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sophaeros · 3 months

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arctic monkeys for q magazine, june 2011 (x) (x)

ARCTIC MONKEYS: Inside Alex Turner's Head

Words Sylvia Patterson Portrait John Wright

The day Arctic Monkeys moved into their six bedroom, Spanish-style villa in the Hollywood Hills, where the first-floor balcony looked over the patio swimming pool, they knew exactly what to do.

"From the balcony, you could get on t'roof and jump in't pool," chirps the Monkeys' most gregarious member, drummer Matt Helders, in his homely Yorkshire way. "We looked at it and said, That's definitely gonna happen. So by the end, we did a couple of 'em. Somersaults in t'pool, from the roof. At night time."

In January 2011, as Sheffield and the rest of Britain endured its bitterest winter in a century, Arctic Monkeys capered among the palm trees, eschewing hotels for a millionaire's Hollywood homestead as they recorded and mixed their fourth studio album, Suck It and See.

The four Monkeys, alongside producer James Ford and engineer James Brown, lived what they called the "American man thing": watched Super Bowl on giant TVs, played ping-pong, hired two Mustangs, cooked cartoon Tom And Jerry-sized steaks on barbecues on Sundays, had girlfriends over to visit, all cooking and drinking around the colossal outdoor kitchen area featuring a fridge and two dishwashers. Living atop the Hills, they could see the Pacific Ocean beyond by day, the infinite glittering lights of downtown LA by night.

Every day, en route to Sound City Studios, they'd travel in a seven-seater four-by-four through the mountains, via bohemian 60s enclave Laurel Canyon, blaring out the tunes: The Stones Roses, The Cramps, the Misfits' Hollywood Babylon. For the sometime teenage art-punk renegades whose guitarist, Jamie Cook, was once ejected from London's Met Bar for refusing to pay €22 for two beers, the comedy rock'n'roll life still feels, however, absolutely nothing like reality.

NICK O'MALLEY: "It were really as if we were on holiday. When we came back it's the most post-holiday blues I've ever had!"

JAMIE COOK: "It's hard to comment on that. It were just really good fun."

MATT HELDERS: "We always said, As soon as things like that feel normal, we're in trouble. But it's just funny. You might think it would get more and more serious as you get older but it's getting funnier. We've done four albums now and I'm still only 24, I'm still immature to an extent. So who cares?"

Alex? Al? Are you there?

ALEX TURNER: "Yeah, it were good times. But we were in the studio most of the time. So there's no real wild Hollywood stories. Hmn. Yeah."

Wednesday, 16 March 2011, Strongroom Bar, Shoreditch, East London, 11am. Alex Turner, 25, slips entirely alone into an empty art-crowd brasserie looking like an indie girl's indie dream boy: mop-top bouffant hair which coils, in curlicues, directly into his cheekbones, army-green waist-length jacket, baggy-arsed skinny jeans, black cord zip-up cardigan, simple gold chain, supermoon sized chocolate-brown eyes.

Almost six years after I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor became the indie-punk anthem of a generation (from the first of Arctic Monkeys' three Number 1 albums), and nothing prepares you for the curious phenomenon of Alex Turner "in conversation". Unlike so many of the Monkeys frenetic early songs, he operates in slow motion, seemingly underwater, carrying a protective shell on his back, perhaps indie rock's very own diamond-backed terrapin. The most celebrated young wordsmith in rock'n roll today talks fulsomely, in fact, only in shapeless, curling sentences punctuated with "maybe... hmn.. yeah", an anecdotal wilderness sketching pictures as vague as a cloud. He is, though, simultaneously adorable: amenable, gentle, graceful, and as Northern as a 70s grandpa who literally greets you with "ey oop?".

"People think I'm a miserable bastard," he notes, cheerfully, "but it's just the way me face falls." Still profoundly private, if not as hermetically sealed as a vacuum-packed length of Frankfurter, his fante-shy reticence extends not only to his personal life (his four-year relationship with It-girl/TV presenter Alexa Chung, whom he never mentions) but to insider details generally. Take the Monkeys’ Hollywood high jinks documented above: not one word of it was described by Turner. Before Q was informed by his other Monkey bandmates, Turner’s anecdotal aversion unfolded like this:

Describe the lovely villa you were in. AT: "Well... we certainly had a... good view."

Of what? AT: "Well, we were up quite high."

The downtown LA lights going on forever? AT: "I dunno. It was definitely that thing of getting a bit of sort of sunshine. Is it vitamin D? If you can get vitamin D on your record, you've got a bit of a head start. So we'd get up and drive to the studio."

What were you driving? AT: "Nothing... spectacular. But yeah, we'd drive up the studio, spend all day there and sort of, y know, get back. To be honest... we had limited time. So we spent as much time as possible kind of getting into it, like, in the studio.

So your favourite adventures were what? AT: "Well, they were really… minimal. We were working out there!"

Any nightclubs or anything, perhaps? AT: "You really want the goss 'ere, don't you?"

Yes, please. AT: "I could make some up. Nah!"

And this was on the second time of asking. It's perhaps obvious: Alex Turner, one of the most prolific songwriters of his generation (four Monkeys albums and two EPs in five years, The Last Shadow Puppets side-project, a bewitching acoustic soundtrack for his actor/video director friend Richard Ayoade's feature-length debut Submarine), is dedicated only to the cause – of being the best he can possibly be. He simply remembers the songs much more than the somersaults.

Throughout 2009, Arctic Monkeys toured third album Humbug – the record mostly made in the Californian desert with Queens Of The Stone Age man-monolith Josh Homme – across the planet. While hardly some cranium-blistering opus, its heavier sonic meanderings considerably slowed the Arctic Monkeys' live sets and on 23 August 2009, Q watched them headline the Lowlands Festival, Holland and witnessed a hitherto unthinkable sight – swathes of perplexed Monkeys fans trudging away from the stage. With the sludge rock mood matching their cascading dude-rock hair it seemed obvious: they'd smoked way too much outrageously strong weed in the desert.

"Heheheh, yeah," responds Turner, unperturbed. "That's your theory. You probably weren't alone."

Back in the Strongroom Bar, Turner's arm is now nonchalantly draped along the back of a beaten-up brown leather sofa. He ponders his band's somewhat contrary reputation…

"I think starting the headline set at Reading with a cover of a Nick Cave tune perhaps was a bit contrary. D'youknowhat Imean?! But to be honest, that summer, at those festivals, we had a great time. And I know some fans enjoyed those sets 10 times more. And you can't just do, y’know, another Mardy Bum or whatever. Because how could you, really?"

With Humbug, notes Turner, "I went into corners I hadn't before, because I needed to see what were there," but by spring 2010 he wanted their fourth album to be "more song-based" and less lyrically "removed". He was "organised this time", studied "the good songwriters" (from Nick Cave, The Byrds and Leonard Cohen to country colossi Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline), discovered "the other three strings" on his guitar, and wrote 12 songs through the spring and summer of 2010, mostly in the fourth-floor New York flat he shared with Chung before the couple moved back to London late last summer (the New York MTV show It's On With Alexa Chung was cancelled after two seasons). The result: major-key melodies, harmonised singing and classic song structures.

At the same time he revisited the opposite extreme: bands such as Black Sabbath and The Stooges ("we wanted a few wig-outs as well"); he was also still heavily influenced by the oil-thick grinder rock of Josh Homme, who is clearly now a permanent Monkeys hero. After four months' rehearsals in London, on 8 January the Monkeys relocated to LA for five swift weeks of production and Homme came to visit, singing backing vocals on All My Own Stunts. Tequila was involved.

"Tequila is probably me favourite," manages Turner, by way of an anecdote. "But it takes a certain climate... It's not the same... in the rain. Yeah. [Looks to be contemplating a lyric] Tequila in the rain."

Vocally, he developed the caramel richness first unveiled on The Last Shadow Puppets' Scott Walker-esque The Age Of The Understatement, finding a crooner's vibrato. "Everything before was so tight,” he notes, clutching his neck. "Probably just through nerves. That's just not there any more." Suck It and See contains at least four of the most glittering, sing-along, world-class pop songs (and obvious singles) of Arctic Monkeys' career: the towering, clanging She's Thunderstorms, the summertime stunner The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala, the heavenly harmonised title track and the Echo & The Bunnymen-esque jangly pop of closer That's Where You're Wrong.

Elsewhere, in typically contrary "fashion", there's preposterous head-banger bedlam (Brick By Brick, the rollicking faux-heavy rock download they released in March "just for fun", featuring vocals by Helders; Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair, and Library Pictures). News arrives that the first single proper will be Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair. Q is perplexed. Brilliantly titled, certainly, but arriving after Brick By Brick, the new album will appear to the planet as some comedy pastiche metal album for 12-year-old boys.

You've got all these colossal, summery, indie-pop classics and you've gone for... The Chair? AT: [Laughing uproariously] "The Chair! I'm now calling it The Chair, that's cool. Well for once it weren't even our suggestion. It was Laurence's (Bell, Domino label boss). And I were, Fucking too right! He's awesome. It'd be good to get a bit of fucking rock'n'roll out there, won't it? It's riffs. It's loud. It's funny."

If you don't release The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala as a single I'm going round Domino to kick Laurence's "awesome" butt. AT: "I think it'll be the next one!"

The record's title, meanwhile, could've been more enigmatically original than the un-loved phrase Suck It and See. The band, struggling with ideas due to the opposing sonic moods, invented an inspiration-conjuring ruse: to think of new names for effects pedals in the style of Tom Wolfe, Turner being long enamoured with the American author's legendarily psychedelic books The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, "cos that just sounds awesome".

"There's the Big Muff pedal," he elaborates, "That’s the classic. I've got the Valve Slapper. And there's the Tube Screamer. So we came up with the Thunder Suckle Fuzz Canyon. And… wait till I assemble it in me mind… em… it'll come to me… The Blonde-O-Sonic Shimmer Trap. So we were going for summat like that."

A wasted opportunity?

"Nah. Because some of those things ended up in the lyrics anyway. Suck It and See was just easier."

Alex Turner, rock'n'roll's premier descriptive art-poet, still writes his lyrics long-hand in spiral-bound notebooks. "Writing lyrics is a craft that I've practised a bit now," he avers. "In me notebook it looks like sums. Theories. There's words and arrows going everywhere. There's always a few possibilities and I write the word 'OR' in a square."

For our most celebrated colloquial sketch-writer of the everyday observation (all betting pencils, boy slags and ice-cream van aggravations) the more successful he becomes, the less he orbits the ordinary. "I'm not struggling with that, to be honest," he decides. "In fact I'm enjoying writing lyrics much more than I did. Stories. Describing a picture. Um. There's quite a bit of weather and time in this one. Which is probably not reassuring. 'Oh God, he's writing about the weather.' Maybe leave that out!"

There are also some direct, funny, romantic observations: "That's not a skirt, girl, that's a sawn-off shotgun/And I only hope you've got it aimed at me..." (from the title track).

Some of your romantic quips, now, must be about Alexa. AT: "Right. Yeah. Definitely. Well... there's always been that side to our songs, when we weren't writing about... the fucking taxi rank. It's kind of inevitably... people you're with." [At the mention of Chung's name, Turner is visibly aggrieved, head sliding into his neck, terrapin-esque indeed.]

It must have been very grounding being in a proper relationship through all this madness. Because if you weren't, girls would be jumping all over your head. AT: "Em. Hmn. Well, of course that helps you to... I don't really know.. what the other way would be."

Does Alexa wonder if the lyrics are about her? AT: "Oh there's none of that. Yeah, no, there's no looking over the shoulder."

She must be curious, at least. "Maybe."

Did you ever watch Popworld? AT: [Nervous laughter] "Em! Now and again."

Did you ever see the episode where she helps Paul McCartney write a song about shoes? AT: "Ah, yeah I think so, maybe I did see that."

Well, if I was you, I'd have been thinking, "She's the one for me." AT: "Well. Yeah... maybe that would've... sealed the deal! Hmn. But maybe that wasn't when i got the ray of light. When was? Nah [buries head in hands]. I might have to go for a cigarette..."

Q can't torture him any more and joins him for a snout. Turner smokes Camels from a crumpled, sad, soft-pack and resembles a teenager again. As early song You Probably Couldn't See For The Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me says, "Never tenser/Could all go a bit Frank Spencer…”

In January 2006, when Arctic Monkeys' Number 1 album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not became the fastest-selling debut in UK history, inadvertently redefining the concept of autonomy and further imploding the decimated music industry (& wasn't their idea to be "the MySpace band", it was their fans': the Monkeys merely kick-started viral marketing by giving away demos at gigs), the 19- and 20-year-old Monkeys were terrible at fame. They weren't so much insurrectionary teenage upstarts as teenage innocents culturally traumatised by the peak-era fame democracy.

To their generation (born in the mid-'80s) fame was now synonymous with some-twat-off-the-telly a world of foaming tabloid hysteria where renown and celebrity meant, in fact, you were talentless. Hence their interview diffidence and receiving awards via videos dressed up as the Wizard OfOz and the Village People. Which only, ironically, made them even more celebrated and famous. (“That were a product of us just trying to hold onto the reins," thinks Turner today. "Being uncooperative.")

Q meets The Other Three one morning at 11am, in the well-appointed, empty bar of the Bethnal Green, Bast London hotel they're staying in (all three live in Sheffield, with their girlfriends, in their own homes). First to arrive is the industrious, sensible and cheerful Helders, crunching into a hangover-curing green apple. He has recovered from last year's boxing accident at the gym, which left his broken arm requiring a fitted plate. Now impressively purple-scarred, the break felt "interesting" and the doctor couldn't resist the one-armed drummer jest: "D'you like Def Leppard?"

Currently enjoying an enduring bromance with Diddy, he still doesn't feel famous, "it just doesn't feel that real, there's no paparazzi waiting for me to trip up." He and Turner, during the four-month rehearsals last year, became an accomplished roast dinner cooking duo for the band. "I reckon we could have us our own cookbook," he beams. "Pictures of us stirring, with a whisk."

O'Malley, an agreeable, twinkly-eyed 25-year-old with a strikingly deep voice and a winningly huge smile, is still coyly embarrassed by the interview process. A replacement for the departed original bass player Andy Nicholson in May 2006, he went from Asda shelf-filler to Glastonbury headliner in 13 months and still finds the Monkeys "a massive adventure". His life in Sheffield is profoundly normal – he's delighted that his new home since last October has an open-hearth fireplace: "Me parents had electric bars." He has also discovered cooking. “I’m just a pretty shit-hot housewife, most of the time," he smiles. "I cook stews, fish combinations, curries, chillies. I made a beef pho noodle soup the other day, Vietnamese, I surprised meself, had some mates round for that."

Recently, at his dad's 50th birthday bash, the party band, made up of family and friends, insisted he join them onstage "for ...The Dancefloor. So I were up there [mimes playing bass, all sheepish] and it were the wrong pitch, they didn't know the words or 'owt, going, Makin eyes... er..." He has no extra-curricular musical ambitions. "I'm happy just playing bass," he smiles. "I've never had the skill of doing songs meself. It'd be shit!"

Cook, 25, is still spectacularly embarrassed by the interview process. He perches upright, with a fixed nervous smile, newly shorn of the beard and ponytail he sported in LA: "Rockin' a pone, yeah, because I could get away with it." With his classic preppy haircut and dapper green military coat (from London's swish department store, Liberty), he looks like a handsome '40s film star. (Turner deems Cook "the band heartbreaker" and had a word with him post-LA: "I said to him, Come on, mate, you've got to get that beard shaved off. Get the girls back into us. Shift some posters.")

His life in Sheffield is also profoundly normal. He still plays Sunday League football with his local pub team, The Pack Horse FC (position, left back), remains in his long-term relationship with page-three-model-turned-make-up-artist Katie Downes and "potters about" at home, refusing to describe said home, "cos I'll get burgled".

A tiler by trade, he always vowed, should the Monkeys sign a deal, that he'd throw his trowel in a Sheffield river on his last day of work. "I never did fling me trowel," he confirms. "Probably still in me shed." He's never considered what his band represents to his generation. "I'd go insane thinking about it, I'm pretty good at not thinking about it… Oh God. I'm terrible at this!"

Back in the Strongroom Bar, Alex Turner is cloudily describing his everyday life. "I just keep meself to meself," he confounds. He mostly stays indoors and his perfect night in with Alexa is "watching loads of Sopranos. And doing roast dinners".

No longer spindle-limbed, he attends a gym and has handsomely well-defined arms – "You have to look after yourself."

Suddenly, Crying Lightning from Humbug rumbles over the bar stereo. "Wow. How about that? I was quite happy the other morning cos Brick By Brick were on the round-up goals on Soccer AM. It's still exciting when that happens. It was like Brick By Brick is real."

He spends his days writing music, "listening to records", and recommends Blues Run The Game by doomed '60s minstrel Jackson C Frank ("who's that lass?... Laura Marling, she did a cover recently), a simple, acoustic, deep and regretful stunner about missing someone on the road.

Lyrically, he cites as an example of greatness the Nick Cave B-side Little Empty Boat [from ‘97 single Into My Arms ], a comically sinister paean to a sexual power struggle: "Your knowledge is impressive and your argument is good/But I am the resurrection babe and you're standing on my foot."

"I need a hobby," he suddenly decides. "I'd like to learn another language." Since his mum is a German teacher (his dad teaches music), surely he can speak some German? "I know how to ask somebody if they've had fun at Christmas." Go on, then. "Nah!"

Where Turner's creative gifts stem from remains a contemporary rock'n'roll mystery; he became a fledgling songwriter at 16, after the gift of a guitar at Christmas from his parents. An only child, did his folks, perhaps, foresee artistic greatness? "I doubt it!" he balks. "Cos I didn't. I wasn't... a show kid." Like the others, he doesn't analyse the past, or the future.

"You can't constantly be thinking about what's happened," he reasons, "it's just about getting on with it." The elaborate pinky ring he now constantly wears, however, a silver, gold and ruby metal-goth corker featuring the words DEATH RAMPS is a permanent reminder of he and his best friends’ past. The Death Ramps is not only a Monkeys pseudonym and B-side to Teddy Picker, but a place they used to ride their bikes in Sheffield as kids.

"Up in the woods near where we lived," he nods. "Just little hills. But when you're eight years old they're death ramps." The ring was custom made by a friend of his, who runs top-end rock'n'roll jewellery emporium The Great Frog near London's Carnaby Street. Ask Turner why he thinks the chase between his writing and speaking eloquence is quite so mesmerisingly vast and he attempts a theory.

"Well, writing isn't the same as speaking," he muses. "Not for me. I seem to struggle more and more with... conversation. Talking onstage... I can't do it any more. Hmn. I'll have to work on that."

The ever-helpful Helders has a better theory.

"Since he's been writing songs," he ponders, “It seems like he’s always thinking about that. So even when he’s talking to you now, he’s thinking about the next thing that rhymes with a word. Even when he’s driving. We joke he’s a bad driver, his focus is never 100 per cent on what he’s doing. Which is good for us cos it means he’s got another 12 songs up his sleeve. I think music must be the easiest way for him to be concise and get everything out. Otherwise his head would explode.”

The Shoreditch.com photo studios, 18 March. Alex Turner, today, is more ethereally distracted than ever, transfixed by the studio iPod, playing Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, a version of I’d Rather Go Blind. Occasionally, he’ll completely lose his conversational thread, “Um. I’ve dropped a stitch.”

The first to arrive for Q’s photoshoot, he greets his incoming bandmates with enormous hugs (and also hugs them goodbye). Today, Q feels it’s pointless poking its pickaxe of serious enquiry further into Turner’s vacuum-packed soul and wonders if he’ll play, instead, a daft game. It’s called Popworld Questions, as first posed by someone he knows rather well.

“Oh, OK. Let’s do it,” he blinks, now perched in an empty dressing room. He then vigorously shakes his head, “Um…I’ve gotta snap back into it.”

Here, then, are some genuine “Alexa Chung on Popworld” questions (2006-2007), as originally posed to Matt Willis, Amy Winehouse, Robbie Williams, Pussycat Dolls, Kaiser Chiefs and Diddy.

Why do indie bands wear such tight jeans? AT: “Um. I supposed they do. They haven’t always. When we first were playing I was definitely in flares. You need to be quite tall to get the full effect, though. So, that's why this indie band wears such tight jeans, cos we've not got the legs for flares."

What makes you tick in the sexy department? AT: "Wow. Pass. What do I find most attractive in a woman? Something in the head? That's definitely a requirement. Well... Hmn. I'm struggling."

Tell us about all the lovely groupies. AT: "No!"

If dogs had human hands instead of paws, would you consider trying to teach them to play the piano? AT: "Absolutely. I'd teach Hey Jude."

How many plums d'you think you can comfortably fit in one hand? AT: "They're not very big. [Holds small, pale, girly hand up for inspection] It's a shame. Probably three. Diddy only managed two? Maybe not then. I can carry a lot of glasses at once, though. If they're small ones I can do four."

Are you cool? AT: "Not as much as I'd like to be. There's this clip where Clint Eastwood is on a talkshow and he gets asked, Everybody thinks of you as defining cool, what d'you think about that? And he gets his cigs out, takes one out, flicks it into his mouth, lights it and says, I have no idea what you're talking about."

Here, Turner locates his Camels soft-pack and attempts to do a Clint Eastwood. He flicks one upwards towards his mouth. And misses. Flicks another. And misses. "Third time lucky?" He misses. "I'll get it the next time." And succeeds. "Hey. Fourth time. Don't put that in! So there you go. I'm four steps away from where I wanna be."

Thank you very much for joining me here on Popworld, here's my clammy hand again. There it is, let it slip, hmmn. You can let go now. AT: "OK! Were you a Popworld fan, then? It was funny. Cool. What were we talking about, before?"

Blimey, Alex. What must you be like when you're completely stoned out of your head? AT: "Stoned? What d'you mean, cos I seem like that anyway? Yeah. A lot of people... tell me I'm a bit... dreamy. But I like the idea of that. Of being somewhere else."

Two days earlier, Turner had contemplated what he wanted from all this, in the end. Many seconds later he gave his deceptively ambitious answer.

"I just wanna write better songs," he decided. "And better lyrics. I just definitely wanna be good at it. Hmn. Yeah.”

—

RUFUS BLACK: AKA Matt Helders, on his ongoing bromance with Diddy

Matt Helders has known preposterous rap titan Diddy since they met in Miami in 2008. “He goes, Arctic Monkeys! Then he said summat about a B-side and I was like, He's not lying! I just thought, This is funny, I'm gonna go with this for a while." Last October Diddy texted Helders, suggesting he play drums with his Diddy Dirty Money band on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, to give his own drummer a day off. “I were bowling with me girifriend at the time. In Sheffield, on a Sunday." On the day of recording, says Helder, "We had a musical director. That were one of the maddest times of my life. Next day Diddy said, Why don't you just stay? Come along with me. So I went everywhere with him." Diddy had "a convoy of cars" and made sure Helders was always in his. "He'd stop his car and go, Where's Matt? You're coming with me! So I'd get in his car. Just me, him, his security, driver." Diddy, by now, had given him a pseudonym - Rufus Black. "He kept saying, I don't wanna fuck up your image. And I'm, I don't think it's gonna do me any harm!" He stayed in Diddy's spectacularly expensive hotel. Some weeks later, Helders almost returned to the Dirty Money drumstool for a gig in Glasgow. "But we were rehearsing in London. I were like, I might come, how are you getting there? And he were like, Jet. Jump on t’jet with me. But I had to stay in Bethnal Green instead.”

Love’s young dream: Diddy (left) with Helders

#arctic monkeys #alex turner #matt helders #nick o'malley #jamie cook #sias era #interview #q magazine #my image id #bands #this is such a funny interview honestly shfjwjs #self proclaimed housewife nick my beloved......#also why did the interviewer describe alex's hands as small pale and girly HELPME #btw im missing page 93 it's probabky just a photospread but yeah #i managed to find the dead links' images on vk #eye contact #not my scan

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freneticsir · 1 year

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Today I want to introduce you my Sweet Sexy Alien Queen, Isay 😌💅❤️🔥✨

WARNING: there is A LOT of text xD (they’ve got some huge lore..)

