I finally pulled the plug on this piece I that have been thinking about since I saw the sundelion in TotK for @zeldaelmo “Just After Midnight” 1000 followers prompt. We all know that Silent Princesses are Zelda’s flowers and after seeing the Sundelion, they immediately became Link’s flower in my mind.
I will say, I got majorly stuck after doing the Silent Princess because it came out just the way I wanted it to and it felt like it was all going down hill from there but I am honestly happy with how it turned out as a whole. I also had quite a bit of fun adding in some constellations to the sky and trying to make them as natural as possible.
For those of you who aren't familiar, I live in an exceptionally flammable part of the United States, and despite the fact that every goddamn year multiple parts of my state catch fire, destroy homes and kill people, the local assholes insist on getting drunk and setting fire to a bunch of illegal explosives anyway.
In 2023, God granted me a Miracle that prevented my house from burning down.
Last year, I had to resort to Psychological and Chemical Warfare to keep the patriotic arsonists at bay.
This year is apparently An Important Birthday for the clusterfuck we have the nerve to call a nation, so despite the fact there is so much smoke in the air that the sun has literally been blood red for the last week, the pyrotechnic fetishists are out in force.
Last year, I hit upon the concept that if my neighbors were going to act like problem animals, it would make sense to use the management techniques on them that you might use on say, a Bear that was doing serious property damage. Thusly, I created The Stench, a nontoxic but FOUL smelling concoction that I could discretely spray around the flammable gatherings and render the area extremely uncomfortable to occupy for the rest of the night, forcing them to give up or move on.
If this seems harsh:
There is no story from 2024 because a grass fire was started by fireworks less than 12 miles from me and the high winds put me in the evacuation zone in under an hour.
Over fifty people lost their homes.
Errant fireworks burning my house down is a very real possibility, and I pay the price in anxiety and insurance premiums.
The Stench is noxious but harmless, and also very effective at building a buffer zone around my home. But sneaking up to parties on foot in this heat is both exhausting and nerve-wracking. There have to be more effective ways to do this
-And there is!
It involves Weeds and Business Cards :)
All of this spring, I've been battling Bindweed and my City Code Enforcement Officers.
The city code people have been professional, but the truth is that one of my neighbors is calling them on use because one of my housemates is transgender. It's extremely grating to get these notices, having to explain repeatedly that I *AM* working on the weed situation, I just have a heart condition and No Money. It's also deeply paranoia-inducing to know that the city is regularly coming by and photographing my house.
The Solution to the Bindweed is 1 gallon of high-concentration vinegar, half a cup of Borax, a quarter cup of salt, and a couple tablespoons of dish soap. Get one of those weed sprayers from a hardware store and mix it up in there. Spray it on your thistles, bindweed, kudzu, garlic mustard or whatever your local herbaceous invasive is on a day with bright sunlight, and in a few hours the entire part of the plant above the soil is Deceased. It's non-toxic to insects, pets and wildlife (just wait a few months before trying to plant anything in the area for the traces to wash out).
The only real downside to this stuff is that it smells HEINOUS.
Sure, The Stench is nauseating, but WeedFucker 5000 is genuinely painful to inhale. Again, it wont hurt people- even my asthmatic housemates can use the stuff- but boy howdy it sure smells toxic. I've got the ingredients for about 40 gallons of WeedFucker 5000 prepared and ready to go.
I've also got a disposable hazmat suit, rubber boots and gloves, respirator, goggles and a shitty little golf cart from the free section of craigslist to haul my shit around in.
I also have Business Cards!
See, the very nice officers from the City Code department left some Very Nice business cards so that I may contact them about "the fucking bindweed is gone, get off my back".
So I scanned the business card into my computer, fired up Clip Studio, and made my own business cards. I've turned my City's Abstract Triangle Logo into an Eye of Providence and the slogan of "E Pluribus Unum" to "E Plurbis Anus", Changed my city's name to a dumb pun, and stated the card originates from "The Department Of Public Nuisances".
Crucially, where the name and contact information of the real city employee has been replaced with the name and business email of the neighbor who has been bragging on facebook about calling the city code department on my home because he hates my housemate :)
It looks, at a glance, very much like the business cards of city employees. If you look at it for like 5 seconds though, there's no way it could be mistaken for the real thing.
I've printed out 500 of these bad boys and will have them on hand as I, a put-upon employee, am forced to work overtime on a national holiday doing weed mitigation, because my boss can't manage deadlines for shit.
You're mad about it? I've been out here since 5 AM! But if we don't finish by the deadline we lose the contract and I could get fired. You know what the economy is.
Here, this is my Boss's Business card- how about you send him an email about how this has ruined your barbecue?
It's golden hour now, so I'm Suiting Up and preparing to embark on some civil service in the form of Noxious Weed Eradication, and by coincidence, Fire Mitigation.
I'll report back later Tonight🫡
(If you'd like to support your local disabled storyteller in their Acts Of Public Service, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or supporting me on Patreon)
Well.
It's not quite an hour into July 5th.
