I Seriously Die Inside Every Time I See It. Even YouTube Channels Can Get Me Some Days.

I seriously die inside every time I see it. Even YouTube channels can get me some days.

Please, for your own safety, tell no one anything about you. Say nothing. Pretend you are a spy and any identifying information will get you killed. Because it just might.

One thing I despise about kids being uneducated about internet safety is the amount of times I’ve had to delete not just their identifying details from my page (don’t fucking tell me where you go to school), but also mine.

If you saw me at work or out and about, no you fucking didn’t.

Shut the fuck up, I’ve had death threats.

They took them. That’s all that echoed in your head. They took them.

You couldn’t believe it when you heard. Not them. Of all the many heroes and hero teams that infest your city, with their youth and enthusiasm, you couldn’t believe they managed to take your favorite hero and his civilian girlfriend. Not that the girlfriend was fooling anyone with eyes. You knew a mafia enforcer when you saw one. You’d warned him, quiet and serious as you so seldom were these days.

He’d given you the courtesy of taking you seriously. And she’d seemed to have fallen in love with the golden light of the sun as it reflected off of his golden retriever personality. (Seriously, golden retriever. He was supposed to have been a werewolf. His pack still were deeply confused as to how he’d managed to be fully from a wolf line, and he’d still ended up a damn golden retriever. You suspected either a cosmic joke, or someone somewhere in both lines had been more adventurous than was wise and the throwback genes had a damn party.) And like any dog, but especially a retriever, he hadn’t been able to stop from falling in love with her either.

She hadn’t been a high level enforcer, you forced yourself to recall as you tore through the underbelly of your city. (The city could trace your path as you sliced through it, rotten flesh and vital organs pouring out of your trail. Like a wolf, you’d opened up the guts and chewed on them as you stalked those who took them.)

You knew what everyone laughed about behind your back. They call you a washed out villain. A Cartoon. There only to be thwarted in all your schemes. A few even sneered and called you a sell out, a shill, a plant to make heroes look good. You never cared. There was even a bit of truth to it.

You started to catch fresher hints of the trail. Your city burned behind you, old wounds ripped open around new ones. No one ever stopped to think that maybe they should have been cautious about what they said around you. Most of the bodies cluttering your trial weren’t from your hands. Your mouth, yes. A decade of overheard plans and plots and then the consequences of everyone thinking you worthless has given you quite a bit of blackmail and secrets. And you’ve dumped much of it out there. You still don’t feel bad.

You found them. The boy, barely legal, dead. His girl, wrapped around him, trying in vain to keep him safe despite her own death wounds. You took them away from that place and cradled them to you. They’d been so young. Young and in love and trying to be happy. But the out of towners hadn’t cared. All they’d seen was a hero and criminal. They hadn’t seen the way she’d smiled at him. The way her Family had turned carefully blind eyes away. She had been only a low level, and he wasn’t a crime hero. He’d been the kind to rescue kittens out trees, find lost children, all the unglamorous jobs that still needed to be done. Her Family had liked them both, and hadn’t been high level in the underworld anyway. They’d been young, either something would have come of it or they’d have broken each others hearts.

You tried so hard to not let your parents’ ways win in you. You would have probably broken if not for an encounter in a park, ten years ago. Where a bundle of golden fluff had parked itself on your foot where you’d been brooding and barked you out of a bad mood. You bury them under the shade of the tree you first met him. (He’d loved that tree.)

You turn flinty eyes to the home city of the out of towners. It’s not done ripping itself to shreds yet. You fan your fingers wide to cup a voice on the breeze as the latest gossip hits your ears.

You can give a mercy stroke to hasten things along.

You’re a villain, but you typically hold back. You’re into villainy for a quick robbery, or just some laughs. But not any more. Today is the day to show them that making you mad is a BAD idea.

@wuxiaphoenix

@mxtxfanatic

Cosplay of Shen Lanzhou from Qiang JIn Jiu

[eng by me]

@wuxiaphoenix

With [确山]打铁花 (da2tie3hua1; [Queshan] struck iron fireworks), a rain of fire is created by striking molten iron into a willow branch pergola using two willow sticks (See my post about this here).

Sparks are created with 火壶 (huo3hu2) by placing burning charcoal into wire mesh onto the two sides of a bar and shaking it.

[eng by me]

first day as a small-town sherif and you discover that some of the convicts you're transporting managed to escape in the night and since the penalty for letting prisoners escape is death, and the penalty for being late because you were looking for escaped prisoners is also death, you decide to free ALL of them and go hide out in the wilderness for a bit, except the convicts are super grateful so they make you their leader and it turns out they're decent guys who were exploited by a tyrannical government, so long story short you're crowd-sourcing for a peasant uprising and would anyone like to chip in?

3650th day and due to a series of unforeseen events you are now the emperor and founder of the han dynasty.

as a knitter, you start to notice how rare it is for characters in tv shows and movies to knit correctly. from worst to best, it ranges from:

- laughably incorrect, just flinging yarn around

- knitting the most basic scarf incredibly slowly because the actor Learned How To Do It For The Role

- old lady actresses casually knitting an intricate lace pattern while doing a monologue

- gromit from wallace and gromit