Isay is a 2.53m nonbinary (any pronouns) polyamory, demisexual, pan(romantic/sexual) Noodle from my closed species, Sirises, humanoid intersex oviparous fire magician aliens 🫶

MAIN FACTS ABOUT ISAY

4167 years old, slightly mad, altruist, survivalist, drifter, has no instinct of self-preservation, adores comforting their lovers and calling them with cute nicknames (and kinda intentionally pissing them off this way) xD Loves children and dreams to born their own child 💔 They was a good loving parent for adopted children many many times in the past 😌

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Isay’s age - is too much even for Sirises (500-2000 is norm), but due to one tragic event - Isay simply can't die, and regenerates no matter what. As a result, Isay’s memory is damaged and scattered: sometimes Isay happens to forget big parts of their life, or even who they are, what they are, and where they came from. Isay has a ‘memory-keys’ collection to keep their memory in order: a close people's photos from past + short notes, a round glasses collection including even really aged ones, and even collection of cold gun and bullets which Isay was ever wounded by xD

Isay falls in love very easily, yet is floating between demisexual/asexual ~ They don't ‘need’ intimacy, but might get interested if evolve a deep trustful relationships with someone. Isay’s sexuality depends of MANY things, including Sirise’s specific features, so, Isay’s current partner, Zack (24 y.o. human boi), is the first person who Isay got interest to try intimacy with ~ All Isay’s relationships before were platonic only ~

Isay doesn’t care about gender and is comfortable with any pronouns but prefer to be free in terms of self-representation ~ While living among humans, Isay mostly goes by he/him pronouns due to people’s perception of Isay as a male xD But there were a times when Isay was perceived as female as well, so they used she/her pronouns ~ Not a big deal for them ~

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Isay has a very tender, melodic, androgynous voice which they love to use 😎 As a voice claim I can attach this song where the singer’s voice is quite sound like Isay’s ~ But mostly I just love to change female singer voice’s pitch and imagine like that’s Isay singing xD

youtube

RANDOM FACTS ABOUT ISAY’s PERSONALITY

Isay sings whenever it's possible, and generally they is the one who would sing ‘Queen - I want to break free’ while vacuum cleaning the house, or just a random meme song as an OST for situation in which they is happened to be like if they live in a musicale xD💦 And yes, they love to rickroll ppl :D

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Isay really loves misadventures, it makes them feel at least something 💀

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Isay is good at sewing/knitting due to their clothes is MUCH prone to be ripped, burned and generally destroyed xD Also they love to knit a sweaters or scarfs for their beloved ones ~ Personally, Isay loves to be SLAY Queen, so their outfits are often quite extravagangeous 💅🔥✨

Isay is really flexible (Sirise’s feature) and good at dancing, especially pole & bellydance ~ Generally Isay is a wide range freelancer, and sometimes (among countless professions including some deadly ones) they gets hired in the clubs as a dancer ~ Isay never feels embarrassed about it or shy, moreover, they enjoying the process and feels pretty under the viewer's eyes ~

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Despite of mostly asexual lifestyle, Isay is hell good at kissing and really loves to do it ~ It soothes them and gives them dopamine in some meanings. They also love touches by the same reason ~

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Isay is a hell good shooter, but they shoot only for self-defence and avoid to hurt people (until one angsty episode break them in the story 💀) ~ Isay also likes to take away guns from ppl (and keep those as souvenirs) so they can't hurt anyone xD

Isay is GOOD at cooking and loves it, especially if cooking for their loved people ~ They’ve even written a field recipe book and proudly using it ✨ many of their recipes involve insects 😀 Sometimes Isay also gets hyperfixated on making molded cheese and herb teas and loves to go wild with experiments.. sometimes the results might end up not much s(safe)uccessful 🤪

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Isay is kinda into orange food, like, oranges, carrot etc xD

They just feel like eat orange stuff :D But in general the main point for Isay is just to have it edible because honestly Isay’s stomach can burn even trash, so, in worst times Isay can eat spoiled leftovers, wood or even sand to just suppress the hunger :D So if you feed them literally ANYTHING edible - they will much much grateful ~ But most likely they’d rather cook a dinner for everyone by themself, if you offer them some ingredients ✨

lil vid about their fav foods ~

Isay has special eyes (👁️ ͜ つ👁️)

This isn't native for Sirises and came from parasite Isay got in the past (something between Leucochloridium paradoxum & Сordyceps unilateralis). Isay removed the parasite's ‘core’, but the ‘roots’ has merged with Isay's body and changed their DNA forever 💀 Isay has a creepy-long tongue due to the same parasite 👁👄👁 The vid about parasite is in the end ~

SIRIS SPECIFIC FEATURES SHINING IN ISAY

Isay is a fire magician (can produce/control/swallow any fire), so their body temperature is higher than human’s: near 45c and might grow to hell high. When this happens - Isay ‘cries’ blood (it hurts..) due to literally boiled blood & bursted eye capillaries 💀💔

●

Isay's bodytype depends from hydration level only ~ Sirises have evolved a liquid-saving tissue instead of adipose tissue: mostly located on tail, hips, booty and boobies ~ So the more hydrated is Isay = the more they soft and curvy ~ And the less they is hydrated = the thinner. Tail wideness changes too ~

●

They purr 👁👄👁

HYPER-EMPATHY

Sirises have a feature that may be named as ‘hyper-empathy’: they can feel if a person has ‘bad’ or ‘good’ vibes towards them: friendly/hostile, likes/hates, happy/miserable, relaxed/scared etc.

Also they might adopt other's emotions or multiply their own, if they feel the same. It doesn’t depend on Sirise's will with other species (only with other Sirises) and may be much traumatic psychically. By this reason, Sirises are mostly a vegeterian specie and they won’t eat / exploit life forms which are evolved enough to feel pain and emotions. Isay follows that diet as well ~

But Isay personally - is no longer able to feel emotions by itself by the exact same reason why they have became Immortal. Generally, they needs to live among people to be able to have any feelings. So, basically, Isay is kind of empty vessel and is obligated to co-exist with humans (or other species) in a sort of symbiotic relationships. Otherwise, Isay would slowly fall into sort of catatonic state of mind for god knows how long. An opposite effect: they might get overwhelmed by people’s emotions around if those are too intense (fear / euphoria / grief / etc) - and this may cause them a mental breakdown and even seriously damage their sanity 💀

EARS

Isay's ears has a lot of nerve endings which helps Isay anticipate weather/atmosphere pressure/wind changes, and generally their ears - are their main organs in terms of their hyper-empathy ~

Due to this - their ears are VERY MUCH sensitive for someone's touches ~ It may be really pleasuring with loving person which Isay trusts, but it will be much painful with unfamiliar person which Isay doesn't trust, and especially if person has bad ‘vibes’ or is simply hostile ~ This involves any sorts of interactions: from a simple touches to injuries and works only in terms of ‘someone’s’ touches. If ears are touched by an item (hat, pillow, etc) there wouldn’t be much trouble, but if the same item touches Isay’s ears while being held by a person - then the trouble starts xD

HAIR

Isay's hair is super coarse (Siris feature) so it’s always kinda messy and spiked ~ But it becomes curly and fluffy when Isay falls in love, and SUPER curvy when Isay is aroused ~ In opposite: hair becomes straight and heavy when Isay feels unwell mentally and physically 💔

TAIL

Isay’s tail is ‘meaty’ and it’s tip can serve as additional ‘hand’ ~ Also, those fancy things on the base of the tail are not fur but fleshy soft scions which serve as liquids storage as well ~ When Isay's body is hydrated well - they're bigger, but when the body is dehydrated - they almost disappear 💦

EYES

Isay is a MONSTER because u know what??

They LOVE onion's juice!! It doesn't hurt them!! Quite the opposite: it CALMS their eyes after blood crying so Isay uses onion juice as eye drops!! And yes.. sometimes Isay smells like roasted onion.

AND THE MOST IMPORTANT

Never give them anything with caffeine 💀

Any food/drinks which contains caffeine affects on Isay's specie like heavy alcohol or drugs, so Isay have to avoid it to act sanely <:D

Also, energy drink can affect them like aphrodisiac (depends of circumstances) 👁️💦

On the other hand: no any human addictive things doesn't affect Sirises. But they will get heavily dizzy and might even black out if you smoke cigarettes near them 💀

WHOOOOSH.. I hope I didn't forget for now 🤣💦

Thank you for coming to my OC TED Talk 👁👄👁🫶❤️✨Next time I’ll tell about Isay’s polyamory family.. or Sirises! depends xD💦

As the final gesture, here is a vid about Sirises (shortly) ~

P.S.: my apologies for the wrong term I used for Sirises as an intersex specie, I was uneducated and wasn’t sure how I should call the specie which has both reproductive systems fully evolved, so I went by obviously outdated term 💀💔 but now I know 🔥

~ and a vid about Isay’s parasite ~

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dontfeeltoohot · 2 years

Note

I’d love to see Eddie’s unstifled snz, if that’s something you think he’d do. And maybe Steve’s reaction.

Love it! Here is a link to mostly what I feel like his sneezes sound like. I’m putting it here because I feel like with the way I’ve written them, they probably could be imagined in a few different ways. But this is what I hear when I think of Eddie’s unstifled sneezes.

He’s being stood up, on their anniversary. Steve huffs and looks around, feeling thoroughly put out as he waits impatiently by the IHOP just a few miles away from his place. They’ve had the whole day planned for a couple of weeks now, and he knows Eddie is aware of what day it is- they’d just seen each other last night.

Walking back over to the pay phone across from the eatery, the jock calls yet again, the third time in the past twenty seven minutes (but who’s counting). When there’s still no answer, Steve clenched his fists and yanks his car door open, letting it shut with a loud thud, ignoring the other people that are around in the parking lot. Normally he’d be worried, but right now, he’s annoyed and hungry and kind of wants to kick Eddie’s ass.

Pulling up to the Munson trailer, Steve gets out and walks straight to the door, knocking. There’s no answer. He tries again, then decides it’s worth it to use the key Eddie had given him a few months ago. Normally he wouldn’t, just to let him have his privacy. But pissed off Steve Harrington is a force to be reckoned with.

“Eddie, where the hell are you?” He says it loudly, knowing the place is definitely small enough that the guitarist will hear. Silence. And then-

“ah’Gksch’huhew! ehTCH’uhew! eh’IKstchEW!!”

Steve jumps slightly, the sneezes reverberate throughout the trailer. They sound desperate and itchy and congested, which makes Steve squirm. He’s never heard Eddie sneeze like that, and he knows he’s certain of it, he would definitely remember. There’s a sniffle that’s overwhelmingly soupy sounding, and Steve can practically see the grimace Eddie’s probably making right now.

Finally walking in further, heart beating fast, Steve makes his way down the hallway. All anger has vanished, now he’s mostly concerned and slightly turned on. In that order of course, the idea of Eddie suffering isn’t something he enjoys. Taking a few long strides, he peeks around the corner into the small back bedroom, then freezes. The first thing he notices, before even his boyfriend, is that the room is clean.

Since he’s met the guy, he’s never seen his room clean. It’s always got d&d stuff on the desk, picks and sheets of chords and notebooks full of songs written sloppily strewn about. His floor is usually the home to a least a few items of clothing, his guitar case, and a little milk carton that holds his snacks.

Now, the room looks practically spotless. All of the papers that once occupied his desk are now nowhere to be seen. His floor looks like it’s been vacuumed, hell, even the lights that are strung around the room (that sometimes remind him of the Byers house all those years ago) are no longer draped half heartedly but actually strung in a straight line with tacks.

Confused, surprised and thinking it’s almost too good to be true, Steve glances at the bed in the corner of the room- the bed that’s much comfier than his own, with pillows and blankets that are actually usable instead of stiff and scratchy. Laying there in all his beautiful, curly haired grace, is Eddie. He’s got his blankets half off, revealing his usual sweatpants and a shirt Steve’s been looking for for the past few weeks.

“heh’ItChh’uhew! ihh’Ttuhew! Ehh’KSCH’uhew!”

