et cetera and a half

fandom old hyperfixating since 2000. i collect hobbies like it's going out of style.

[artschoolglasses]

Fashion + Art

Looks from the Met Gala 2026 red carpet and the art that inspired them...

Ciara + Nefertiti Bust

Sam Smith + Erté

Cardi B + Hans Bellmer

Angela Bassett + Laura Wheeler Waring

Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo + Nike of Samothrace (Winged Victory)

Claire Foy + John Singer Sargent

Luke Evans + Tom of Finland

Rachel Zegler + Paul Delaroche

Alexi Ashe + Yves Klein

Amy Sherald + Amy Sherald

[hawberries]

“You probably won’t be happy until you’re an old man. No matter what kind of tournaments you win, you’ll never be truly satisfied. You’ll be that annoying guy who chases volleyball forever.”

[hawberries]

sometimes you just have to return to that beach in Brazil to remind yourself what joy feels like

[hawberries]

been thinking again about the parallels between hinata and oikawa lately

[hinamie]

we (still) call everything on the ice 'love'

[shitpostingkats]

Obsessed with the character of Kudo Shinchi. Imagine this smug little rich kid, ooh, he thinks he's the smartest person in the room at any given moment, he solves crime as a hobby because his parents don't give him enough attention at home and also because he really likes Sherlock Holmes. He's extremely autistic. He is vaguely aware he should have hobbies outside of murder (because Sherlock Holmes had hobbies outside of murder) so he's also a varsity player. He makes every conversation about his interests and is genuinely very confused when people find this upsetting (because one of his special interests is murder). He's a sarcastic little greasestain. He's extremely rude and abrasive. He firmly believes that all human life is worth saving. He's a niche micro celebrity. He carries himself like nothing can even touch him. He's walking around just asking to get his ass kicked. And he does. He gets his head smashed in with a lead pipe in the pilot episode of the show in which he is the main character.

[ransomflanagan]

OSCAR ISAAC as Duke Leto Atreides in DUNE (2021), dir. Denis Villeneuve

[mouseinamushroomhouse]

[mouseinamushroomhouse]

Cordelia & her boys

[brownpuffball]

Look who's running for Somerville Bike Path Mayor 2025!

[jbaileyfansite]

Jonathan Bailey through the years from IMDB [x]

[etirabys]

a particularly satisfying characterization paragraph

[etirabys]

miles vorkosigan is so deliciously annoying to his bosses who are less competent than him. he's not trying to be annoying. it's just that when he's just thinking out loud, he forgets to run the extremely unnatural mask of subordination. forgets to mask that he in fact considers them his pieces to move around. a fantastic guy

[mytly4]

Miles politely ignored this impractical outburst.

What a lovely way of saying "Ensign Miles Vorkosigan chose not to follow his superior officer's direct order, because he didn't feel like doing it." 🤣

[psqqa]

the real tragedy of the vorkosigan saga, like, the real true actual tragedy of the vorkosigan saga, is that lois mcmaster bujold wasn’t able to Predict texting back when she started it in 1986

because like, we haven’t seen enough of gregor for me to have any real sense of the miles-gregor relationship, but if i was miles, and i was in the Imperial Service, and the Emperor, he in whose name all my actions and orders are carried out, was That Guy I Grew Up With, and i had his personal number (and idk what their relationship is like but miles would have his personal number), it would just be a constant stream of BarrayApp messages like 

“nearly suffocated in a tent buried under a meter of mud For You” [hypothermia selfie]

“found a corpse in the sewer For You” [selfie with pair of boots sticking out of sewage]

“stood naked in the snow at midnight For You” [hypothermia selfie #2]

“charged with high treason For You. again.” [handcuff selfie with middle finger salute]

[umamidjezhda]

#ivan made a group chat for the three of them#it’s called vorcousingans#they all block each other at least twice a week

[lannamichaels]

this is amazing and also kyril island would be great if miles is just texting gregor the whole entire time. although knowing miles, he would not give any complaints, it would just be gregor asking aral every morning “is X normal” and aral being like “why is miles simultaneously not calling home but also pestering the emperor about his socks not being thick enough” …also but like, when miles asks ivan to spy on the secured computer for him, ivan posts screenshots of it into their whatsapp group, so when Illyan tells Gregor there’s a breach in security they need to fix, Gregor is all sagely, “yes, Ivan told me himself”. Ivan: I did not tell him? Gregor: I interpreted this as being on purpose, because otherwise you’re in trouble. Ivan: oh, right, cool, I absolutely reported the problem *thumbs up*

(Ivan, per acc, never bothers using the imperial access he has, but look, he’ll also never remember that Gregor lurks on all the group chats, so it all evens out)

[lannamichaels]

okay also now that I’ve been thinking about this for a couple minutes, the idea of Gregor Vorbarra Lurks On Group Chats has *gotten to me*. He would be on so many group chats from his time at the Academy and eventually everyone would forget he’s on them or assume he’s left them, and it’s not like he says anything to remind them, but he absolutely reads them. Not immediately, he’s got them on mute, but he’ll bring them up to look at them for breaks between other things. And so he’s so very very very up to date on high level imperial business but also the most absurd minutia of imperial business. on one of the chats, someone says “huge emergency, lives are at stake, alert the emperor, the junior officers mess on the prince serg is out of coffee!!11!!!!” and they joke around about it, nbd, and then on the next shipment, there’s extra coffee with a note that it’s courtesy of the emperor, and everyone just assumes that someone forwarded it to someone’s cousin who put it in but NO ACTUALLY the emperor takes coffee orders these days.

