28):

Anthony Warlow - Alive

Jhariah - Knives Are Dangerous, Kid, So Cut the Theatrics!

Creature feature - The art of poisoning

Crooked Still - Wind and Rain/Twa Sisters

Danny Gonzales - I'm gonna kill Santa Claus

Death Grips - Beware

Foster The People - Pumped Up Kicks

Kanannon - The Riddle Solver Who Can't Solve Riddles

KuragePChururira - Chururira Daddadda

Lemon Demon - Sweet Bod

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

Sodikken - people eater

steampianisti - feed

Teddy Hyde - Terry's Taxidermy

The Beatles - Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

The Cranberries - The icicle melts

The Garages - Firewalker with me

The Protomen - The Hounds

Tom Lehrer - Poisoning Pigeons in the Park

Warrant - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Yugami-P - Alice human sacrifice

The Stupendium - Fiend Like Me

Eliza Carthy - Mrs Dyer The Baby Farmer

George Ezra - Drawing Board

The Mechanisms - Lucky Sevens

The Crane Wives - Curses

Louis Armstrong - Mack the Knife

Panic! At The Disco - Time to Dance

Are part of Addiction Song Mini Bracket (1 from 12):

AJR - Weak

Linkin Park- Breaking The Habit

SIAMÉS - THE WOLF

Dresden Dolls - My Alcoholic Friends

Eric Clapton - Cocaine

Florence + The Machine - Morning Elvis

Franz Ferdinand - Ulysses

grandson - Overdose; Pain Shopping

Jack Stauber - Coffee

Ringo Starr - The No No Song

The Living Tombstone - Drunk

The replacements - Here comes a regular

Are part of Fame Song preliminary poll (1 from 7):

Albert Hammond - It never rains in southern California

Bug Hunter - Disco! in the Panic Room

Grand Commander - Fuck you im going underground

John Douglass aka jacksfilms - We're all just assholes talking to a camera

Måneskin - Gossip

The neighbourhood - Wires

Taylor Swift - Long Live

Are part of Supernatural Song Bracket (4 from 36):

Heather Dale - Black Fox

Lord Huron - Dead Man’s Hand

Alex Brightman, Sophia Anne Caruso - Say My Name

Lemon Demon - Cabinet Man

Ludo - Lake Pontchartrain

Alex Brightman, Sophia Anne Caruso - Say My Name

Bear Ghost - Necromancin Dancin

Blue Oyster Cult - Godzilla

Bobby "boris" Pickett - monster mash

Charming Disaster - Wishing Well

Creature feature - The Greatest Show Unearthed

David Bowie - Magic dance

Feuerschwanz - Untot im Drachenboot

Single File - Zombies Ate My Neighbors

The Darkness - Black Shuck

The Longest Johns - Moby Duck

Weird Al Yankovic - Jurassic Park

Periphery - Reptile

steampianist - to our colorful scintillating future

Nancy Kerr - Fragile Water

The Hush Sound - Lighthouse

Cave mouth - Hecate

Kurt Elling - Nature boy

S. J. Tucker - Cheshire Kitten

The Living Tombstone ft. BSlick & Crusher-P - 1000 Doors

Jessica Law - Raising the Dead!

the forgetmenauts - charlatan in red

Everything Everything - Leviathan

The Searchers - Love Potion Number Nine

Tenacious D - Tribute

Thoushaltnot - The Haunted Phonograph

Heather Dale - Changeling Child

The lab rats - Devil's train

The Mechanisms - The Riddle Of The Sphinx

S.J. Tucker - Song of the Witches

Bug Hunter - 2 Bed, 2 Bath, and a Ghost

Are part of Piracy/Western Song Bracket (1 from 16):