The twenty year old sneezes freely, not even bothering to cover. It’s possibly the hottest thing Steve’s witnessed. He’s got his right cheek smushed against one of his pillows, his left hand rubbing at his eyes in a circular motion. Another abysmally thick sniffle pulls Steve out of his turned on stupor.

“Bless you sunshine,” Steve walks over, making Eddie sit up quickly, his face contorting into utter confusion. His big brown eyes look at the clock and there’s a sharp intake of breath.

“Shit! Our date! I thought it was earlier, must have dozed off again.” He punctuates the end of the sentence with a rough scrub to his nose. His voice is thoroughly congested, his face is a little puffy, eyes red rimmed and watery. The guitarists nose is pink and quivering constantly, thin nostrils red and inflamed. “I’m so sorry Stevie.”

Steve’s heart swells and he shakes his head, slipping his sneakers off and crawling onto the bed.

“Don’t be so worried Munson,” his voice is teasing and soft, which makes Eddie deflate, grabbing his hand and lacing their fingers. “Are you okay though? You sound awful.”

Sheepishly, the older (by two months!) man nods, and Steve watches as his nose proves him wrong. His nostrils flare and he tilts his head back, eyebrows knitted together.

“I uhh…hh! I c-cleahhned, and the duhh! The dust…” Eddie waves his hand around theatrically, then his eyes flutter shut. “eh’GKTchh’ew! hihh’tGschh’uhew! ehISHh’uhe! snf! The dust…m’kinda allergic I guess.”

Brain short circuiting, Steve feels heat pooling everywhere. It’s not just that Eddie’s unstifled sneezes are hot, it’s the whole package. The unstifled sneezes, the messy hair, the talking through needing to sneeze, shrugging off his allergies. And the worst thing is that Eddie knows. Eddie knows about his...being turned on, and he’s still such a tease.

“How about we skip breakfast, ahhnd I can give you s-something behh-iXTCHH’uhew! hih’Xkktuhew! h’ahtschhuhew! better, huh killer?”

Steve surges forward, pressing his lips to Eddies, not minding the slight dampness of it, the other mans cupids bow slick with allergic mess.

“Sounds like a plan to me, sunshine.”

#my fic #em #sh #strthi #snzsteve #asks #answered

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can-of-pringles · 6 months

Text

When I'm Alone with You - Chapter 10

Rating: Gen

Warnings: None

Word Count: 1k

Summary: Copia and Silas talk more

Also Read on AO3

Note: Sorry that there's not much plot progression in this chapter, I've been sick for a while so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

June

---

“I love that we’re getting into summer now… reminds me more of home,” Silas spoke.

Silas and Copia rarely spent breaks by themselves now, taking the time to get to know each other. They had seamlessly moved from just recommending songs to talking about their lives in general; slowly opening up to each other as time moved forward.

“Well, it’s good for you. Here I am, stuck in these layers as it grows hotter.” Copia mildly grumbled to himself.

The heat was even more obvious as they were hanging out in their usual favorite outside place.

“You wouldn’t last in a Texas summer.” Silas teased.

“Maybe not all season, no, but I think I could handle a bit of it… although, actually, could we move and sit somewhere shadier?” He frowned.

“Yeah, there’s another bench close by under a big tree. Should be plenty of shade for you,”

“Thank you for understanding despite being totally immune to the sun, apparently.” Copia joked slightly.

“Hey, I never said that did I? Yeah, sometimes the summers were unbearable…” He winced. “It helped that I could go and visit my dad’s side of the family during that time. Summer here is cooler.”

Copia was finally able to relax more in the shade, although one thing he didn’t take into consideration was that now the sun wouldn’t shine on Silas and show off his eyes. He sighed, but Silas didn’t seem to notice.

“Do you miss it?” He asked. “Back home, I mean.”

Silas nodded. “Course. I like living here full-time, but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss my home country, or more accurately, my state. Do you miss Italy?”

“Yes, sometimes… I grew up in the Ministry there, so this place does feel somewhat familiar, but it’s not the same.” He glanced down.

“So… if you don’t mind me asking, have you always been really involved with… all of this?” Silas gestured vaguely.

“Yes, I was mainly raised by the Sisters of the Ministry and partially my older brother figures… mostly by Papa Emeritus the First, or Primo, as he usually preferred.” Copia chuckled shortly, remembering how Primo would repeatedly remind people to call him by his name rather than title. How long had it been since an old memory brought him happiness instead of the usual grief?

“It’s good you had them around, I’m an only child so I don’t know what it’s like growing up with siblings, although my friend Hanna and I have known each other since we were little kids and so I guess that’s the closest experience I’ll have to that,” Silas remarked.

“She’s the one that watches Blizzard, yeah?” Copia asked.

“Occasionally, she jokes and likes to say it counts as job experience. She’s a dog groomer.”

“Oh… interesting. I can’t imagine dealing with all those dogs. Not that I don’t like dogs, but I just meant it seems like a lot.” He stammered.

“I agree with you, Blizzard is work enough.” Silas chuckled. “No, seriously… he’s a crazy bundle of energy, but I love him, though.”

“He sounds like a good dog. Maybe I can meet him, eventually?” Copia asked.

Silas smiled. “Sure, as long as you’re prepared for tons of fur…” He joked.

Copia laughed, and Silas grinned at the sight.

“I promise it’s actually not that bad…” He quickly added.

“I think I can handle a little bit of dog fur… honestly, I got used to how much the Ghouls shed…” Copia sighed and shook his head.

“Right? Ugh, I have to do so much sweeping and vacuuming because of the fur! At least it’s not all the time.” Silas exclaimed. “But that’s one good thing about the summer. They’re not shedding right now,”

“You know what? You’re right, that is one good thing about summer.” He shrugged. “Also, let me clarify, I do like summer, just in lighter clothes, alright?”

Silas tried to refrain from snickering at his persistence in defending himself about the summer opinions. “Understood.”

“Yeah, I can imagine myself just relaxing at a beach house or something…” Copia sighed and closed his eyes, imagining it as a bit of sun shone on his face.

Silas had a small smile on his face. “It sounds nice.”

“Did you and your family ever go on summer vacations?” Copia looked at him.

“Well, we never went to any beach houses. When I was younger, we’d go camping and sometimes that meant near the beach.” Silas glanced down at his clasped hands, reminiscing about his childhood.

“Oh, I’ve never been camping, is it fun?” He slightly tilted his head.

Silas pressed his lips into a line. “Well… when you’re a little kid, it’s pretty fun, but once you get older, it kinda loses its charm… I got tired of it once I became a little older.”

“Oh…” Copia furrowed his brows. “Seems to me you still like being outside, though.”

“Yeah, I don’t mind spending a bit of time outside. It’s when it’s multiple days outside without a house or proper shower or bathroom… it really started to irritate my skin after a while.” He sighed and dropped the tension in his shoulders.

“I’m sorry…” He frowned.

“It’s alright, I haven’t gone camping since I was in my teens. I’ve had plenty of time to get over all the issues.” Silas smiled reassuringly. “I’m thankful my parents never pressured me into joining scouts.” He scoffed.

“Yeah, I suppose if you hated camping you’d want to avoid that,” Copia said.

“I’m guessing that the Ministry didn’t have like their own version of that or something?”

“No, just worship and the likes. Why do you ask?” He raised a brow.

Silas squinted and hummed. “I don’t know… you just seem like the scout-ish type to me… or just wanting to hang out with other kids doing one big activity together? Actually, I just realized that sounds similar to school.” He chuckled.

“I had tutors, basically homeschooled. And I sometimes would play with the other kids in the Ministry, or with my older brothers, but honestly, most of the time I was by myself…” Copia absentmindedly kicked a pebble. “I think that’s why I took such a liking to my pet rats, because we always had each other, if that makes sense.”

Silas’ expression softened. “Yeah, it makes sense. I understand being by yourself a lot… I was a pretty shy kid.”

Copia gave him a small smile. “At least we’re not by ourselves a lot now, right?”

He returned it. “Yeah, you have a point.”

“We’re together.” Copia lightly bumped his shoulder with his. “Friends, we’re friends spending time together,” he quickly added.

“Yeah, of course.” Silas smiled, not picking up on Copia’s quick correction.

“Anyway… looks like we better get back to work.” He sighed and stood up. “Don’t need Sister finding us slacking.”

Silas furrowed his brows. “We’re on break, though. We’re not ‘slacking’ as you put it.” He stood up as well, brushing off any possible stray dirt from the bench.

“I know, I know, I just meant Sister- either way… probably wouldn’t approve. Eh, you know how she is.” He fidgeted with his sleeve.

Silas shrugged. “True.”

“Walk with you back?” Copia asked.

He nodded and smiled, walking beside him.

#the band ghost #ghost band #ghost #copia x oc #silas x copia #cardinal copia #papa emeritus iv #papa copia #ghost band oc #ghost oc #silas petersson #ghost band fic #ghost band fanfic #ghost band fanfiction #the band ghost fanfiction #my writing #pringles writing

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nmzuka · 11 months

Note

3, 5, 8, 11, 23

3. Who cooks? Who cleans up? Who’s banned from the kitchen? KC does most of the cooking (Ribbon's attempts at making food are pretty pathetic ffff she tries but is just not good at it) sometimes they cook together tho so KC can at least be there to supervise/assist Ribbon when she needs (so Ribbon isn't really banned from the kitchen but def better if she is not there alone lol) cleaning up is probably a joint effort (tho I don't think Ribbon would really like dealing with dishes she probably at least helps put any leftover away tho) 5. Who does what chores? as far as basic household chores I think KC would do vacuuming and dishes (again I don't think Ribbon would like dealing with dishes? probably because she doesn't want to get food or any dirty water on her hands/ARMS) Ribbon would do dusting and laundry (easier for her to do those then for KC to with his big ole paws) 8. Do they have any favorite activities to do together? I think I've mentioned before in an ask before that I think they really enjoy just chilling together and watching movies/chatting (they both have super hectic lives so getting down time is a real treat) when they are both in the League and able to I can see them enjoying training together as well heh 11. What’s a song that describes their relationship? Or, what’s the song that they’ve deemed “their” song? this is the perfect opportunity for me to share the playlist I made for them!! specifically tho Walk with Me by Ivory Circle to me is like THE song for them (its even a duet its so perfect and I only just realized it got removed from the playlist so I'm kinda pissed about that fgfgfgf)

23. Do they like pick up lines? lol probably not? if anything they might kind of say lines like jokingly to each other and then laugh about how stupid/corny it sounds (mostly KC would be the one doing that am sure he can come up with a bunch of stupid pickup lines)

#zuka replies #ribboncobra #otp asks #tho withe the pickup lines it would be really funny #if one time Ribbon catches him totally off guard with some pickup line that is like snake based #and it just gets him rolling with laughter

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oldguy56-world · 11 months

Text

Let It Be

We have all heard the expressions 'let sleeping dogs lie' and 'don't poke the bear'. They are there as reminders that as humans we sometimes have to just leave things as they are and walk away, no matter how tempting the situation can be. There is only one instance I can think of where you cannot turn your back and walk away and that is when you have been fighting a psycho killer (who hasn't) and you take them down. Do not turn your back to make a call, hug your loved one, or anything until the job is finished because I have seen enough movies to know they don't die that easily. Suggestion: before you walk away, cut off their head, hands and feet, dowse them with some kind of fuel and set them on fire. Even then do not leave until you see there is nothing left but ashes, then vacuum up the ashes, stick a grenade in the vacuum and perhaps then you are finished.

Anyway I let that get away from me a bit. That last part has been on my mind a lot. So what are some examples of when you should just 'Let it Be'? So glad you asked.

Never think it is a good idea to pet a wolverine. I got this one from an old intern Two Finger Tony.

No matter how bad your spouse's cooking is do not mention it in public. Should you ever die from food poisoning they have plausible deniability.

Do not let your kids cuddle baby bears, lions, wolves or anything where a pissed off mother might be around. Could also apply to other kids in day care if the parents are uptight.

You are driving your car and a maniac cuts you off several times while they zig-zag through traffic. Check their plates. If the car is registered in a U.S. state odds are there is a firearm of some sort in the car. Just let it be. Odds are they have no health care and you will outlive them anyway.

You are at the grocery store and hamburger meat is 25 cents a pound but there is a greyish-green tint to it. Leave it in the bin unless your spouse has been mocking your cooking. If they have buy some, make their favorite hamburger helper recipe before going out with friends then leave. Remember: plausible deniability.

If a cop pulls you over, no matter how goofy looking they are do not comment on it. They could have one eye in the middle of their forehead, horns and a tail, but bite your tongue. You might be surprised how many extra charges they can come up with on the spot. (they will not appreciate lines like: how long have you had your 'eye' on me.)

You are driving your kid home at night and a Timmy's is just ahead. Do not get yourself something and think you are being a good parent by getting your kid something as well especially if you plan on watching anything on TV that night. Might as well just give them a full crack pipe.

If you are going out somewhere and have to bake something don't let your husband 'try one'. It is much better to have them sit home frustrated than you go out with only half of what you wanted to take. No man wants to stop at one.

There is a reason McCartney repeats the line 'Let it Be' 73 times in the song. It is a warning along with a life lesson. He should have taken his own advice and not told John that Yoko sounded like a Banshee strangling a cat when she sang. The Beatles might have had another decade together.

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK: I am not sure why it is called common sense when it appears to be so rare these days.

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saxifactumterritum · 2 years

Text

found one! Lynne calls them secret fic, cus they are secrets from me, hiding in the google docs. Here is... well... idek. Just like, get past the first paragraph hahahaha anyway I enjoyed myself reading it

Sometimes, it rains. That’s just life, really. Rain has a bad reputation, but it isn’t so awful, as long as you are dressed sensibly and can afford the right footwear and have a nice warm place to come home to. The puddles are always pretty nice, once you have the right boots on; to just carelessly walk right through the puddles, umbrella resting on a shoulder, maybe singing as you go through the wet, noisy world. People rush about and are more chaotic, it feels great to be uncaring among all of that, to laugh and look up at the sky and maybe let your face get wet, good water against your skin. Out of the crowds, away from the bustle, the noise of it falling against a metal sign, concrete pavements, stone benches, grass, is softer, lulling, rising as the rain falls harder almost like music.

“Shaotian!”

Huang Shaotian hurriedly pulls the umbrella back over his head - he’s come to a halt and turned to get more of the rain on his face, he twists back now, breaking into a run to get undercover. He pants a bit and makes a show of rushing, pretending he ran the whole way, already complaining about being wet to divert attention from his leisurely walk. His captain is standing there, arms crossed, head a tiny bit tilted to listen to Huang Shoatian. Listening carefully to all the words but the unimpressed look on his face suggests he doesn’t believe a single one of them. He looks pretty warm and dry and Huang Shaotian is pretty cold and only a bit wet, other than his hair which is a bit soaking but as long as he’s careful he can deftly slot himself in under the crossed arms and get some of that good warmth for himself, his chilled fingers tucking themselves under Yu Wenzhou’s armpits and his cold cheek, one then the other, rubbing against Yu Wenzhou’s nice soft jumper.

“It serves you right if you’re cold,” Yu Wenzhou says, making no move to hug Huang Shaotian or warm him up or anything at all. “Your umbrella is dripping on the floor, someone is going to have to clean that up, it’s inconsiderate.”

“I’ll clean it, I can do it,” Huang Shaotian promises. “I know where the cleaning staff keep their signs for the wet floors.”

“If I let you into the cleaning cupboard, our Blue Rain cleaners are going to go on strike. They wrote me a letter last time to tell me so,” Yu Wenzhou says. He sounds stern and barely even a tiny undercurrent of amusement.

“Slander. It’s lies. I didn’t do any of it,” Huang Shaotian says.

He works his way better into Yu Wenzhou’s arms and into some of his clothing too, finding warm skin, wondering if the letter was because of the incident with the ladder and the mop, or was it after he and Song Xiao got into that little tiny spot of trouble and needed all the buckets they could find? But more recently was the time with the vacuum cleaner and the monster that lives in the Blue Rain basement. Or… better to just keep quiet, he decides. Yu Wenzhou is leaning awkwardly, reaching to shake the umbrella out of the door and folding it up, leaning the other way to try and fit it into the umbrella stand nearby. Huang Shaotian holds on around his waist so they don't overbalance.

“You’re so late, you went out three hours ago. You were only going around the corner to get snacks for the team meeting, which you have now missed,” Yu Wenzhou says. “I was just deciding whether to send someone out to look for you when you came wandering back, like this, as if you were communing with water spirits, talking to the sky.”

Oh right. The snacks, the meeting, the training; his job. Huang Shaotian is a pretty diligent vice-captain, but once in a while his mind does wander off a bit. Usually one of the many alarms or reminders set up on his phone will get him back on track, but he left it somewhere today. He checks Yu Wenzhou’s pocket and sure enough, there’s his phone, picked up conscientiously and kept safe for him. He looks up into Yu Wenzhou’s face.

“I like the rain,” Huang Shaotian says. “I’ll explain how I got distracted and tell you about the bird I saw and the cats that lead me astray, and you can try on the hat I got for you. Okay? Good. I left my badge somewhere…”

“I have that too, come on, let’s go inside,” Yu Wenzhou says, heading for the security gate, swiping both their badges so they can head through and to the stairs up to the higher levels.

Down here there’s the canteen and a Starbucks, a lounge and waiting area, some of the admin offices, and the other side of all that is the guild, though people mostly come in the other entrance around the back for that. The lounge is a pretty good place to watch the rain, there are big floor to ceiling windows to look out, but the best place is at the very top of the building. There’s a staircase that must have once lead somewhere but now it just leads to a locked door hiding nothing but a cupboard. There’s a wide windowsill there that you can tuck into, and it’s right under the roof, you can hear the rain and watch it through the window and it’s high above the world. Yu Wenzhou likes it up there, too, which is a bonus; often if you go sit there, he’ll come join you.

Huang Shaotian found him up there once, years and years ago, after Wei Chen left and before they were properly friends. Yu Wenzhou had been crocheting, fish-scales working outwards in a spiral, quick and clever under his fingers, so neat and beautiful. Huang Shaotian had squeezed onto the windowsill with him and sat to watch the spiralling jellyfish come to life out of the yarn, blues fading to purples to a hint of red and then back to blue. Yu Wenzhou never asked him many questions, and sitting in silence was so much easier with him than the others. It made the others uncomfortable, but Yu Wenzhou would just talk about a strategy he’d been thinking of, or about a game they’d watched.

That day, he’d been quiet too, intent on his project, frowning. It was the first time Huang Shaotian had thought that Yu Wenzhou was upset by something. Not the yarn or the jellyfish or Huang Shaotian finding him, about something else. Huang Shaotian didn’t ask until years later, and it had taken Yu Wenzhou a while to remember that it was a comment about him using a warlock account in the hopes of taking Swoksaar from Fang Shijian. It hadn’t been the unkindest thing people had said in his hearing, and he hadn’t usually let it bother him, but that day it had got under his skin for some reason. It had been raining then, too, hard, flung against the glass they had their backs to. Huang Shaotian hadn’t known what to do, then, to make Yu Wenzhou feel better, so they just sat there miserably together.

“I kissed you here, for the first time,” Yu Wenzhou says.

Today they’re not sat apart, like back then. They’re bigger, fully-grown adults now, and they have to sit half on top of each other to fit on the sill, Yu Wenzhou’s arms around Huang Shaotian to keep him from falling off. Huang Shaotian pauses peeling the tangerine he found in his jacket, twisting to see if Yu Wenzhou is joking.

“No you didn’t,” Huang Shaotian says.

“I did. I kissed you here after we beat Tyranny for the first time and you came up here to hide because that press officer kept cutting you off in the event afterwards. You were so excited you couldn’t stop talking,” Yu Wenzhou says. “Luckily, she left not so long after that.”

“I’m not saying that didn’t happen, but it wasn’t the first time you kissed me,” Huang Shaotian says, prying a segment of orange loose and sticking it in Yu Wenzhou’s mouth to keep him from arguing. “And she didn’t ‘leave’, you meticulously and ruthlessly made sure that every one of her weaknesses and shortcomings was exposed until they realised she wasn’t good for the job. The first time you kissed me was at least a few months before that. You were drunk, but not so drunk you should have forgotten it! Captain, I’m astounded and shocked and appalled.”

“Outside the restaurant, after Manager Peng accidentally gave me too much wine, in the rain, because you looked like a drowned chihuahua. That was three weeks after I kissed you here. We were in City W, I can find the schedule for the season that year and prove that we played Thunderclap after we played Tyranny,” Yu Wenzhou says.

They bicker about it for a while, pausing now and then to listen to the rain or shut each other up with pieces of the orange. Neither of them bother to find that schedule. Neither of them really remember very clearly which came first, it doesn’t really matter, it’s just nice to think about. It’s nice to think up fun insults and it’s nice to have Yu Wenzhou threatening to do all sorts of good things in punishment for everything from lying to not doing enough brain exercises. They end up agreeing that whichever came first, rain is good for kissing in, and they set about proving that, the last of the evening light catching in Yu Wenzhou’s glasses, against the sharp line of his cheekbone, settling into him to remind Huang Shaotian just how beautiful he is.

Rain isn’t so bad at all.

#yuhuang #the king's avatar #mine

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hospitalterrorizer · 2 months

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diary163

2/24-25/2024

saturday - sunday

heard three gunshots just now.

i'm not like freaked out or whatever but i always wonder what's going on with that. i wonder i guess if it's the armed security around all the apartment complexes around here, sounds too far to be ours but near enough to be like, around here. like why do you need to fire 3 times. idk. i just feel like i guess if you're shooting a gun 3 times you're definitely trying to kill somebody, i hope nobody is being killed, especially by random security people. or maybe there doesn't need to be an especially. it's grotesque i guess to act like any death would be better, it's just a travesty in the first place that people think the security is necessary, that is an awful part stuck to all this. i think i'll basically be fine as long as i'm not wandering around at 2 am and stuff, obviously. it's most likely, i guess, just people shooting guns to shoot guns, so it's not a big deal i suppose. it's interesting, i've always been near-ish gunshots basically, but the frequency was like, a couple times a month, it wasn't uncommon but it also wasn't like, crazy, there were a few times where stuff ramped up and i'd see things like shells on my way to the school bus or to college but that didn't really phase me, i guess because more of a picture appeared by morning when i was out walking, i'd see the police cars out there, i knew who was shooting at who basically so it wasn't like, a question of why/what, and when it was at its normal rate, it just wasn't especially interesting i guess, there was more distance + it really did seem like that'd be the rate at which people just shoot randomly. like, oh, i wanna shoot my gun into the air lol, and then they go back inside. since it's closer it just punctuates more i guess, i mean it does that crazy thing where like, there's a vacuum of sound in the echo, it's not so close that it like, actually sounds like 0/nothing, but the echo carries that shape, if you know what i mean. it's also probably because i'm tired from work and stuff, my head hurts, i worked too long today, i wasn't even supposed to i just had to. it doesn't matter though, i am home now. but it's hard to go and work on music rn. i am soo tired and i only ate when i got home today, i woke up at like, 11:30-ish, and i got home and ate at about 10:40, so that's like 11 hours and ten mins of not eating (i worked from 4:30 to 10:16ish). it's kind of good i guess, to me, idk, maybe that's bad or whatever but it's not too bad to me, to not eat a lot, idk, it feels useful, like idk, i do just want to stay skinny. idk. i do eat so it's not like, very bad, it's just intermittent fasting or whatever, honest (not cope i swear not coping (lol)), it's not like that every day, i just use work to do that sometimes, esp since i need to pay to eat there and the food looks disgusting basically. it's like, idk, i kind of like going long without things. i guess it's because of being raised catholic or whatever, you get this thing where you get off on withholding things from yourself and suffering, taking on suffering, that kind of thing.

listening to the problem song now, i am certain that there's something in the low-end that needs to be eq-ed out, this weird resonance, it might be something super specific i need to eq out, if it is, that's good, i thinkk.

anyway i am really tired, i am just sitting here listening to combatwoundedveteran and feeling tired, they really made perfect music, for a certain sort of person. even if my head hurts i can listen to this shit. i just like it that much.

oh, one last thing, about reading, i've gotten to the part of cybernetic hypothesis that's about ways/methods/lines of flight (as the book puts it) that open up possibility, essentially guerilla methods, one hand is the taking pleasure in desire perversely, and then shutting one self up, volunteering nothing, they reference bartleby here with "i would prefer not to," that kind of oscillating, as well as actual references to what wider/more materially aggressive sorts of tactics might be. this kind of all coalescing around the idea that basically many cybernetic apparatuses are geared to, at extremes, manage panic, and so, panic being the nightmare of cybernetic organizing/management, we ought to open ourselves up to panic/fear in some way. i would like to articulate that better/how i read it better, but i'm just so tired. it's hard. but essentially it recalls bataille to me (who they criticize at points in the book (rightfully, as much as i love him, he is wrong in certain ways (even baudrillard has gone here and it's very fascinating))), anyway, it recalls the necessity of horror, or the experience of horror, not even necessarily in its attachment to sacrifice (which is one thing specifically criticized, the idea that sacrifice could/would be this thing that could deliver us/provide an escape from capitalism, this fantasy of pre-capital return, basically (here too is where baudrillard saw issue with bataille)), but horror as an opening up to, sensation of everything, where you absorb so much, you are sent elsewhere, you are taken out of yourself, as the book puts it, the crowd disintegrates in the crowd, we all horrified, we do not withdraw, but we exit, we exit ourselves, and then we exit sociality. here is a convergence with the carnivalesque, where the obscene and grotesque is held at such length to perturb and captivate, a stage where one might engage perversely, and then to shut up, a silence which will not tell on itself, only absorbing or even discarding everything but the intensities surrounding oneself. this is an oscillation, necessarily, sticking oneself to an oscillation of this nature means, among other things, productivity in the regular sense would be impossible, at least in terms of appraisal by our managers/meter/measures.

(there is a level where i wonder about a critique of tiqqun here, i suppose, or maybe a defense from a critique that would accuse them of being squarely reactionary here (i cannot parse what i think, but my sense that what they seek is aligned more w/ the carnivalesque and grotesque (and asking one to not turn away but embrace these rather than to embrace what wipes these away/would seek to absorb the signs/symbols of these things back into itself as defanged and speaking regularly, normalizing in a way so as to force it into discourse w/ the normal/using cybernetic apparatuses of agitation to coax these things into some kind of guilty conscience, shame, whatever) i do not think they are reactionary) i suppose i have come across my answer to this problem here in this aside, already, or at least some of the answer. i am not sure.)

another thing, i guess, is reaching this point, i see why a friend didn't like it, but i think accusing this book of being neo-luddite theory is squarely wrong + idk, she is honestly quite obsessed w/ efficiency as it is laid out in the cybernetic sense. i do like her, but her aspiration is to be a manager, in some way, a manager of flows, thought, and so on. she wants to direct. i suppose one could accuse her of desiring being an apparatus, but i don't think it's squarely true, i think she wants to want to be, is ashamed and ashamed of being ashamed of it, it's a complex, basically, i suppose.

anyway i also read this:

this was quite good, it's hard to articulate my thoughts/what it says, so i will instead talk about what i would like to absorb from it, where its end is quite strong and everything, and leaves much to think over, i think many of the historical insights it offers are the meat, or i guess they obviously are, but they can be approached from so many angles, reused, essentially he puts valuable information there, i hope to remember it. i'm not sure why this is sticking to me, this thought about what i want to learn, it's good i think, but it's also i guess kind of neurotic. i fear, very often, that i am really quite stupid. i would like to not be, i think this is just part of that. anyway, i am very glad will's writing/thinking is something i've been exposed to recently, because he is bringing me back to foucault, who i'd read in the past and learned much from, and now there is more to learn. it's just nice to be reunited i suppose, with the man.

so now i really do have to sleep, sso

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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purplesurveys · 4 months

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1795

After doing your laundry do you leave it in your basket for a couple days, then put it away?: No, I fold everything immediately so it doesn't leave a mess.

when you have a drink with ice do you usually eat all the ice before you’re done with the drink?: No. I eat/drink very slowly that when it comes to ice it usually waters down before I'm anywhere near finishing the drink.

(if you have one) do you change your ‘about me’ on your tumblr daily?: Back when I was much more active on Tumblr I changed my blog layout only once every few months. Everyday sounds so exhausting?

when you drop something do you have someone else pick it up?: It depends on a lot of things lol. Did it end up too far? Did someone else bend down much faster than I did? Usually I'll insist on doing it myself but if someone wants to help then I let them.

when you do a puzzle do you find all the edges first?: Not necessarily. If I see a piece that fits then I lock that in.

are your parents older than everyone elses?: No, I find that mine are actually relatively younger than those in my age range. It's got everything to do with birth order, since most people I know are the youngest in their family – which means their parents are a few more years ahead of mine.

when you hear about a band do you download a billion songs by them to see if you like them?: I don't really do that. I let Spotify's algorithm do its thing and from there I decide if I'm into an artist or not.

when your gum runs out of flavor do you throw it out or stick it somewhere?: I chew it for as long as I can until I find a trash bin to throw it in.

ever been stupid enough to blow in an ashtray?: No. Yikes. I've never thought about that, that sounds nasty.

do you actually get songs stuck in your head when you hear other people sing them?: If it's a really good cover then it might happen.

don’t you hate fake french?: I mean, I dislike condescending imitations of any language in general. I'm not sure if this is what this question means.

when you’re in the car, & you eat something with a wrapper, do you throw the wrapper out of the window?: That sounds horrible. How hard is it to wait til you see a trash can?

don’t you hate it when you’re vacuuming & the plug comes out of the wall?: It does sound inconvenient but I can't relate for the most part anymore as we have a wireless vacuum cleaner.

do you eat jello with a fork or a spoon?: I don't eat Jello.

when you make a drink that needs to be stirred do you just use your finger?: Hahahahah, ew. I reach for a spoon and stir.

don’t you hate when you forgot what you were going to say?: Sure.

when you go to throw something out, & you realize the garbage is almost to the ceiling, do you just try to push it down?: Sometimes.

are there never any clean cups or silverware because they’re all in you room?: Occasionally lol, it drives my mom balls to the wall crazy. Sorry mom!

(if you sleep with the tv on) what’s usually on tv when you wake up?: I sleep with YouTube on, but since I have a setting on my phone where it turns off by itself after an hour, I usually wake up with the screen off. Helps so that the battery doesn't get abused.

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allnightlongzine · 8 months

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In the Wake of Grunge, a Rock Culture Clash

Kelefa Sanneh | Jan. 26, 2006 | nytimes.com

What does mainstream American rock 'n' roll sound like in 2006? On radio stations across the country, it sounds like two things at once. Sometimes you hear the never-ending aftershocks of grunge; plenty of nth-generation alt-rock bands are still following the trail blazed by Nirvana and others. And sometimes you hear the still-burgeoning sound of emo, the sentimental punk offshoot; plenty of fresh-faced, girl-obsessed boys are finding ways to woo listeners beyond the confines of the Warped Tour. This is a culture clash that's also a musical generation gap: the 90's versus the 00's. (Sadly, it's starting to look as if the current decade will never get a pronounceable name.)

You don't hear much talk about grunge these days, yet the sounds of the 1990's have endured, along with some of that decade's most perplexing fashion statements. (For starters: wool hats, worn indoors.) The veterans persist: Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters and Audioslave (formed from the remnants of Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden) all find themselves near the top of the rock 'n' roll heap. And a horde of popular but unheralded bands continue to crank out hits by recycling the mildly disaffected sound of 90's guitar rock: Nickelback, Seether and all the rest. Right now, the Florida band Shinedown is responsible for one of the country's most popular rock songs, a vaguely Soundgardenish power ballad called "Save Me."

While neo-grunge hasn't quite gone away, emo hasn't quite arrived. In 2005, emo bands ranging from fair (Hawthorne Heights) to good (Fall Out Boy) to great (My Chemical Romance) enjoyed banner years and earned spots on rock radio playlists. But emo has yet to produce a block-busting, stadium-filling band like Creed or Linkin Park. And so instead of conquering the rock mainstream, emo bands have to share it with their more old-fashioned rivals. And because no subgenre is triumphant, mainstream rock seems a bit lifeless; there's a vacuum at the top. Not coincidentally, rock radio itself is in something of a slump. (In New York, K-Rock, 92.3 FM, recently rebranded itself a talk station, Free FM, during the week. Rock fans have to wait for "Free Rock Weekends.")

The latest emo band hoping for a blockbuster is Yellowcard, the clean-scrubbed, violin-enhanced group responsible for one of the best-selling emo CD's of all time -- which is to say, so far. The band's 2003 album, "Ocean Avenue" (Capitol), sold about 1.7 million copies, thanks mainly to the sing-along title track, which had a crunchy guitar line and a big, hopeful refrain: "If I could find you now, things would get better."

On Tuesday night Yellowcard came to Irving Plaza to celebrate the release of a new album, "Lights and Sounds" (Capitol), which suggests that the emo elite is a bit like triple-A baseball: apparently the only thing better than getting in is getting out. This is a CD meant to show that Yellowcard isn't merely an emo band, that its songs aren't merely odes to girlfriends real and imaginary. (As if there's anything wrong with any of that.) The band's singer, Ryan Key, told one interviewer, "We took the opportunity to show people that, hey, we like to make real music." Which tells you something, perhaps, about the inferiority complex that afflicts lots of emo bands.

In fact, that inferiority complex is central to the appeal of bands like Yellowcard. Compared to the brooding but swaggering men in a band like Shinedown, the members of Yellowcard seem appealingly boyish: lightweight, not heavyweight. In the howling sound of 90's rock and neo-90's rock, self-loathing is a constant. (That Shinedown song is written in the voice of an addict, begging, "Someone save me, if you will/ And take away all these pills.") But those raspy, slightly guttural voices and those swaggering guitar riffs also suggest aggression, even anger. By contrast, the music of, say, Fall Out Boy is more nasal than guttural, more awkward than angry. (Especially to anyone who's seen the music video starring a lovesick boy who is self-conscious about the antlers growing out of his head.) To listeners on either side of rock's latest generational divide, there's a big difference -- the difference of a decade -- between being a loser and being a twerp.

Among other things, "Lights and Sounds" is Yellowcard's attempt to split that difference. The violinist, Sean Mackin, has evolved into the lead string-section arranger. The band's music has gotten a bit slower and a bit more stoic. And Mr. Key is aiming for bigger themes in his lyrics, although his ambition sometimes leads him to write lines like "No one's hands are big enough to hold onto this fear." (It could be the tag line for a singularly inept horror movie.) The album includes a duet with Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks and a lame antiwar ballad, "Two Weeks From Twenty," which sounds suspiciously like Green Day; the lyrics echo the plot of the video for Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends."

Luckily, Yellowcard is still pretty good at the thing it has always been pretty good at: writing sweeping, upbeat punk-rock love songs. At Tuesday's concert, the old hits got big roars, but so did the new album's title track, which is also the soundtrack to a Verizon Wireless commercial that was shown before the set began. (This decade's bands are even less shy about corporate sponsorship than last decade's bands were.) And although the new CD had been in stores for only a few hours, some of the other new songs also seemed like surefire sing-alongs, none more than the catchy lament called "Down on My Head," which may yet convert a few Nickelback fans. (As Yellowcard's accountants surely know, that's no insult.)

In a lot of ways, these twin traditions have lots in common, starting with loud guitars and plaintive lyrics. And it may be inevitable that the distinction between 90's rock and 00's rock will eventually get blurred beyond recognition. Bands like Green Day and Weezer were singing tuneful love songs long before the current emo boom, and they're still thriving now. And the emerging Orange County band Avenged Sevenfold is succeeding by pioneering an unlikely and intriguing fusion, drawing from emo while also embracing the swaggering look and sound of 1980's metal.

You won't find anything nearly so unexpected on the Yellowcard album, though you will find a hint of the anxiety that pervades the rock mainstream these days. Listen closely and you can hear the strain of a band struggling to sound as big as its aspirations. Listen even more closely and you can hear something else: the quiet sucking sound of a rock 'n' roll vacuum, waiting -- still -- to be filled.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 26, 2006, Section E, Page 5 of the National edition with the headline: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; In the Wake of Grunge, A Rock Culture Clash.