I am very tired, may have destroyed my sense of smell, and am not sure if I'm proud of or VERY disappointed in my fellow citizens.
On one hand: FAR fewer fireworks parties this year!
- Only nine to last year's thirteen
- three of them had the good sense to be firing their recreational explosives out over the local reservoir
- That's far from foolproof
- and really bad for the fish
- also y'all are RIGHT NEXT to where the Bald Eagles are nesting
- but congratulations on at least attempting some risk mitigation!
On the other hand.
Absolutely NOBODY questioned why the hell I was out spraying weeds.
- In a Hazmat Suit (technically it's a coverall for painting rooms, which is much more breathable, but looks the part)
- In a Residential Area
- After Dark
- On a Federal Holiday
Like I'm glad I didn't get into a fight or something, but like.
I was Ready.
I had that conversation locked and loaded.
I MADE BUSINESS CARDS.
...But instead of Very Reasonably asking What The Fuck I Was Doing, the crowds at these parties saw me (5'0" flat, potato-shaped, sweating profusely) trundling up on the slowest and least-intimidating motor vehicle in the county*, hanging a bit out the side to spray thistles and bindweed on the streets and sidewalks**, and instead of raising a rival stink, I was instead greeted by some derisive muttering and a couple of "OH COME ON!"s, but the groups dispersed and retreated indoors or at least away from the general direction of my home.
*Like genuinely, I think Barbie's Dream Car has more horsepower than this golf cart. This thing doesn't have horsepower. It doesn't even have ponypower. It's running on duckpower. It waddles, something I didn't know a wheeled vehicle could do.
**Actually completely legal and a welcome community service in my city. Thank you Neighbor Barbara for telling me the exact part of city code that details what civilians are allowed to do about weeds on public roads, which is apparently "LOTS". Theoretically I could bill the city for my time tonight.
Do people not know how to Make A Scene anymore?
I was absolutely sure I was going to get filmed and shit thrown at me, or someone would call the cops. My beloved was terrified I was going to get shot. I at least had ONE woman shout "YOU'RE RUINING EVERYTHING!" at me, which isn't quite as good as being told I'm ruining Christmas, but she said it with a genuinely heartwarming anguish while gesturing to a homemade "HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!!" banner, with an attempt at rendering The Evil Orange that as so enthusiastically yet talentlessly executed I almost stopped to get a picture of it. He looked like he'd been put in a wafflemaker.
I promised my beloved that I would turn around and come home at midnight, and I did, having eliminated every fireworks party and Scottish thistle in a five-block radius despite the lackadaisical maximum speed of my Steel Steed.
The complete lack of protest is honestly shocking to me. My flabbers are completely gasted. I waddled home on the golf cart in a sort of stunned silence that this HAS worked so well. The whole world is almost eerily quiet, and reeking of vinegar.
...Which is maybe why I didn't notice the cop pulling up beside me at a red light until he rolled down his window and leaned out at me.
"WHAT'RE YOU DOIN'?" He asked, in a voice that could be used as a foghorn in emergencies.
I probably would have jumped were I not currently melting into a semblance of the Chernobyl Elephant's Foot in the heat, which was the first thing that saved me.
The second was the voice of my Grandfather, coming to my aid through decades of generational memory, to tell me his words of wisdom, usually spoken right before doing something wildly inadvisable:
The Age Of Miracles Is Not Yet Over.
"Weed Mitigation!" I called back.
"CHRIST ON A BIKE, THEY GOT YOU GUYS WORKING THE HOLIDAY TOO?" He said, in the same fontissimo as before. Apparently Officer Foghorn just talks like this.
"Yep." I nodded.
"SHIT." He blared in solidarity. "WHEN DO YOU GET OFF?"
"Just finished."
"MOTHERFUCKER. THEY GOT ME OUT HERE UNTIL GODDAMN 5 AM." Officer Foghorn whined in THX.
"Shit." I commiserated.
The light turned green.
"ALRIGHT YOU GET HOME SAFE! GOD BLESS!" He waved, and drove off at something significantly above the speed limit, and I trundled on home.
I must have still looked shocked when I came in, because My Beloved immediately got up to hug me and ask if I was alright.
"The Age Of Miracles Is Not Yet Over." I nodded slowly as the animals all battered me about the legs for attention. "...For real though, absolutely nothing happened."
"What?" he squints, wobbling slightly as Charlie tries to shove him aside for better access to me. "That's... Is it weird to say I'm almost disappointed?"
"I mean, I confirmed that I inherited my Grandfather's supernatural ability to get out of trouble for no good reason, but we knew that from the code enforcement people." I shrugged. Selene finally noticed the smell of vinegar and retched in disapproval.
"How about a shower and some Ice cream?" My Beloved suggests.
So now it is July the 5th.
- My house is not ablaze
- There are four medium-sized carnivores sleeping on me
- I am freshly bathed
- and I have a pint of Americone Dream all to myself
Here's to you, your health and your happiness, and a reminder to go make good trouble. Goodnight all.