Fish in a Birdcage Rule #23 - Birds of a Feather

Alestorm - Drink

The Longest Johns - The Last Bristolian Pirate; Wellerman

Master Bones Jangle - The Derelict

Brillig - The old captain

The Arrogant Worms - The Last Sasketchewan Pirate

Stan Rogers - Barrett’s Priveteers

The Longest Johns - Off to Sea

Brian David Gilbert - Pumpkin Cowboy

glen campbell - Rhinestone Cowboy

Jim Croce - You Don’t Mess Around With Jim

Charlie Daniels Band - The Devil Went Down to Georgia

Marty Robbins - Big Iron

Tom Cardy - The Ballad of Smokin' Joe Rudeboy

John Denver - Take Me Home, Country Roads

Are part of Positivity Song Bracket (4 from 52):

AURORA - Running with the wolves

Avril Lavigne - Here's to Never Growing Up

Bon Jovi - It's My Life

Brent Morgan - Gonna Be Okay

Caleb Hyles - Amber and Rain

Chip Skylark - My Shiny Teeth and Me

Colbie Caillat - Try

Death - Let The World Turn

Death Cab for Cutie - Grapevine Fires

Delta Rae - Dance in the Graveyards

dodie - Secret for the Mad

Elsa - Show Yourself

Florence and the machine - daffodil

Go! Child - Outro

Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes - Wake Up Everybody

I Fight Dragons - Disaster Hearts

Jeff Williams - This Life is Mine

Jimmy Cliff - You Can Get It If You Really Want It

Kenny Loggins - Footloose

Lord Huron - Until the Night Turns

Louis Armstrong - What A Wonderful World

Måneskin - Zitti E buoni

MARINA - Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land

Mother Mother - Infinitesimal

OR3O - Living on

Paloma Faith - Upside Down

Rachel Platten - Fight Song

Rhett and Link - I'm On Vacation

Rhythm Heaven - Beautiful One Day

Rise Against - Tragedy + Time

Something Else Yt - I’m Something Else

Sonic adventure 2 - Escape from the city

Stan Rogers - The Mary Ellen Carter

Steam Powered Giraffe - Malfunction

Steppen Wolf - Born The Be Wild

Surfaces - Sunday Best

Tamino - Indigo Night

The Black-Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling

The Cog is Dead - Weird

The Crane Wives - Volta; Turn Out The Lights

The Crüxshadows - Quicksilver

The Mowglis - Bad Dream

Thomas Rhett - Be a Light

Vanessa Doofenshmirtz - I'm Me

Jack Johnson - Upside Down

VHS Christmas Carol - Christmas Electricity

Frank Sinatra - My Way

Tank and the Bangas - Black Folk

Survivor - Eye of the Tiger

The Stupendium - Shine Through

Are part of Mortality Song Bracket (4 from 54):

AJR - Bang!

Bears in Trees - Doing This Again!

Beth Kinderman - Refusal of the Call

Bowling for Soup - 1985

Coldplay - Viva la Vida

Dan Deacon - When I Was Done Dying

Dayglow - Junior Varsity

Death Cab for Cutie - Gold Rush

Ed Sheeran - Castle on the Hill

Eurielle - City of the Dead

House Phone - Drinking Song

Jeff Williams feat. Meredith Hagan - Contact Redux

Lord Huron - Frozen Pines

Lorde - Ribs

Madilyn Mei - Have I Outgrown Minecraft?

Megadeth - Time: The Beginning

My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the Black Parade; The Foundations Of Decay

No, really - Beginning of the end

Oingo Boingo - Dead man's party

Rusty Cage - The Hearse Song

Orla Gartland - Souvenirs

Pale Waves - Act My Age

Peter, Paul, and Mary - Puff the Magic Dragon

Pim Stones - We Have It all

Radical Face - All Is Well (Goodbye, Goodbye)

Saintseneca - How many blankets are in the world?

The arcadian wild - The graduate

the cast of Adventure Time - Time Adventure

The Crane Wives - Keep You Safe

The Gregory Brothers - The Last Goodbye

The Kingston Trio - Where Have All The Flowers Gone

the mountain goats - pale green things; bleed out

the replacements - birthday gal

They Might Be Giants - Am I Awake?