#emo #nyt #outside

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kypossumlady · 1 year

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My goal this year is to stop demeaning myself for literally everything lol. I want to stop apologizing for being sensitive and having giant feelings. I want to stop apologizing for needing extra help sometimes. I want to get help from medical professionals without anxiously canceling every single time. I think I’m doing a good job so far. Quitting my job was a good thing for my mental health, and I’m sticking by that.

Girl crush has burnt out so fast. She got so weird, and it just aided in Tony and I feeling like she’s a giant ass red flag.

Quitting my birth control was like a 50/50 decision. On one hand the side effects that wrecked my body are gone. On the other hand, my period comes full speed and my moods are real fucking insane. I was thinking today that maybe the autism was kept semi-hidden because of (extreme masking) the hormones. Idk if that even makes sense but, still.

I don’t like talking about my autism because I feel like it makes people perceive me as attention seeking. That’s weird right? But talking about it has helped me realize so much about myself. The breakdowns I had as a kid where I would lose my absolute mind and my parents didn’t know what to do so they yelled back. (I don’t feel anything negative towards them about it. They are on the spectrum too. ) Preferring to be by myself when I played. Rocking all the time lmao. It’s so funny to think. My parents used to see me rocking in the car and they’d say “she’s just bopping”. I love/hate the fact that they didn’t know I was autistic and just thought I was quirky.

My goal this year is to move more and be outside more. My body is having a really hard time with chronic pain and I’m trying to combat it. Soft movements and stretches, resting, hydrating, listening to my body, and meds of course. Hopefully I can get my medical card for weed and it can help some too. I really don’t want to be on pain pills. I’ve not gone to the doctor for the pain I’ve felt forever because I’m scared I’ll be seen as a drug seeker. Which is silly but that’s my brain.

People tell me a lot that I’d be a good mom. And I think that’s kinda true. But the reason I don’t want kids (besides the responsibility part?) is I struggled my whole life with having giant feelings and not knowing what to do with them. They physically made me sick and made me ache. I know itd be different because I could help the kid but it seems too much. It’s just not for me.

I want to talk about the wedding more than I am. I need to get out of my head that I’m this giant burden when I’m not even talking that much.

A funny thing about my brain that I find hard to articulate is how edibles really level me out and make me functional. Sometimes it makes me chill. But I slept until 8 today, got up and chored, went back to sleep at 10, got up at 2 and went for a hike/walk, ate some lunch, napped again from 4-7, and did the barn chores. Then I ate 500mg of edibles- did a little laundry, gathered trash, vacuumed, did litterboxes, swept upstairs, and did some self care all within 2 hours. Some days I take 100mg and can function like a soccer mom on a school night, but some days like recently, it takes more just to mellow me out to function.

I want to find a way to document how my brain sounds and I have some of it saved on TikTok. Some days it’s like a crowd of people all talking at once, and while they’re talking, you hear at different times more prominent things. And during those talkings, a song is playing and it’s somehow loud. It sounds like word vomit but that’s a good way of explaining it.

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this-is-a-dystopian-parable · 1 year

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"a joy these last few weeks has been rebuilding an old piano. its good to be with the hands again, creating with solid objects, practical, working, not this ethereal creative crap of my day to day. here is sound with elmers carpenter glue and particular screwdrivers and *parts* ordered from a special website (ips, go and feel the back of a scifi pulp glee of a boy in the fifties), parts that come special delivery, oh mailday bliss oh, and such beautiful names: backcheck, jack, flange, punchings, bushings, action felt. the action: the entire inside of the piano, the wriggly wood combo that connects key to string, times 88, is all called the action, the action. action felt, yes it is. and i repairing, regulating, soon to tune and voice as well, these small meticulous tasks tingle from fingertip to lip to slip deep within and counter the wild leaf blown world on the surface, where all is blown into a delirious and borderless leaving me reeling, groundless skyless heartless clueless. thank you these simple moving parts who ground me with their physical logic.

today while placing a screw small in a place smaller i saw my grandfather grin back at me from the within the row of hammer shanks that are the pillars of the piano actions architecture; there his face roaming the single alleys of doweled wood, his head floating through and smiling at my clumsy fingers, fingers supple to ease the art out of this instrument but nevertheless too fat when dealing with the small crevices between damper spoons and flanges. i think he gets it, i think he really does; that all this above the wood is whirl and curl and just so much wind...my heart may pound furiously in the midst, but all that passion and stress in the end is over air, timeshadows though an ever moving sunbeam gone so soon...rn reminded me after our understudy crisis in 'cabaret' that our profession, the theater, is so bizarre in its hyperbole; its a fucking play. its a fucking play, its a fucking song - - and then: its a fucking feeling, its a fucking heart. its not the ground beneath my feet, the wood and felt and brass and strings wound tight held together with screws too small and elmers carpenter glue too rich.

the actions that i perform are truth; they are what i do, and what i do is who i am. the action is the inside of the piano, its the diamond not the box. action, act; ive been acting, so strange; its causing me to lose my sense of truth. which is dangerous for an artist, where the subjective truth is the only objective ground one can count on; so much truer to me always has been "this song is right" than anything else true untrue. yesterday i was on the phone with a lady/wall trying to get a credit card charge reversed (the free trial for "entertainment rewards" coming back to haunt me. though i did get a free ticketmaster ticket out of it) and i decided to act kind of crazy. ive done that before. but if im acting crazy, im crazy. if im conscious of my actions, am i acting? is that all it is? is it only acting if its not true, or only not true if its acting? but now leaves blowing detour whirlwind are a bit much sometimes, there is something in my eyes, i cant see myself,

science math and physics, elmersglue, thats true, its true. so just hold on to that, and let the rest fall where it may. i think ive learned in my old age (the third decade has caused many changes in me, amongst them purchase of health insurance and a vacuum cleaner) to stop trying to force truth; if its there it will and if not it will not. on the surface just simple wood felt brass glue hold it together hold it hold it together. layers of three a red onion gossamer peel around my egg hard boiled.

my heart is only so much, under the action a subsurface secret truth that even i am not allowed to know."

Pointless - Dave Malloy, 21 February 2006

#pointless dave malloy #another one i think about often #there's a lot in here it's just a lot #oh dave malloy you pretentious artist you

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tiikerikani · 2 years

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Last week I wrote (elsewhere):

for all the emphasis that finnish discussions around occupational health and psychology place on 'recovery' after work and on holidays, people sure don't like to be proactive about making sure people actually get that rest and listening to people when they say it's not working out for them.

i just wish people would believe me when i'm like this ??? i'm not making shit up just to be a drama queen???? i just so desperately need somebody to actually LISTEN TO ME rather than making up their own interpretations of why i feel so goddamn tired and sick of everything all the time

...

because i am like barely a functional human being right now and i'm also burning all my money grasping at things to feed my psychological needs at the expense of my physical needs (also burning money for that, because i can seldom put my mind on eating anymore so i get ready-to-eat and restaurant stuff instead of cooking) and i don't want to be like this

...

looking forward to seeing senpai helps me count the days but he can't fix this

He got the "barely a functional human being right now" message. (He was already familiar with my overall situation, which helps.) I hate that you kind of have to play mind games to get the help you know you need without bringing up the suggestion directly. So, like, you have to make things sound as serious as possible without outright lying about it.

It seems to be a usual thing, that when medical professionals know they're dealing with matters stemming from anxiety/mood (rather than something more...concrete like, for example, lack of sleep), they ask the patient "what do you think would help you right now". Sometimes I don't have an answer for that. But I had one now, especially because I had just had this very unsatisfying summer vacation: to spend time more like how I did over Christmas; it wasn't without its own worries and burdens, but I was at least able to get a modicum of enjoyment out of that time. (OK there was also waiting for The Mail keeping me in a hype loop but I didn't mention that.)

So now I have the rest of this week and next week off. Fortunately I'd only been back from vacation for 2 days so it hasn't been long enough to completely undo what little recovery effects there were from the last 2 weeks. It's not going to fix everything but should give me more time to feel like I've had SOME kind of a vacation.

I didn't go to bed again until like 3:30 AM, but I woke up at I think 10:30? I had forgotten to switch my alarms off so I had to be semi-awake to turn those off. I haven't done the thing for a while where I put the radio on when I wake up, so I did that, and a Vesterinen song came on a couple of songs later, so that was my signal to get out of bed.

So far today I've accomplished:

Taking my first shower in... at least a week? (I was not at all exaggerating about being a barely functional human being. I am just very good at intuitively hiding it outside of home.) I had a nice title for this post while in the shower but I've since forgotten it.

Applying spray fixative to a cloth-bound hardcover book that has metallic foil on it. It was rubbing off really badly already when I received it, and I've been keeping it in a bag. The fixative leaves an ever-so-slight cloudiness on the black cloth but you don't really really notice it. I'm keeping the book in the bag anyway.

Cooked and ate pasta

Messed around with making silicone molds and casting resin bases for miniature figures, the sanding and polish of which led me to

Vacuuming the dang apartment for the first time in I don't know how many months

(I think I) fixed a speaker cable

But most importantly, doing these things not feeling like I have to climb out of a well to do them. (Having to force yourself to do your hobbies kind of defeats the purpose of them.)

#personal #mental health #senpai can't fix this

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ryukyuusu · 2 years

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cara del sol 0.2

Home. She could see home. The little split-level one up on the ridge, with the shin-height bare concrete shelf separating the tiny entryway and kitchen from the tiny dining room. They stayed there the longest, almost eight years. Every few days, En or her parents would hear a thud and a yelp coming from the front of the house as one of them smacked their leg into it. They'd smile and joke about it.

Warm orange light pouring in through the steel bars that crossed the front window. Little knick-knacks garnishing the bare walls from whatever discarded or makeshift furniture that her parents could find. Dad was always coming home with junk. It'd pile up in a corner until he had a free day, then it'd vanish like magic, and all the junk would reappear somewhere else. The wobbly table would suddenly have a new leg. The fridge would rattle less and stay colder longer in between blackouts.

Mom would cobble together sheets and covers out of spare fabric, and at times their little house was quite colorful. But it would come and go- good fabric was expensive, and Dad would repurpose her shoddy threadwork to mend clothes or make socks. Sewing was just a hobby to Mom, but Dad was a wizard at it, as he was at everything else relating to tinkering.

Mom would complain about him to her friends as they all sat around the dining room table, smoking and playing dominos or mahjong or whatever tile-based game was in fashion at the time. "That lousy motherfucker, all he wants to do is take shit apart. I have to fight him every night to keep him away from my shit, otherwise I wake up and my hairdryer is a vacuum pump."

Then she'd laugh. "I mean, look at this table. He built this out of half a bike and a sofa without the stuffing. Two weeks, he was at it, keeping me up all night!" She'd thump the table, making sure the sound was full and solid. "The top is some kind of wall paneling he lugged a mile up the hill from a recycling dump in Johnson. And the space heater, there! That was an oven before! Oh, the mess he made when he brought home that beast!"

And so she'd go on, making sure to bring up every little thing that her husband had made or fixed. She was more proud of his work than he was. Dad didn't brag much. He was a stone wall to everyone else, but with her he was butter. Sometimes En would walk in in them dancing to slow songs. She would always slip away quietly, feeling like she had stumbled in on something too intimate to be decent.

She could smell chlorine. The house was upwind of the CleanCo plant, and in the summer the winds in the valley would blow the white plumes that always crowned the stacks right into their neighborhood. The single little window they had overlooking the slope stayed shut tight, and a thick green film obscured it over the years. It cast a lovely light, at the right time of day. It was the right time of day.

But she couldn't be here, because there wasn't a here anymore. It was gone even before the camp was. She'd watched as they blasted and bulldozed the whole neighborhood down. She and Abul would smoke cigarettes outside that shitty little office they had in Chitown, up the ridge a bit, and make small talk while they watched industrial drones carrying construction equipment to and from the site like polite little worker bees.

They built a control board fabricator here. Which meant there wasn't a home to be in. Which meant she couldn't be there.

So, where was she?