[kellylor]

Yes yes, but also, what about Mark? When Miles slips him that credit chit at the end of Brothers in Arms, he also gives him a wrist com with allll his contact information and also pre-added to the vorcousigans group chat. Mark mostly forgets about the chat because you have to be on the same planetary network to get updates, sending messages on a jump ship is still the only way to communicate across wormholes. But he keeps the com with him the whole time, and then when he comes to Barrayar it loads three years’ worth of backscroll and he is at first too overwhelmed and guilty to read any of it.

But at the end of Mirror Dance he finally reads through a bunch of it, and he sees how much Ivan trolls Miles, and he thinks, maybe I could do that. He still doesn’t post anything yet, and then he’s off to Beta Colony, but then he’s back for A Civil Campaign, and he starts chiming in. He gets really, really good at it, because who understands better how to press all of Miles’s buttons? Between the conspiring at the dinner party and the mutual devotion to shitposting at Miles, Ivan begins to warm up more to Mark.

[cookie-nom-nom]

okay but the group chat during the dinner party scene. Naturally, Miles, Mark, and Ivan are all furiously texting under the table and pretending they aren’t under a veneer of civility. Miles screeeching at Mark in the group chat about the butter bugs only to get hit with a ;P but also Mark’s horror of Kareen’s parents while Ivan is fuming about not having been to the Orb. Ivan making snide remarks to Miles about everything the whole time but terrified about comments on Lord Donno. Gregor is mid date important imperial meeting with Laisa and just getting pinged over and over and eventually the pair end up watching the essentially live tweeted dumpster fire. Gregor makes a mild text about if the Ma Kosti desert is nice and the entire chat explodes in a war between Miles and Mark about the butter bug sorbet.

Also after the botched proposal where the group chat is desperately trying to contact Miles and it’s this utter wall of spam that Miles pretends he can’t see (even though he checks his com regularly praying it’s a notification from Ekaterin).

After a few days and the chat dies down a little, Gregor makes a blandly formal text about hearing the dinner party was ‘eventful’ and how he would like to be invited to the next one. Everything implodes once more.

[vorbarrsultana]

i finished rereading the first four vorkosigan books (+ "the flowers of vashnoi" because ekaterin!!!), and you really have to feel for piotr vorkosigan because what a nightmare life, truly.

imagine you are born just in time for your world to be unified by dorca vorbarra and rediscovered by people from wider galaxy. things are finally looking good, for the first time in 600 years of isolation there is no more feudal infighting, and the promise of galactic medicine and technologies being available lightens everyone's perspectives. sure, your grandpa is called count pierre "le sanguinaire", but who doesn't have terrible relatives?

then you are 15, and suddenly your planet is attacked by the aggressive eugenecist space empire hell-bent on subjugating your people and turning them into disposable material for unethical genetic experiments. you flee into the mountains, away from your family, and create guerrilla forces from locals sworn to your dad, and it's really terrible for a very long time. you have no high-tech weapons and no food, you sleep in a cave in the dead of winter, and the cetagandans try everything (from carpet bombing to chemical weapons) to murder you.

but hey, at least you now have your bff ezar vorbarra, and (from the bff's words on his deathbed) it sounds like you two had so much fun between unimaginable horrors and despair, and it's not surprising, since no one really believes in death after life at 20. then the emperor makes you a general at the tender age of 22. fortunately for him, you & bff make a frighteningly competent dream-team, and the joke's on cetagandans.

then, several years later, you ask the emperor for weapons, because you still sleep on the bare cave floor, there are little resources, and every ghem on the planet is trying to murder you. he offers you the hand of his granddaughter instead, like it's some sort of twisted fairytale, but you grow to love your olivia more than anything, and the tide of war is finally turning, and you allow yourself to entertain the idea of peaceful life, and then...

the space eugenecist empire nukes your hometown, killing your mom, dad, surviving brothers, and two hundred thousand of your people. plus your bff (ezar) gets a radiation doze large enough for it to cause severe cancer thirty years later. great.

but you win! your district is in shambles, your capital is an irradiated crater, your castle is in ruins, but you win! the old dorca dies, and yuri ascends the throne, but politicking is secondary to the fact that you are alive.

yes, you are probably not entirely sane, and you've long forgotten what the peaceful times look like, but you are alive, just under 35, and your entire life is ahead of you. olivia is alive too, and ezar, and you now have three wonderful children, and the extended vorpatril-vorbarra family that hosts regular get-togethers. sure, your mom-in-law is a betan with all sorts of crazy ideas in her head, but she is not pierre vorrutyer. small mercies.

but then the new emperor goes mad, and decides to murder your entire family overnight. your brothers-in-law are gone, one of your sisters-in-law too, and all your nephews and nieces except little padma. but all of this pales in comparison to the facts that olivia is murdered, and that your heir and daughter lay dead beside her.

all you have left of her, of your house, of the family you've lost in vashnoi not a ten years ago, is aral, whom you keep by your side throughout the bloody civil war to put your bff on the throne.

but you win again. you are 43, and ezar vorbarra is now the emperor. you are responsible for the imperium's entire ground forces. you are also responsible for a severely traumatized boy of 13, and the only children you've interacted with without olivia's genle guidance were little messengers of guerilla companies.

what a mess.

[call-me-rucy]

The reunion scene in The Vor Game will live in my mind forever.

(Shoutout to my sister who, when helping me make this comic better, accurately recognized the characters as "That's the guy who wanted to get into the army, right? And that's his dad, I guess?")

[umbershift]

I made even more Vorkosigan memes

Part 1 Part 2

[mouseinamushroomhouse]