it seems like I got a little carried away...

shark | any pronouns | twentysomething | 18+ blog | you're much more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a shark

[voxtek-official]

heyyy bitches !!

can you keep a secret, just between us?~ 🥺😉

basically… it’s shark week, andd… i feel kinda bad ? like obv vox still has to make up for being the massive shit he was to us, but….. usually he’s annoying as fuck this week and this year he’s just… quiet.

sooooo, naturally, i had an AMAZING idea !!

you have until the end of his nerdy little “shark week”… so, the 27th, to share ur CUTEST shok.wav outfit ideas !!!

use the hashtag “#voxtek shark week 2026” to share *YOUR* *HAND DRAWN* (don’t fucking try me, no AI bullshit) concepts. and on the last day of shark week, my babydoll and i will look through your beautiful art and choose one very lucky sinner’s work at random to make into an actual outfit to surprise vox.

we’ll be sure to get a pic of the reveal !!

so GET TO IT. and don’t disappoint me, baby~ 😘

~ Valentino xxx

[awholeweekofjustsharks]

making it your business to persuade other people to sell their souls is, in practice, much more of a "selling your soul" behavior than the act of selling your own soul could ever be. that's the thing

[persephoneme]

advancing a new theory that all the vox fanon I don’t like is actually just elaborate misinformation spread by valentino for the bit

[awholeweekofjustsharks]

from the studio that brought you "vox is both the puppet and the puppetmaster" comes the new concept "velvette is both the witch and the witch hunter"

[fandaniel]

having a multi year long character obsession becomes like a abstract thought experiment at some point

[sapphorror]

anyway extremely specific headcanon hours but I think Vincent should've grown up with a stutter. Like, obviously he kicked it after putting in so much effort that he swung all the way to the opposite extreme of elocution becoming the basis behind his entire skillset, but there will always be that little bit of lingering childhood trauma around trying to speak in public and not being able to. which incidentally makes the muting incident so much worse but nevermind that. he's 100% convinced that the buffering, distorted speech is another of hell's extremely pointed inside jokes—like, oh, he thought he'd grown past that? that he'd never have to worry about getting so worked up he can't get words out again? that's funny. doesn't he know that no one ever really changes?

[communistkenobi]

I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting

[communistkenobi]

People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results

[joctordekyllandhistermyde]

alastor. do you understand?

[soapkaars]

Doodling a little Lucifer wing study before going to bed. I saw some interesting looking angels by Jeroen Bosch at the Accademia in Venice, and I wanted to give him similar sharp, swift-like wings

Based on the wings in this painting:

[rneliflua]

one of my favorite types of content is people who analyse low brow media with the same seriousness with which one generally uses to analyse artsy/prestige media. not cynicism, no mockery, no acting like they're above it, even if they think its bad. everything has themes even when not intended to be there, everything says something about the context in which it was made even if its not trying to, and sometimes the lack of depth betrays a different type of depth in what the media does not realize that its saying much more than the little that its saying on purpose. even if the craft is bad.

[romanceyourdemons]

i’m not going to call myself “the friend who’s too woke” or hedge around my opinion because this is my deeply considered belief: horror literature is the theater of disgust, and the disgust that drives the vast, vast majority of classic horror media from the 1890s-1940s—dracula, jekyll and hyde, king kong, nosferatu, the mummy, universal frankenstein, the wolf man, cthulhu, and more—is the exact disgust that drove the worldwide tide of violence in the 1930s and 40s, a tide that has never fully receded, and you have NO business adapting a piece of classic horror media if you aren’t willing to put in the work to identify what is portrayed as disgusting in that property and enter into some form of dialogue with it. if you don’t want your movie to be “about” race or class or gender or sexuality or ability, you’re free to choose a source material that isn’t already about that, but unluckily for you giant hypersexual apes do not exist in a vacuum

[awholeweekofjustsharks]

they should make vox host the voxtek home shopping network. for his sins

[runawaymarbles]

I've talked about this before but being a gay woman in slash fandoms always feels a little like anthropology. Every couple years fandom picks a new man they claim is so hot that he transcends sexual orientation. And he never does.

[sapphorror]

niche post for me and the small handful of people who understand my vision, but up til now I've been very conflicted about whether I think Al sees Vox as the living embodiment of everything wrong with men (predatory, entitled, comfortable abusing power but crumples like paper mache the moment you put him on the back foot) or as Basically A Woman, Really, I Mean Just Look At Him (high energy, incomprehensible, fundamentally nonthreatening but very entertainingly so). and I've decided that the real answer is that Al swings between both perspectives based on his mood with absolutely no in between and no acknowledgement at any given moment he has ever felt differently. and in this way it can be argued that Alastor was technically the first person ever to clock Vox's genderfluidity.

[alastoressays]

Cab Calloway's Straight Hair

Musicians and cultural historians discuss how Cab's hair played into his celebrity

Found a very fun little segment from PBS about Cab Calloway and the politics of hair with Alastor implications. He does do a little hair flip! It's very Calloway!

[alastoressays]

The Millie and Moxxie arc I really want next season is a "baby but not right now" arc. Too often there's a dichotomy drawn between getting an abortion and parenting but lots of people who get abortions want to parent! They just don't want to parent in this exact set of circumstances, right now. I want to see them cooing obnoxiously over baby clothes and setting up a hellish educational savings account and babyproofing their apartment and asking Stolas traumatizing questions about parenting and working through their fears mid battle and the abortion is a thirty second offhand flashback. Time delayed baby. Baby TBD.

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges