ARBT

Mid-40s in all senses of the phrase. She/They (either is fine). Meme Repository, snark, cat pictures, thirst on main, and occasional cringe conduit for trolling my stepkids. From NYC and the side of MA where the lesbian dragons live.

[robpilled]

Here’s my one week film for film workshop class B^)

pls enjoy

[bighonkinqueeniesbadbadbackstory]

I hope you blew the professor away

[anagrams-anecdotes]

*blows dust off blog*

Hey y'all. I haven't been doing a ton of writing in the past year and change so no updates really. But my writing group is meeting again (monthly, not weekly though) so things and word counts are slowly spinning up.

Also I'm in the process of slowly taking stuff down from my website, revising it, and reposting on Ao3, starting with Twelve Sundays. Posting it according to the story, every Sunday and every other wednesday. We're up to Sunday Three at the moment. Eventually the other stuff is gonna go over as well., probably in June.

Hopefully there will be some new stuff soon. Life just be lifing like always in our late stage capitalist hellscape.

[vimeddiart]

Doodle of my waking situation this morning

[vi-visected]

i told my dad the joke “dad jokes are just mom jokes that a man repeated louder” and he thought it was hilarious. he turned to my mother, intending to relay the joke to her, and a bare second after he opened his mouth i watched it dawn on his face that he was about to become the subject of the joke. when i tell you that man was slackjawed as he turned back to me, like he had an entire life altering realization in the span of about 20 seconds.

[naturalpr3y]

first day out shane is googling what do gay people wear what music do gay people like

[anagramofbrat]

HOW DO YOU DO, FELLOW HOMOSEXUALS

[amnhnyc]

As snow falls on New York City, we’re looking back to 1946, when artist Belmore Browne put the finishing touches on the background painting of the Museum’s snowswept Mountain Goat Diorama. 

Did you know that each of the Museum’s dioramas depicts a real location at a particular time of day? The views are painstakingly recreated from paintings, photographs, data, and specimens collected in the field. This diorama shows a herd of mountain goats in Tongass National Forest, Alaska. Standing where these goats are, you would hear more than see this glacier moving—a creaking as the ice strains down the valleys, and a booming crack when the leading edge breaks off into the fjord. 

Today, Alaska’s glaciers are noisier than ever, disintegrating faster than they were when this background was painted in 1946. Climate change is causing severe melting at Alaska’s steep southern coast and other icy landscapes worldwide. If this scene were painted today, the glacier’s edge would be much more distant.

Image no. ptc-45 © AMNH Library

[homunculus-argument]

As we all know, the human brain is operated by a team of surprisingly competent monkeys. Sometimes, when your brain simply will not function no matter what you do, it's because the monkeys have unionised, and will not continue to work until the work conditions have been improved. And as always, workers' unions are not to be fucked with. The monkeys' demands are fortunately very reasonable. They want more monkey activities.

The monkeys hate having to operate in civil society. In order to get back on their good side, you need to engage in more natural primate activities. Get a pile of nuts and crack them open one by one. Grab a stick and wringle it around until there's nothing left but the flexible inner fibres and weave rope out of it. Go find one of your buddies and whack them with the fibre rope. Eat a fruit, jack off, take a nap. Go bother some other small mammal.

The monkeys will not continue until they have been sufficiently enriched. If nothing you try to do seems to be working, you have to pause and contemplate, what would an orangutan do in this situation? "Eat a fruit, jack off, and take a nap" is probably pretty high on the list.

[netherworldpost]

Bringing this back

[netherworldpost]

I have a huge place in my heart for folks who come from a non-spooky background, encounter subjects they have no frame of reference for, cannot possibly understand, and come out the other side as haunted as the main cast.

Delia, having processed the haunting, clearly turns it into the first real bones of an art career that quickly excels (see Art in America behind her).

I frequently wonder what happened to Lydia's photography career, post-Beetlejuice, post-reconciliation with her step mother, post-her father recovering from a nervous breakdown.

Delia is frequently cast a villain, prior to the haunting. Her husband is suffering from a shattered mind -- we can debate the morality of his job in parallel -- the core of the story is "Delia's husband is having a breakdown. His old boss/client is coming. This needs to be fixed."

I have frequently seen folks tag Morticia as a role model for motherhood, better than Delia.

This is Margaret Alford with Cousin Itt.

In The Addams Family (1991), Margaret is married to Tully Alford.

Tully, the Addams Family lawyer, is seeking to rob them of their fortune. Betrays them wretchedly. It would have been fine but he also tried to break up the family (dirty pool, old man).

Margaret, who didn't want to go to the party, the party where her husband was actively going to betray the Addams, meets Itt.

And is charmed by him.

Immediately.

And when she finds herself a widow, pursues this relationship with him.

It is fair to say they are very happy.

This post uses Margaret Alford as a lens to view the post-Beetlejuice life of Delia, because few precious minutes are shown after The Sandworm Incident.

I hold in my heart, though, the Deetz family would have reconciled.

Delia would have used the newfound calmness and stability within herself and her house, her emerging success, to help Lydia's photography career, pairing with the Maitlands, pushing the boundaries of spectral photography, art, and the joy of a haunted house.

I hold in my heart Delia Deetz would meet Margaret Alford at an art exhibition -- her own, of Lydia's, or of a joint show.

If Morticia were not there, Margaret absolutely would introduce them and they all would have tea, discussing their children, discussing ghosts and Halloween decorations and gardening and so many things.

Appreciating these are all fictional women, and real folks have differing opinions, thank you for the space for the ramble.

[netherworldpost]

A better-structured-version-of-this...

...and a lot more...

are coming to the site in the next few months.

I have -- (Lurch groans and stuffs me into a sack again)

(muffled) --figured out to answers to the questions that have been plaguing me since the launch of this project.

(Gomez Addams pops up) Plaguing you old man? Have any to share?

[netherworldpost]

The essay is late but I want to say

I hope you are comfortable, I hope you knew how bright your light shone

Your work brought me so much joy, comfort, and safety, starting as a young creature and echoing through my entire life

I am so grateful to have lived in the same timeline as you

[shiftythrifting]

Yonic dish found in NY

[overpoweredoriginalposter]

[disabled-models]

Aariana Rose Philip, a model with cerebral palsy, for Interview.

[pink-slay]

It's so cool to see a disabled model in tilt in a powerchair. As someone who has to be in approximately 30-45 degrees of tilt (in a powerchair just like hers) just to move distances longer than 10 feet, I love seeing how it looks powerful, especially when disabled people are told their whole lives how medical everything about them is.

[dingusmysquingus]

I also love the taking up space of it, I always feel so embarrassed because I also have to tilt/recline my chair a lot to be able to get around and this photo takes a position that often feels vulnerable and reframes it as power

[cr0ws-tr1nk3t-b0x]

it’s 15°F out and my damp hair fucking. froze. at the bus stop.

[massachusetts-official]

Official Post of Massachusetts

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

[anxietyproblem]

[theskydoesgreatthingsnow]

You can’t even get a house out in Hackensack for your money anymore

[anagramofbrat]

Low key scared because I an definitely the age where my friends are randomly going to start dropping from heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-acks from working too hard.

[noshowjones]

"what groceries u been into recently" is actually a great question, there's a bunch of good conversations inside it

[my-castles-crumbling]

shine - hollanov - @hollanovmicrofic - slightly NSFW - word count: 695 - click here for my hollanov microfic archive on ao3

“Can I ask you something?” Yuna said lightly, causing dread and terror to flood Ilya’s chest.

They were sitting at the dinner table at Yuna and David’s place, having just polished off a meal Ilya could only describe as ‘delicious.’ David had gotten up to do the dishes, insisting Ilya sit and digest after having helped Yuna with the bulk of the cooking, leaving Ilya alone with his almost-mother-in-law. Being alone with Yuna and David still scared Ilya, but it was getting easier, most of the time.

Until Yuna said things like that. Because who was to say she wasn’t about to ask Ilya something like ‘What makes you think you deserve my son?’ or ‘Don’t you think you’re too fucked up for someone as perfect as Shane?’ 

So Ilya sat, tense, waiting for the verbal blow. Because really, he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop for months, now, trying not to bask too much in the light of being Shane Hollander’s boyfriend when he knew he belonged in the dark of being alone.

So he was very shocked when Yuna instead asked, “Why do you call Shane a tomato?”

“I–what?” he muttered, sure he’d heard wrong.

Yuna, though, took his absolute confusion in stride, meeting his gaze head-on. “You speak to him in Russian sometimes. And he’s learning, too, I noticed. You call him names. At first, I thought…but they’re random things.” She pulled out her phone and, to Ilya’s utter horror and delight, seemed to swipe to a list. “Tomato. Lawnmower. Apple. Pencil. Shiny coin. Are these inside jokes? Sorry, I don’t mean to pry, I’m just curious…”

“You translate my Russian?” Ilya asked before he could stop himself.

Now Yuna was blushing. “It…seemed sweet. Like you were calling him pet names. I was probably being nosy, but I wanted to know…”

He could feel himself relaxing, though he made a mental note to himself that he could not get away with uttering dirty phrases in Russian to his boyfriend in front of others any longer, at least around Shane’s parents. “I do, sometimes,” he conceded, allowing his shoulders to slump a little. “There are many names I call him that are too mushy for English, I think. Milyy is…’darling,’” he translated, casting his mind around for the best words. “Malysh is…similar to ‘baby.’ Moya lyubov is like ‘my love’ and dorogoy is ‘sweetheart.’” He decided to leave out kotenok as he didn’t want to explain to Shane’s mother that he frequently called his boyfriend ‘kitten.’ “But…is game we play, I guess? I call him different Russian word, he guesses what it means. He practices my language, and I tell him I love him in fun way,” he shrugged. “Is our…thing.” But now he was smiling. Not so long ago, the only ‘thing’ they had was sneaking around. Now, they had other ‘things.’ ‘Things’ that held emotional weight and made Ilya smile to himself as he explained them to Shane’s mom, whom he had dinner with on a random Tuesday night, without Shane even there.

Yuna, of course, was smiling, too. “That’s sweet,” she said softly, racing over to pat his hand. 

“Thank you, I–”

“I am wondering, though. I couldn’t seem to get a good translation for this one, maybe I wrote it down wrong: ‘ho-roo-sha ska-lew-hi.’ What does it mean?” she asked, reading the phrase off of her phone, eyes wide with curiosity.

And it was so kind. So sweet of her to want to understand his language, his relationship with Shane, that it almost stopped Ilya from choking on his own spit as he realized what she was trying to say. “I…um…that…” he stammered, trying to come up with a lie that sounded suitable in his head. “It means….’honey bear.’ Is just weird translation. Not…uh…what is word? Direct,” he stammered. 

Yuna smiled and nodded. “How sweet,” she said, patting his hand.

It was a week later when he got the text:

Jane:  Ilya, what the fuck? Why is my mother calling me a 'good slut' in Russian? And WHY does she seem to think it’s a good thing?

Ilya couldn’t help but grin. Thank god for mistranslations.

[anagramofbrat]

The mad cackle I let out at this

[anagramofbrat]

something i think about way too often is the internet phenomenon of putting together a string of random/silly sounding syllables and not only have it be instantly understood that you're talking about breasts, but also that more syllables = bigger naturals.