Too Small the Limelight - Anatomy of a Car Crash

Will Wood - Cicada Days; Euthanasia

Yorushika - Say it

Alec Benjamin - Outrunning Karma

Anthony Warlow - I Need To Know

half.alive - creature

The Hoosiers - Goodbye Mr A

The Hush Sound - That's Okay

Judy Kuhn - Just Around the Riverbend

The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby

The Mechanisms - Losing Track

The Audreys - Sometimes the Stars

Eve - Fight Song

John Mayer - Waiting on the World to Change

Jukebox the Ghost - Fire In the Sky/Where are all the Scientists Now?/A Matter of Time

Jessica Law - Six Years

The Highwaymen - Highwayman

Are part of Morality Song preliminary poll (1 from 6):

Alec Benjamin - Outrunning Karma

Anthony Warlow - I Need To Know

Yorushika - Say it

Twisted the Untold Story of a Royal Vizier - Twisted

The Oh Hellos - Dear Wormwood

Tears for Fears - Everybody wants to rule the world

Are part of Alter Ego/Duality Song Mini Bracket (1 from 12):

Anthony Warlow - Confrontation

grandson - The Ballad of G and X

Eden Espinosa and Jeremy Jordan - Nothing Left to Lose

Brasma - Oh, Funny! (How The Sea Goes Round)

Jessica Law - Jekyll & Hyde 4eva

The Amazing Devil - Farewell Wanderlust

The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Let It Out

Will Wood - Dr Sunshine is Dead

Billy Idol - Plastic Jesus

Hozier and Bear McCreary - Blood upon the snow

NF - HOPE

Street People - Facade

Are part of Music Song Mini Bracket (1 from 14):

Billy Joel - Piano Man

Bob Seger - Old Time Rock n Roll

Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode

Death - David's dream

Heaven Pierce Her - Altars of Apostasy

Johann Sebastian Bach - Toccata and Fugue in D minor

KEYGEN CHURCH - Tenebre Rosso Sangue

OMORI - not-so-empty house

Saint Motel - A Good Song Never Dies

Tally Hall - Welcome to Tally Hall

Wild Cherry - Play that Funky Music

Don McLean - American Pie

Sarah Bareilles - Love Song

Kenny Loggins - One Small Voice

Are part of Dance Song preliminary poll (1 from 7):

ABBA - Dancing Queen

Caramell - Caramelldansen

dArtagnan - Tanz in den Mai

Loosey Laduca - Let Loose

Miriam Makaba - Pata Pata

The Bangles - Walk Like an Egyptian

The Spinners - The Rubberband Man

Are part of Sci-Fi Song Bracket (1 from 20):

Basset - Perfect Human

Brendon Small - The Ocean Galaktik

Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, James McAlister, Nic Muhly - Jupiter

Heather Sanders - Call the Navigator

Portal - Still alive

Qbomb - 1000000 ad

Steam powered giraffe - Brass goggles

Heather Dale - I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing?)

TWRP - Starlight Brigade

Brad Sucks - Lonely

Mili - String Theocracy

Cepheid - Goddess

The Mechanisms - Lost in The Cosmos; Alice; Redeath; Frankenstein; Gunpowder Tim vs. The Moon Kaiser

Train - Drops of Jupiter

The Killers - Spaceman

Alderon Tyran - Dawson's Christian

The Hound + The Fox - The Paradox

Are part of Social issues Song Bracket (2 from 44):

A perfect circle - Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drum

Billy Joel - We Didn't Start the Fire

Bo Burnham - Channel 5 News

Bob Marley & The Wailers - I Shot the Sheriff

concrete blonde - god is a bullet

Eddie Grant - Electric Avenue

Geoff Berner - Daloy polizei

grandson - Dirty; Is This What You Wanted; Bills; Blood // Water

Harry Belafonte Day OIskwe - Little Star

John Lennon - Working Class Hero

konstrakta - in corpore sano

Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows

Les Misérables Cast - Do You Hear the People Sing

lovejoy - the fall

Megson - Generation Rent

muse - explorers

Newsies Cast - Watch What Happens

Poor Man's Poison - Feed the Machine

Shayfer James - Weight of the World

Shinedown - Planet Zero

Steampianist - Dream Eating Machine

Steven Sondheim - Another national anthem

Suzanne Vega - Luka

The Beatles - Black Bird

The Black-Eyed Peas - Where is the Love

The Crane Wives - The Hand That Feeds

The Strokes - The Adults Are Talking

Tikkle Me - Blow My Brains Out

Tom Morello, Shea Diamond, Dan Reynolds, The Bloody Beetroots - Stand Up

Arcade Fire - We exist

Vienna Teng - The Hymn of Axiom

Froukje - Groter Dan Ik

Simon and Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence

James Currier - A Fertile Wood at Heart

Bring Me The Horizon - Happy Song

Ralph McTell - The Streets of London

Ren - Money Game 2

Hozier - Eat your young

Greek Fire - A Real Life

Rare Americans - Love Is All I Bring

Penelope Scott - Dead girls

Are part of Biographic Song/Character Theme Mini Bracket (2 from 18):

Boney M. - Rasputin

Don Mclean - Vincent

TeamFourStar - Alexander Anderson

The Cast of Centaurworld - The Nowhere King

They Might Be Giants - Doctor Worm

Tom Lehrer - Lobachevsky

Sabaton - The Unkillable Soldier; White Death

Leonard Nimoy - The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

Sonya Belousova - Toss a Coin to Your Witcher

Sabaton - Father

Mili - Salt Pepper Birds and the Thought Police

Weird Al Yankovic - The Jedi Song

The Doubleclicks - Wonder

Rare Americans - Brittle Bones Nicky

Jim's Big Ego - The Ballad of Barry Allen

The Mechanisms - Hereward The Wake

Sabaton - A Ghost in the Trenches

Are part of Creativity/Tropes/Games Song preliminary poll (1 from 7):

David Bowie - Life on Mars?

Foster the People - Best Friend

Waterparks - Mad All the Time Nicholas Karr and Scott Wozniak - Stupid Nintendo games

Jason Charles Miller - Your Turn to Roll

the mountain goats - wage wars get rich die handsome

Will Wood - The Main Character

Are part of Faith Song Mini Bracket (2 from 18):

Arcade Fire - Here Comes The Night Time

concrete blonde - tomorrow, wendy

Eric Clapton - Swing Low Sweet Chariot

Ghost - He Is

Joan Osborne - One Of Us

K-modo - You will believe

Lemon Demon - Ask For Nothing

mewithoutYou - The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate

Moon walker - I'm afraid I'll go to heaven

the crane wives - the garden

the oh hellos - passerine

The Rare Occasions - Notion

Ben Caplan - Birds With Broken Wings

GHOST - Honey I’m Home

The Dear Hunter - Wait

The Narcissist Cookbook - Apple

Therapy? - Turn

Tub Ring - Impress Your Creators

Are part of Gender Song preliminary poll (1 from 11):

green day - king for a day

Mother mother - Verbatim

Penny parker - Metamorphosis

She/her/hers - Gender is boring

Shea Diamond - I Am Her

teniwoha - Villain

Will Wood - I/Me/Myself

Christine and the Queens/Red Car - Christine

the replacements - androgynous

Ezra Furman - Maraschino-Red Dress $8.99 From Goodwill

The Doubleclicks - I'm Winning

Are part of Womanhood Song Mini Bracket (1 from 12):

Dolly Parton - 9 to 5

Emilie Autumn - Thank God I'm Pretty

Little Simz - Woman

LOONA - So What

Queen - Killer Queen

Florence + The Machine - King

Donna Summer - She Works Hard For The Money

The Crane Wives - Ribs

Veruca Salt - Seether

Alvan & Ahez - Fulenn

Reba McEntire - Fancy

Seanan McGuire - Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves

Are part of Travel/Journey Song preliminary poll (1 from 6):

The Beatlesøns - The Yukon Song

Byrds - 8 Miles High

The High Kings - The Rocky Road to Dublin

The Mountain Goats - Parisian Enclave

Shakushain - Wednesday Campanella

Hadestown Cast - Wait for Me

Are part of Greed Song preliminary poll (1 from 6):

The 88 feat. Lorax Cast - Biggering

Lemon Demon - Redesign Your Logo

Patrick Stump - Greed

Pink Williams - The Devil is Real

Dire Straits - Industrial Disease

The Oncler - How Bad Can I Be?

Are part of Dystopia/Propaganda/Preconceptions Song preliminary poll (1 from 9):

The Stupendium - The Fine Print

The Stupendium - Rest Employed

The Stupendium - And So We Fall

The Stupendium & Dan Bull - It's A Joy

Crusher-P - Propaganda!

Hadestown Cast - Why we build the wall

Encanto Cast - We Don't Talk About Bruno

Connor Spiotto - The Villain I Appear To Be

Raye Zaragoza - They Say

Are part of preliminary Nature Song poll (1 from 4):

S. J. Tucker - Firebird's child

Eddie Rabbitt - I Love A Rainy Night

John Anderson - Seminole Wind

Cosmo Sheldrake - The Moss

Are part of preliminary Marriage/Divorce Song poll (1 from 4):

Cécile Corbel - Le bal de chats

The mountain goats - No children

AJR - My Play

Cavetown - Devil Town

#bracket info

[ash-and-books]

Rating: 4.5/5

Book Blurb:

Home is where the books are. This inspiring home decor book is brimming with photos of cozy places to read and creative ways to display books at home.

For stylish bookworms and bookish stylists, this covetable home décor book merges the literary appeal of Jane Mount’s bestselling Bibliophile with the aspirational allure of Emily Henderson’s bestselling Styled. Discover beautiful bookshelves adorned with lovely objets d’art, handsome home libraries with snug armchairs, reading areas for kids that ignite the imagination, and cookbook corners in quaint kitchens—and learn to replicate these in your own space.

From bedside tables to bar carts, leather-bound collections to color-coded shelves, here are book nooks and styling techniques for every room and aesthetic. Reading lists from Gillian Flynn, Jasmine Guillory, Alex Elle, Joanna Goddard, Nik Sharma, and more offer plenty of recommendations for stocking your shelves (and your TBR list).

In a stunning package with a tasteful hint of gold foil on the case, this sumptuous book is perfect for browsing, displaying on a coffee table, or gifting to the reader, book lover, designer, or creative in your life. Filled with clever design ideas and dreamy spaces, Book Nooks is an irresistible invitation to curl up with a book, whether this one or another.

Review:

A beautiful collection of home decor and book nooks. This is the perfect book for bookworms. This showcases all the various ways you could decorate your books around your house and the different book nooks and potential book cases you could design and have. It even includes reading lists from popular authors! This is seriously such a fun book to have and I would absolutely recommend it for bookworms!

*thanks Netgalley and Chronicle Books for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

#book review #bookish #book #book nooks

[luvcraze]

Book Date Ideas

Book dates for couples can be a wonderful way to bond over shared interests and explore new worlds together. Here are some book date ideas for couples to enjoy:

1. Bookstore Adventure:

Spend an afternoon browsing through a local bookstore together. Explore different sections, recommend books to each other, and discover new authors and genres. Make it even more special by picking out a book for each other as a surprise gift.

2. Book Swap:

Organize a book swap where you and your partner each select a book from your personal collection to exchange with each other. Discuss why you chose the books and take turns reading them together or separately. It's a fun way to share your favorite reads and discover new ones.

3. Literary Picnic:

Pack a picnic basket with your favorite snacks, a cozy blanket, and, of course, a book or two. Find a peaceful spot in a park or garden, spread out your picnic, and take turns reading passages or chapters aloud to each other while enjoying the serene surroundings.

4. Book Club for Two:

Start a book club just for the two of you. Choose a book to read together and set aside time each week to discuss your thoughts, reactions, and favorite parts. It's a great way to engage in meaningful conversations and deepen your connection through literature.

5. Author Spotlight Night:

Select an author you both admire and dedicate an evening to exploring their works. Choose a few books by the author, read excerpts or short stories aloud, and discuss their writing style, themes, and impact on literature. You can even research the author's background and life to gain deeper insights into their work.

6. Literary Movie Marathon:

Pick a book-to-movie adaptation or a series of movies based on your favorite books, and have a movie marathon night at home. Watch the movies together and compare them to the original books, discussing how well they capture the essence of the story and characters.

7. Bookish DIY Project:

Get creative together with a book-inspired DIY project. Choose a book-related craft or activity, such as making bookmarks, creating literary-themed artwork, or building a miniature bookshelf. It's a fun way to express your love for literature while unleashing your creativity as a couple.

8. Literary Travel Planning:

Plan a dream vacation inspired by your favorite books or literary destinations. Research places mentioned in books you both love, such as Paris for "The Da Vinci Code" or Scotland for "Outlander," and create an itinerary together. Whether it's a weekend getaway or a bucket-list trip, dreaming and planning together can be an exciting bonding experience.

9. Poetry Night:

Explore the world of poetry together by hosting a poetry night at home. Select poems to read aloud to each other, ranging from classic favorites to contemporary works. Discuss the themes, imagery, and emotions evoked by the poetry, and even try writing your own poems as a couple.

10. Bookish Cooking Date:

Get creative in the kitchen by cooking up dishes inspired by your favorite books or literary characters. Look for recipes online or in cookbooks that match the cuisine or flavors mentioned in the books, and prepare a themed meal together. Enjoy your culinary creations while discussing the books that inspired them.

These book date ideas offer a fun and meaningful way to connect with each other while indulging in your shared love of literature. Whether you're exploring bookstores, discussing your favorite reads, or getting creative with book-inspired activities, the possibilities for book-themed dates are endless.

[windslar]

this might be a dumb question but I'm a new follower catching up on your Flores legacy. Does your legacy follow any rules?

Hey! Sorry it took a while to answer this question, which is not dumb btw.

My legacy is based off a challenge I wrote but never published; not because I didn't want to share it but because I realized I wanted to keep the ~plot~ of each generation to myself for story purposes. If you see one of my first posts, it reads like the little blurb for a particular generation in a challenge.

Since I'm almost through the goals of the first generation, I'll share them below the cut.

My plan is to continue with the challenge I have outlined, but make updates based on the packs that are released. As far as other rules, I'm using a random legacy roller to determine number of kids and a random number generator to select who gets to be heir.

Yellow - Country Bumpkin

You’re a hopeless romantic (stress on the word ‘hopeless’) who’s moved to the countryside in hopes of finding purpose and love just like the main characters in your favorite novels. There may be an absence of supporting characters, but you make a promise to yourself to crawl out of your comfort zone into your new community. You don’t have much to start out with, but you hope the animals and crops will yield enough to allow you to carve a life you can call your own.

Location: Henford on Bagley

A: Country Caretaker

C: Self-employed farmer

T: Romantic, Animal Enthusiast, Socially Awkward

RT: Independent --

Challenges:

Simple Living lot challenge

Participate in weekly Finchwick Fair competitions

Complete at least one errand from every “neighbor” in Henford-On-Bagley

Write love letters to the sim you’ll eventually marry

Write a series (at least 4) of romance novels loosely based on your own love life, and submit them to a literary digest

Write a country-themed cookbook

Make extra income by selling your crafts (i.e. cross-stitching, knitting, flower arrangements) on Plopsy

Build a library in the family vacation home and don’t forget to add copies of your books --

Bonus recommendations:

Secondary aspirations: Lady/Lord of the Knits or Bestselling Author

Skills to develop: Writing, Cooking, Gardening, Cross-stitching, Knitting, Flower Arranging

Calendar: Set up an annual holiday for sims to Ramble the Bramblewood, where they can forage for mushrooms, befriend wild rabbits and birds, enjoy the ruins, and stop by Sophie The Snail

Stick to a literary theme when naming your cows, llamas, and chickens

Set up a backstory for why your sim has absent or dead parents

Have an enemies to lovers storyline for you and your eventual spouse

Rags to riches: set your household funds to §0 when you start your game

Spouse’s career: Culinary - Chef  or Mixologist Branch

#inbox #asks