Somewhere a thousand miles away from her, something tiny vibrated. She could feel it just behind her ear, but she couldn't hear a thing.

That was bad, but En couldn't remember why. Then she couldn't even remember what it was that made her try to remember. Then she wondered why her hand was up at her neck. She was grasping something with metal fingers. She brought it around to her face and opened her hand, but there was nothing. Just the dull gray of aging medical plastic.

It was the sight she was used to, but looking at it inspired a resentful suspicion she couldn't explain. She turned her hand around. Black plastic crinkled and stretched around the joint gaps of her fingers; the smooth ball at the wrist rolled perfectly well, save for the few familiar problem spots.

But it couldn't be in this house- it only came later. And this house couldn't be here, so neither could En. Suspicion turned to panic, and something vibrated in her ear.

Trap. The word hurtled into her consciousness, sent with shock and awe by some primal part of her lizard brain. The arm was a trap. The house was a trap. She looked back at the familiar walls, but she couldn't focus on them; they were vague and faded like the spots that bright lights leave when you close your eyes. Something was pulling her. The room slid slowly, sickeningly, out of perception, taking space and time with it.

She was left in the void. The sudden lack of sensation bled the stress out of her, and the panic subdued. She remembered memory and then remembered everything. The spot behind her was still pulsing, and now she could hear a low hum in her ear.

It was psuedosensation, an automatic message warning her of dangerous neural activity. For the thousandth time, En felt grateful she hadn't gone for a cheap antivirus. Probably the best decision she had ever made, even if it hurt at the time. One of her middle fingers twitched, then her pinky and thumb. The system log came up under her eyes.

She had to hand it to the sysadmin- their vector was clever. It could only affect people with extensive write-capable wetwork, and it only worked if the foreign agent was inspecting a huge volume of traffic with a syntactic engine instead of rendering it in a session. It wouldn't even execute unless the user had extremely lax regulations on neurotransmitter management, just so it wouldn't fry the brain of some college kid who came by with dreams of being a whitehat and started sniffing traffic.

In other words, it was made specifically to target scanners like her. Corporate work. Inspired corporate work, maybe, but still just corporate work. A less discriminating barrier with more bite than just dream sequence injection would be a better defense, but the lawyers would never give the go-ahead. En had sympathy for the poor pigeon stool who managed to put together halfway decent protection under corporate restrictions, but not enough to stop her from finishing what she came for.

Less than fifteen seconds had passed since the dreamhack started; her protein payload remained intact and her vitals were running fine, save for a little overheating. She pulsed back out to the dummy box and the virtual machine GUI filled her view, everything else frozen in just barely transparent slides behind it. Most of the instances were returning compromised, but a collision mismatch script was coming back promising. She subbed into it and started adding to the script, fingers twitching to fly through context menus and corrections.

In the infinite distance, a massive cube hung in a minute lattice of I/O ports, white lines spinning off of it and terminating at indeterminate points. She clicked in closer and it was suddenly filling her view, a monolith towering over her- stubborn, offensive. She set her deck to process the scripts she had put together in her head.

A hit, then another. Thin rays of light shot into the cube, twisting this way and that as it wormed through invisible geometry. She tuned into the passing spoofs and copied their seed. The white lines that girdled the cube began to shift and rearrange, some of them growing in definition, others disappearing from sight. One range of ports in particular began to twist with enthusiasm, jumping to stretch themselves out towards her. En smiled and sent the payload that matched the protocol they were responding to.

The cube flew through her, and suddenly the world around her initialized with a crack of sensation; low resolution, but navigable. This server's operating environment was modeled after a glade. En was in a small clearing surrounded by literal process trees, sprouting branches that shivered robotically in response to a breeze that represented clock speed.

Staring through the poorly textured ground, she could see blocks of neatly arranged data trending off into perspective infinity, roots suddenly appearing and disappearing as the process trees accessed stored data. Primitive glowing spheres of what she guessed were supposed to be fruit dropped from branches of the trees to be swallowed up by the ground and written to somewhere in storage.

Somebody's pet project, for sure; probably better than staring at the inside of a cubicle all day. And whoever spent enough time on this server to make a custom rendering framework was probably going to notice her fucking around with it sooner rather than later. Little sprouts of light kept stuttering into existence underneath her feet as the server kept trying to recognize a user while being told that what it was trying to recognize wasn't there.

She reached up a hand to touch a fruit that was sprouting from the edge of a tree, and the ground flew underneath her feet to bring her to it. It plopped into her hand without weight or sound, and she loaded the data into memory. Text appeared underneath her eyes- inscrutable gibberish, a log dump for some minor process that seemed to involve hashing text. She copied the formatting and let the fruit drop from her hand; another followed it, and then a steady stream. Her spoofed logs showed up as bright scarlet blocks some forty branches into the data structure beneath her feet, and they rapidly grew in number. The process tree next to her shuttered and groaned as the wind picked up, its 'leaves' fluttering in a blurred mess.

The antivirus and the render might have been custom jobs, but the firmware sure wasn't, and just like every other CentCom OfficePro installation it could be tricked with simple overflow. Faced with increasingly large duplicate logs running out the allocated space, the branches of the tree reached outward, searching for new space. They reached right into her open hand, where the server had just allocated space to what it thought was the appropriate partition. Instead, it started dumping to active memory.

Now she had arbitrary execution. Her first script compiled and the resolution bloomed as she opened up a proper connection. Her second script gave her root permissions and she brought up the full storage hierarchy, the ground underneath her disappearing entirely. She flew through the root systems, semantically searching for patterns of data that matched her criteria.

A possible match- she accessed it. Blurry CCTV footage sprang into view- right car, wrong license plate. She pulled out, grabbed the next one. This one matched, but it was the wrong time and place- she already knew he came through Edinburgh. It was tagged with the reference data for the car, though, so she followed the trail, hopping from sighting to sighting until she got to the last available camera, an outdated little thing encased in a plastic bubble on a lamppost too far out of town. She watched the little caravan pull into the rusted chain link gate, then two drab security guards pulling it close.

The time was this morning. Jackpot- now time to leave. The trees were rumbling, space shifting as another user loaded into the environment. She dropped one last fruit- a little goodbye- and cut the session. The world disappeared, and she was safe at home again.

A second later, the sysadmin loaded in and checked the log. The last entry caught his eye:

ADMIN(U)091006/23062240 echo STR[Free hi-res textures can be found at www.galleriaverano.com/inventora/libre

Thanks for the memories!!]END

#writing #short stories #prose #fiction #cyberpunk

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amerrierworld · 3 years

Text

Little Songbird (pt 1)

Summary: Lady Dimitrescu becomes addicted to your voice and wants to hear you... sing some more.

Characters: Alcina Dimitrescu x fem!reader

Word Count: 1,120

Warnings: EVENTUAL SMUT (this chapter is the build-up). all the new screenshots and re8 content is giving me life and the game isn’t even released yet okay so i just need to get this out. part 2 to come after I finish and post other stuff first~

The water sloshed over the bucket’s rim with every heavy step you took up the stairs. You didn’t often venture around the Castle, usually sticking to the kitchens and the rooms you kept tidy, but you were a good cleaner, and the head housemaid needed you to do a good thorough cleaning of the main hall.

You dusted off the two knights by the fireplace and picked off beads of hardened wax from the candles that had dripped over the ornate wood of the winding staircase.

A trusty broom in your hand, you swept the tiled floor of dirt and muck, trying to overlook the obvious blood stains that you would need to scrub hard at to get off the surface.

You paused a moment, listening for any buzzing of bugs or heavy footsteps. The staff was instructed to stay quiet, to not bother the ladies of the Castle, and often you just slipped in and out, doing your duty and getting out of their way as fast as possible.

But you had heard they were out today, or at least nowhere near you. The Castle was extensive anyway, you figured you'd hear them if any of the four women did approach.

So you began to hum as you worked, methodically sweeping until the white tiles began to shine a little brighter.

The rug would need a proper vacuum later, but that wasn’t your duty this time. You wiped down the coffee table and tidied the chairs, the dust clearing away as you hummed and sang softly under your breath.

When all the loose dirt was removed you hiked up your skirt to bunch around your knees so the cold floor wasn’t as tough on you, and began scrubbing with a soaped-up brush.

The song got a little louder as you scooted around the hall, cleaning as you went. You added words as you polished the stairs, and were completely oblivious to the matriarch standing, hidden in the shadows of the balcony above, listening to your bewitching voice.

Your voice wasn’t necessarily the best, but you could hold a tune. Often when you were working nearby, Alcina would stop to take a break from work and just listen to your singing, whether or not she knew the melody.

It made her smile as you hummed and worked, not to mention that you were in fact one of the better staff they had around here, obedient and diligent. She wanted to keep you around, and so Alcina had told her daughters not to ever take you down for blood-draining in the dungeons, which made them amused, but she simply ignored their wide eyes and maniacal grins.

At least they left you alone. And right now, they were hunting on the castle grounds somewhere, and if she remembered rightly, you were also the only maid up here on this floor right now.

Something stirred deep inside Alcina and she was tempted to throw you over her shoulder, take you up to her room and lock the door until you were exhausted by her efforts.

But instead, she just wanted you nearer this time. The seduction would have to wait. You were scrubbing on the lower stairs, and she drifted down, silently. So enthralled by the mindless, rhythmic cleaning of your job and your focus on your song, you didn’t notice the Lady until the hem of a creamy dress appeared in your vision.

You shrieked and nearly fell back off the stairs at the sight of her. You stood and righted your skirts, bowing your head, the brush clutched in your head as you trembled with this sudden shock.

“G’evening, m-my lady,” you said, stepping to the side so she could get down the rest of the stairs. But she didn’t. Instead, her gloved fingers tapped the railing, and you felt her golden eyes pierce through you before sweeping along the hall, inspecting your work from where she stood.

“Good evening,” she said, her rich voice rumbling through your body, “I see you’ve done a fine job of cleaning this hall.”

“Thank you, Mistress,” you said, eyes still on the floor. Did she hear you singing? You desperately hoped not.

“I need you upstairs. Bring your bucket,” she said, before turning without another word.

You were frozen to the floor for a moment, looking up as her tall, intimidating figure turned and walked back up the stairs.

“Come along, pet,” she hummed when she noticed you weren’t following immediately. That seemed to snap you back and you hurried to bring your trusty bucket. You stayed a respectful distance behind her, shuffling quietly and trying your best to not look up at her curvaceous figure walking ahead of you. Your cheeks flamed at the thought.

You entered one of the studies that seemed to be hardly ever used, and the first thing you noticed was the smell of old blood. It was explained, obviously, by the stains of blood on the floor and rugs.

“My daughters can get a bit.. wild sometimes,” Alcina said, “do what you can to clean here. I’l just be going through some documents.”

“Of course, my lady,” you said. She walked towards the desk at the other end of the room, and you set about scrubbing down whatever surface your brush could handle. You wondered why she had to work in here as you cleaned, it was much more stressing to have her so near, scrutinizing your work.

“And hum that song you were singing down below, little songbird,” Alcina added without looking over at you. You blushed, songbird?

You were now losing focus on the cleaning at hand because you tried to keep the tremble out of your song as you tried to sound as good as possible for her, hoping you didn’t sound too terrible.

“Don’t be shy, dear,” Alcina said, “I enjoy hearing you sing.”

Your fingers shook as you gripped the brush again, this time willing yourself to do as she said, scrubbing and singing and humming and scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing. She didn’t look over at you the entire time you worked, for which you were eternally thankful.

A loud cackle and a call exclaiming ‘Mother!’ announced the three daughters had returned, probably with some poor, thrashing creature in their clutches that they had snatched from the nearby forestry.

Alcina rose from her spot and left the room, and your racing heartbeat had a moment to calm down. She had said nothing else about your singing, and didn’t indicate you had any other duties left to do after you cleaned what you could.

When Alcina came back to the study, both the smell of old blood and the sound of your voice were gone.

#alcina #alcina dimitrescu #alcina dimitrescu x reader #alcina x reader #Lady Dimitrescu #lady dimitrescu x you #lady dimitrescu x reader #resident evil #resident evil fanfic #resident evil 8 #resident evil village #wlw #merry writes

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