Text Moment - Tumblr Posts
fellow seasian user blog thing w/
an unhealthy helping of
-*- youtube fandoms
*- video games
-*- theatre & musical theatre
*- and more!
incl. specific niches such as:
* the magnus archives
* team starkid
* dave malloysicals
... to name a few
+ a few servings of my own silly art / fanart / song covers / music / writing ✨
on other silly socmed:
tumblr — (most reblogs moved to) @captents-crapola
instagram -- @capnofthecthrola
tags (for reference):
#text moment -- any cool writing, writing prompts etc. #creators moment -- any cool bts and various posts from favourite creators/artists/developers/etc. #merch moment -- self-explanatory #art moment -- self-explanatory (though mainly not incl. fanart just cus all the fanart will be in their own fandom tags anyway)
#cthrola crapola -- my nonsense textpost spams
full list of faves in the tags but some written out here cos im blur sometimes:
The Magnus Archives + Protocol, Smosh, dropout.tv (+ some Dimension 20), Dave Malloy, Joe Iconis, Undertale + Deltarune, Starkid (esp. Hatchetfield), dodie Clark, Orla Gartland, (your fave band) FIZZ…
"They're going to bury you three feet deep, because you've only ever been half a man" sounds like a raw ass line from Shakespeare or something buts actually from me yelling at my cat for stealing my sandwich while I was getting a drink.
saw three houses this weekend and dave really got me with the
"My heart broke
And then the world broke
And then my brain broke too
And I don't know which one to blame
I just know I'm not the same
I've been drifting
Drifting through the haze"
anyway if you can get to the city go see three houses to commiserate on your pandemic coping habits
every day should be like i wake up & my first thought is a beautiful idea of a fun & new activity & i spend my day accomplishing it
I am so glad it wasn't Chester reading out the statement itself- if i had to listen to all that influencer slang in Jon's monotone computer voice i wouldn't actually be able to hear anything over my own laughter
Posting this for the people who think that Tolkien's world-building was something complete and entire and finished before he started to write.
You always learn and discover your story and your world as you write. Sometimes you are just the first reader.
When I was in college, round about 2002 or so, I did a paper on hate groups that necessitated a couple of visits to Stormfront, a white supremacist website and message board. One of the pages on the site was a "children's page" operated by the child of Storrmfront's founder, which was a unique form of horrifying. But I also remember looking at a photo of the kid on the site and thinking, that poor fuckin' kid, what kind of chance did he ever have?
But it was just a paper and that was just a photo of a child I didn't know, so I turned in the paper and graduated and got on with life.
In 2016, @archwrites posted a link to an article by the Washington Post titled "The White Flight of Derek Black" (sorry about the paywall, Arch's post quotes some relevant parts here). I thought it looked like an interesting read: it was about a white supremacist named Derek Black and a group of campus activists at the school Black eventually attended, who set out to see if they could change his mind about race with radical kindness. In large part because of their work, Black eventually renounced white supremacy and became an antiracist.
And then I hit a photo in the article and gasped, because I recognized it. I'd seen the same photo on the Stormfront children's website. The kid I'd seen and pitied was grown up and had gotten out. Immensely satisfying to see.
But it was just a news story about someone I didn't even know, so I posted about how pleased I was to see it, and I got on with life again.
This morning, I woke to the news (sorry, it's the Daily Fail) that R. Derek Black, now 35, has just published a memoir, The Klansman's Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism. And in the epilogue, they come out as trans.
I can't imagine better news I could have heard about them -- that they're out, they're thriving, and they're embracing themself.
Congratulations, kid. It's a great new photo.
[ID: A recent photograph of R. Derek Black, with long curly red hair, wearing a floral collared shirt and a red cardigan, smiling for the camera.]
poor things // musings on the body (via @metamorphesque)
Ilya Kaminsky, Antonio Porchia (translation by W.S. Merwin), Warsan Shire, Porochista Khakpour, Anna Akhmatova (translated by Judith Hemschemeyer), Shruti Swamy
you don't get it. i miss batman. except not that batman, and not that guy's batman, and not that guy's batman, but this highly specific iteration of batman that coalesces after you're hundreds of batman comics deep and you figure out that everyone in your entire life has lied to you about batman this entire time. i miss that specific batman
having thick hair and going to get your hair cut is just having to listen to your hair dresser repeat over and over again how millions of people would commit despicable crimes to have your hair
Got Bones? (Printable)
Hey, I made a printable .PNG version of that “got bones” flyer if anyone wants to make a few copies to hang up in real life and cause some minor chaos around their town. Have fun, feel free to send me pics if you stick it up anywhere
Mizu, femininity, and fallen sparrows
In my last post about Mizu and Akemi, I feel like I came across as overly critical of Mizu given that Mizu is a woman who - in her own words - has to live as a man in order to go down the path of revenge.
If she is ever discovered to be female by the wrong person, she will not only be unable to complete her quest, but there's a good chance that she'll be arrested or killed.
So it makes complete sense for Mizu to distance herself as much as possible from any behavior that she feels like would make someone question her sex.
I felt so indignant toward Mizu on my first couple watchthroughs for this moment. Why couldn't Mizu bribe the woman and her child's way into the city too? If Mizu is presenting as a man, couldn't she claim to be the woman's escort?
However, this moment makes things pretty clear. Mizu knows all too well the plight of women in her society. She knows it so well that she cannot risk ever finding herself back in their position again. She helps in what little way she can - without drawing attention to herself.
Mizu is not a hero and she is not one to make of herself a martyr - she will not set herself on fire to keep others warm. There's room to argue that Mizu shouldn't prioritize her quest over people's lives, but given the collateral damage Mizu can live with in almost every episode of season 1, Mizu is simply not operating under that kind of morality at this point. ("You don't know what I've done to reach you," Mizu tells Fowler.)
And while I still feel like Mizu has an obvious and established blind spot when it comes to Akemi because of their differences in station, such that Mizu's judgment of Akemi and actions in episode 5 are the result of prejudice rather than the result of Mizu's caution, I also want to establish that Mizu is just as caged as Akemi is, despite her technically having more freedom while living as a man.
Mizu can hide her mixed race identity some of the time, and she can hide her sex almost all of the time, but being able to operate outside of her society's strict rules for women does not mean she cannot see their plight.
It does not mean she doesn't hurt for them.
Back to Mizu and collateral damage, remember that sparrow?
While Mizu is breaking into Boss Hamata's manse, she gets startled by a bird and kills it on reflex. She then cradles it in her hands - much more tenderly than we've seen Mizu treat almost anything up to this point in the season:
She then puts it in its nest, with its unhatched eggs. Almost like she's trying to make the death look natural. Or like an accident.
You see where I'm going with this.
When Mizu kills Kinuyo, Mizu lingers in the moment, holding the body tenderly:
And btw a lot of stuff about this show hit me hard, but this remains the biggest gut punch of them all for me, Mizu holding that poor girl's body close, GOD
When Mizu arranges the "scene of the crime," Kinuyo's body is delicate, birdlike. And Mizu is so shaken afterward that she gets sloppy. She's horrified at this kill to the point that she can't bring herself to take another innocent life - the boy who rats her out.
MIZU'S ONE MOMENT OF SOFTNESS AND MERCY, COMING ON THE HEELS OF HER NEEDING TO KILL A GIRL TO SPARE HER THE WORST FATE THAT THIS RIGID SOCIETY HAS TO OFFER WOMEN, AND TO SPARE A BROTHEL FULL OF INNOCENT WOMEN WHO ARE THE CASTOFFS OF SOCIETY, NEARLY RESULTS IN ALL OF THEIR DEATHS
No wonder Mizu is as stoic and cold as she is.
And no wonder Mizu has no patience for Akemi whatsoever right before the terrible reveal and the fight breaks out:
Speaking of Akemi - guess who else is compared to a bird!
The plumage is more colorful, a bit flashier. But a bird is a bird.
And, uh
Yeah.
I like to think that Mizu killing the sparrow is not only foreshadowing for what she must do to Kinuyo, but is also a representation of the choice she makes on Akemi's behalf. She decides to cage the bird because she believes the bird is "better off." Better off caged than... dead.
But because Mizu doesn't know Akemi or her situation, she of course doesn't realize that the bird is fated to die if it is caged and sent back home.
Mizu is clearly not happy, or pleased, or satisfied by allowing Akemi to be dragged back to her father:
But softness and mercy haven't gotten Mizu anywhere good, recently.
There is so much tragedy layered into Mizu's character, and it includes the things she has to witness and the choices she makes - or believes she has to make - involving women, when she herself can skirt around a lot of what her society throws at women. Although, I do believe that it comes at the cost of a part of Mizu's soul.
After all, I'm gonna be haunted for the rest of this show by Mizu's very first prayer in episode 1:
"LET" her die. Because as Ringo points out, she doesn't "know how" to die.
Kind of like another bird in this show:
the point of art is not to be great but to make it transparently obvious that there is something wrong with you
i got this new anime plot. basically theres this high school girl except shes got huge boobs. i mean some serious honkers. a real set of badonkers. packin some dobonhonkeros. massive dohoonkabhankoloos. big old tonhongerekoogers
so apparently Minecraft did this thing where people submitted their own builds to be made into steel structures that would be used to regrow coral in coral reefs, and one of the ones that got selected is a fishwolf, so now there is an actual physical minecraft wolf mermaid hybrid at the bottom of the ocean saving the coral reefs and i am living
(full video here btw)
You, a heroic paladin have successfully slain a fearsome dragon. But the dragon warns you that death is but a door, and dragons don’t die, they reincarnate. You paid it no mind….until your son was born with golden, slitted eyes.
“Love Song” by Jordan Bolton
My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is now available to pre-order! Get it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky