“Although it was still bright, the bite of the sun was going. As it lessened, the pull of the beach relaxed and life began to flow back into the town, sauntering under the little trees, glancing, pausing, loud with many voices, a tide obedient to the sun which in the morning drew it down to the water’s edge and in the evening let it roll back into the land again. The townspeople who, in the baked midday hours, had sat outside their shops or done their marketing or cycled busily in the half-empty streets, now withdrew once more into their shops to serve, sallow and hollow-eyed under the weak electric light, until the last postcard, the last foreign newspaper, the last pair of wooden sandals strapped with gold seemed likely to have been sold until tomorrow. Sluggishly the tide eddied past their windows, fingering shirts and beach smocks hung on outside racks, the street loud with exhausts and peremptory hooting, speeding to Rimini, to Cesenatico, to Cervia, drawing the day’s heat away from town.”
--Celia Dale, A Helping Hand
7 notes
·
View notes
being a manager sucks balls half the time but the cashier kids im in charge of trust me enough to dick around in front of me so ive been keeping a running list of the shit they say that makes me laugh randomly:
-"guys, is it cheating if you play fortnite with your ex" [4 seperate others, immediately]: "YES"
-"there must be like… infinite sentences"
-"bro what bro what the fuck bro what's that mean bro why'd you say that bro what" <distraught response to a girl randomly greeting him with 'hey there big boy' in an old timey transatlantic news reporter accent
48K notes
·
View notes
guy who's stuck in a timeloop for so long he stops wanting to leave it. guy who started out trying to escape but slowly grew used to and became comforted by the familiarity of the repeating day. guy who is no longer who he was before the timeloop. guy who is offered a way out and violently refuses it because he can't leave, doesn't want to leave. guy who escapes the timeloop by chance or force or accident and doesn't know how to live anymore. guy who keeps going through motions that don't match the situation and keeps having conversations that aren't actually occurring. guy who panics every time he realizes he can't predict the next instant. guy who left the timeloop but still lives with it.
8K notes
·
View notes
I don't know who needs to hear this, but as a creator -
I am fine with "the audience" -
downloading my fics
printing my fics
copy/pasting or screenshotting my fics
sharing your saved copy of my fics with anyone else who might want them in the unlikely but never impossible case that my fics are no longer available on ao3
making a book of my fic(s) and running your fingers across the pages while lovingly whispering my precioussss
doing these things with anything I create for fandom, such as meta, headcanons, au nonsense like 'texts from the brodinsons,' etc
I am not fine with "the audience"
doing any of the above with the purpose/intent of plagiarizing my work or passing it off as their own in any capacity
feeding my work into ai for any reason whatsoever
Save the fandom things. Preserve the fandom things. Respect the fandom things.
Enjoy the fandom things.
21K notes
·
View notes
becoming a furry nonhuman otherkin objectum genderweird relationship anarchy freak has made me immune to weird conservative whatifs. "what if people want to identify as animals" let them "what if people want to marry furniture" let them "what if-" is it hurting YOU? personally? or are you just so joyless that you can't conceive a living thinking person that isn't as repressed and deprived of whimsy as you
EDIT: Incest and pedophilia (including simulated pedophilia) don’t count because they do hurt people. I can’t believe I have to say this but things that hurt people aren’t part of the list of things that are weird but don’t hurt people.
10K notes
·
View notes
I love the idea of Tim and Bruce being the two smartest people in batfam; So they occasionally say weird things that only they can understand.
Dick, panicked: OH MY GOD! I asked Kory out. What should I do now? What if she won't like me?
Bruce: Schrödinger's cat.
Dick:
Dick: ...what?
Tim: He's saying you won't findout unless you actually try it and go on a date with her.
Dick: Aww! That's so nice. Thanks, B.
Jason: Who's Schrödinger's cat?
...
Tim, with soaked shirt:
Duke: What happened?
Tim: The driving frequency corresponded to the resonance frequency of coffee, therefore the sloshing amplitude reached its maximum.
Duke: Say what again??
Bruce: He spilled his coffee.
Duke:
Duke: ...right.
Jason: Fucking weirdos.
8K notes
·
View notes
i love my therapist but i hate being in therapy. 10 minutes before my appointment, i'm in a meeting with my boss - we discuss my artistic choices; my boss recommends i artistically choose less. 10 minutes after therapy, i wash my hair and think about everything that was said, and then i have to switch it off, like a lamp, and go back to work again.
i was on a walk the other day and someone had the perfect combination of his cologne and whatever-else. it was almost exactly his scent. i fucking hate that. after all these years, i remember that? i tell my therapist - i feel like a fucking wolf. try telling a middle-aged blonde lady. oh i scented him on the air. i'm 30, and i'm having a panic attack over something that would be a plotline in the omegaverse.
what they don't tell you about mental illness is that if you are lucky enough to survive it into adulthood; it becomes a weird slice of your life. because you do, eventually, have to build a life. i realized in a panic somewhere around 22 - oh. i don't know what i'm fucking doing, because i always assumed i'd just go ahead and die. i didn't die, and i'm grateful for that, and i'm very happy about that choice. but it does mean that i am an adult in an apartment, living with my conditions side-by-side like. oh, that's my roommate, adhd. ignore the glass, bytheway, that's ocd.
so you pick your stupid life up by the scruff of the neck and you're, like glad for it (so much laughter and light and friends you would have never thought possible, when you were in the worst of it). but it feels so strange to be dancing around these odd little microcosms, these patchwork moments of your symptoms. if you have a panic attack at night, you still need to wake up and walk the dog in the morning. if your depression is making everything boring, well, you don't have any sick days left, and a job's not really supposed to be that exciting anyway. your ocd tears out each individual leg hair, and then, an hour later, you sigh, patch up the bloody bits, and go get dinner with friends. and the life is kitten-quiet, mewling and pathetic, but it's also like - it's yours, so you're fond of it.
and it's like - you're real. so you still enjoy pushing the shopping cart really fast and then riding on the back of it down an empty aisle. and you're not, like, so sick anymore that when you accidentally drop a mug you burst into tears (except for the days you do that. which are bad). and no, you're not allowed around certain items anymore. oops! but you've learned to be good about brushing your teeth most days of the week. and yeah sometimes in the middle of the day you have a little freak-out about how fucking unfair it all is, how fucking hard, how other people can just do this without having to fucking hurt the whole time. and then you sigh and force yourself to sit down and fucking journal about it so you can tell the nice middle-aged blonde woman yeah i had a hard day but i practiced grounding. you still sometimes want to burst out of your own skin, but you force yourself to eat kind-of healthy and to take your vitamins. you let yourself chop off all your hair in the sink in a dramatic poetry of control and relief - and you also have developed good hobbies that help you move your body more frequently. you feel helplessly behind, lost in the shuffle - but you also practice gratitude, taking stock of what you have garnered. because you're trying. even if you're never gonna be normal, you have something... close enough.
and the little kitten of your life, this mangy, starlit tigercub, this thing you expected to rot so young: in your arms, it turns itself over, belly-up. exposing this new soft part, all the organs and guts. like it's saying i trust you now. you won't give me up.
14K notes
·
View notes