[angelltheninth]

"We want more complex female characters" you can't even handle an angry, grieving daughter who just had her mother killed by her future wife's sister, shut the fuck up

[aicodraws]

happy Pride!

[clatzstoriesphoto]

Jodie Comer for WWD, 2026

[agoraphobe]

[alicent-florent]

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo — photographed by Dana Scruggs for The New York Times

[takereveng3]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[jamjoob]

So there's this game called Tomodachi Life. & well. It's gone triple platinum in my house

[misselesava]

victoria pedretti ⇾ forbidden fruits (2006)

[just-your-average-shiz-student]

Artwork by the amazingly talented Paiges_of_Art.

It’s always fun to see how the original Wizard of Oz canon converges with the Wicked canon on material made by fans. Glinda having a harem of beautiful women sounds just like a big power move in and of itself in the L. Frank Baum books’; the queer undertones (or overtones, I’d say) are obvious and fun. However, once you try to fit it into the Wicked canon, knowing that Elphaba is the love of Glinda’s life and her “the one that got away”, it feels the tiniest bit less like a power move and more like a desperate coping mechanism and extreme case of overcompensating. Glinda can have all the women of Oz in her bed, but none of them will ever be the one her heart truly yearns for.

[ellewantsrevenge]

aadam jacobs's archive

[saturnvs]

i hear the wind across the plain a sound so strong, that calls my name

[havingapoemwithyou]

poem by Langston Hughes

[la-mombey]

Favorite gelphie moments in Wicked part 1

1. The flashback after No One Mourns the Wicked

It says a lot that when Glinda, our narrator, mind you, is asked whether they were really friends, her brain immediately goes to the Ozdust dance, the hand touch, and the poppy field scene lit like the final five minutes of a period romance.

And the way she looks at Elphaba there? That’s not the face of someone remembering a casual friendship. That’s admiration at the very least, and in my professional opinion, yearning.

The flashback feels less like “we were friends” and more like being trapped inside the mind of someone remembering the love of her life and trying very hard to call it something else.

2. What Is This Feeling?

The way this song is framed, and the lyrics that go with it, make it very clear that whatever they’re feeling here, it’s absolutely not loathing.

I’m sorry, but pulse rushing, head reeling, face flushing, and a strange exhilaration are not symptoms of hatred. Those are the side effects of having a crush.

Which is why the whole song is pretty funny. And pretty gay.

3. The Ozdust

The visuals, the music, the way they seem to forget everyone around them the second they really start dancing together... need I say more?

And then they just… leave together after the dance. To do what, exactly? Go smooch behind the club? Sadly, we’ll never know. What we do know is that they really didn’t seem to care about anyone else in that moment.

4. Popular and scenes around it

There are so many moments in and around Popular that feel like the air is quietly crackling between them. You can see it in the way they look at each other, the little smiles.

And some of the framing is doing a lot of work too. The shot where they’re lying on the bed just looking at each other for a moment is filmed with such deliberate intimacy that it’s hard not to read it as charged.

Or when Glinda takes off Elphie’s glasses and has a full-on “oh no, she’s hot” experience?

Because sure, the official purpose of the scene is “let’s see what can be done about the glasses,” but that’s not what her face is giving at all. Her face is giving sudden attraction followed by immediate internal crisis.

The fact that she even seems to need a moment to literally collect herself after putting the glasses back on is very telling.

And last but not least, the “Why, Miss Elphaba, look at you. You’re beautiful” part.

Which honestly requires very little commentary, because their faces say it all.

5. You could’ve picked me

Yes, this is a deleted scene, but it’s one of my favorite gay moments, so I’m including it anyway. I also do think there’s a very real chance it got cut for being a little too gay.

At first, Glinda seems jealous because Elphaba ran off with her boyfriend. But then the scene takes a sharp turn into “wait, is she actually upset because Elphaba didn’t run off with her?” Which, I’m sorry, says a lot.

Also, as a bonus, we get a little sexy smirk from Elphaba here when she takes off her coat:

Plus a very “need me, want me, love me” deer-eyed look from Glinda:

All in all, this was a super gay moment.

6. Train to the Emerald City

I mean, just look at the heart eyes they’re giving each other here.

And then there’s Glinda’s note: “I hope you’ll get what your heart desires.” Elphaba’s immediate response is to invite Glinda to come with her, which is, of course, extremely subtle and not revealing at all.

The deleted train scenes also have a few touchy-feely moments, which I’m including here because why the hell wouldn’t I.

The way they’re practically glued to each other, you’d assume there was only one bench thingy to sit on.

Well, no.

There’s more than enough space, but these two clearly have no interest in putting any actual distance between themselves for more than a minute. Gay.

7. EC and the Palace

Hands touch, eyes meet... repeatedly. For what feels like the entirety of One Short Day and beyond, these two are basically holding hands and looking at each other like this is all going very well for them.

And while the Wizard puts on his Sentimental Man bs and the lights dim low, Glinda scoots closer to Elphaba for reasons only her lesbian ass knows.

8. Together we’re unlimited

There’s just something about the two of them running from guards and fighting them off together that gives me adventure-movie vibes. You know, the kind where the protagonist and the love interest get thrown into danger together and come out of it even more in love than before.

And finally, there’s that brief moment where it genuinely looks like they might leave together, and the lyrics are literally giving us “together we’re unlimited” and “just you and I defying gravity.”

That puts the two of them in this very exclusive little world that feels reserved for them alone. For one moment, the vibe is: I don’t need anyone else as long as I have you.

And that’s incredibly romantic. And very, very gay.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So those were my favorite gelphie moments from part 1. See you again when I inevitably return to do this all over for part 2.

[ava-deb]

CYNTHIA ERIVO & ARIANA GRANDE RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars: S10E07

[sakurabraches]

wicked the novel doesn't really have an equivalent of the ozdust. the closest thing would probably be the caprice in the pines incident. unlike the musical, galinda isn't the one to play a prank on elphaba. instead, galinda's friends (who don't actually seem to like her that much and have clocked her pathetic gay ass) write a fake letter to elphie from 'galinda' inviting her up to the summer house they're all staying at. and this letter basically is just a really poorly written booty call begging elphie to come up 'for reasons i dare not write.' elphaba is initially skeptical of it--book galinda is canonically a very good, polished writer because that's how she won her scholarship to shiz--but eventually decides to go at boq's insistence. elphie frames this as her doing a favor for boq and only going because he has a crush on galinda, but i think this is very much her just not wanting to let her feelings show and hiding her feelings for galinda behind boq's. so she pulls up to caprice in the pines with boq and avaric only for galinda to freak out when she arrives and make it clear she doesn't want elphie there, while her friends laugh at elphie falling for their trick. and it's just important to me that everyone understands that the ozdust evolved from elphaba getting baited by the promise of gay sex with galinda and falling for it hook line and sinker

[kiras-monkey-bum-face]

rest in peace a league of their own (2022) you would have loved and deserved the same treatment the gay ice hockey show is getting

[starpeace]

i love when tragedies are like “the love was there. it didnt change anything. it didnt save anyone. there were just too many forces against it. but it still matters that the love was there”