---
(If you enjoy reading about my adventures (and the occasional curious non-adventure) I'd appreciate it if you could tip me on Ko-Fi. Apparently my Patreon link is fucked but it's basically 1 in the morning and I can't be arsed.)
Al and Ed's dynamic is so funny bc Edward's got such a complex about being the older one even tho the difference is by one year and he thinks himself a single mother of one raising Al by himself and he needs to protect his little baby brother at all costs then Alphonse is like holding Ed's leash and telling him no when he barks/lunges at passers-by and is making sure he gets his rabies shots and doesn't die doing something stupid also protecting him at all costs etc
like this sentence from the introduction alone is fucking crazy. “approximately half of adults in the united states think that torture can be acceptable in counterterrorism.” what!
not to make this important post about my brain worms but this paper actually discusses captain america: the winter soldier at some length
in the appendix (which you can find by scrolling down) CA:TWS is listed as having one torture scene, which immediately made me wonder because there are two that I can think of.
further on in the appendix when the authors are discussing the criteria for including torture, they give the vault scene in CA:TWS as an example of a scene that isn't torture, with the justification that Bucky seems to comply with his captors, and given the information shown on screen we can't conclude whether or not Bucky is a willing participant in the "wipe." Willing participants cannot be tortured, therefore the vault scene is not counted as torture
That is a WILD take on that scene. "doesn't fight back" does not equal "not being tortured" come on now
now, I could see disqualifying the vault scene as being a torture scene on the basis that the purpose of the "wipe" is not to inflict pain, it just happens to be an extremely painful process.
That's an interesting take. Is doing something incredibly painful or distressing to a person torture when there is ostensibly a secondary purpose to the painful thing, even though it also clearly doubles as a way of inflicting suffering and asserting power? This is a really important question to answer, since a lot of instances of torture and mistreatment in prisons and military situations etc. seem to fall under this. e.g. a strip search is nominally for "security" purposes, but it is also forced nudity which is a common form of sexual violence inflicted as part of torture.
But disqualifying the scene because there is not enough evidence that Bucky is being coerced to do it is nuts, since immediately prior Bucky gets slapped in the face for not answering a question and doesn't retaliate, and immediately before that Bucky gets a bunch of guns pointed at him when he acts up
That's another important question. Does being forced to comply with or participate in your own torture disqualify it from being torture?
The answer is, to me, obviously no, and in fact this seems like a relatively common feature of torture: e.g. forcing prisoners to dig their own graves requires a good amount of compliance from the victim and that's a major reason why it's so distressing
anyways the vault scene was what got me thinking about torture in media and got me to rewatching jacob geller's fantastic video essay "analyzing every torture scene in call of duty" which actually cites this paper.
okay, for one thing, he doesn't "lean back," he is pushed by the scientists. also! the chair restrains him. but even apart from that, how do you watch that scene and get "active and willing participant." Pierce literally hits him when he doesn't answer a question quickly enough.
@deus3xmachinablog I think it would have to be the scene where the heroes throw Sitwell off a roof yeah.
I kinda want to see the breakdown for ALL the movies listed.
i would be very interested in that, too! partly because I'm wondering which other Hot Takes of theirs I will disagree with (bc I am 1000% with you on The Vault Scene), partly for Academic Reasons (i miss being a cultural anthropologist) and... partly for Sicko Reasons
Yeah, like, as insanely high as the stats seem to be for torture in media, this weird victim-blaming take on the Vault Scene suggests that they underestimated the amount of torture, perhaps dramatically.
So, I am deep in a marvel phase and I am looking for fic recs. Mostly I want to see the first meeting between Bucky and Zola following the train mission. An expansion of Bucky’s memories from CA:WS. Second, I need to know if someone has written Steve as a salty but diehard Dodgers fan. Like Sam tries to take Steve to a Nationals’ game and gets a rant about disappointing it is that they left Brooklyn for LA but it is very clear that he has been keeping up with their current to the time scores and is either pleased or disappointed about how they are doing. Bonus points if we get to see Bucky be similarly invested later.
man y’all remember when the avengers movie came out and everyone headcanoned that all the avengers would live together in the tower and had all these cute posts about various fun ways they could interact and then the movies literally never had any of them even be friends
I want to state, for the record, that “all the avengers would live together in the tower” wasn’t collective headcanon, it was canon. The very last scene of Avengers (2012), the one they left us on, is Tony redesigning the tower, designing a living area for each Avenger. That was, canonically, what was supposed to happen, in canon, and they just changed their minds and decided to… not. For whatever goldarn reason.
Also it was canon for literal decades in the comics. First it was Avengers Mansion which was Tony’s Manhattan family home and then Avengers Tower when Tony built it. At one point Avengers Mansion couldn’t get their trash carried away because in order to operate in the US they had to be an embassy and NYC trash carriers don’t service embassies.
those people are wearing button-downs and suit jackets at their place of employment, after a work party. (Dr. Cho and Maria Hill are both still there.) they’re not depicted as enemies, sure, but this is still pretty firmly in the realm of “coworkers.”
You what happened, Civil War happened and character dynamics hit a stone wall and shattered for the sake of conflict. This was always going to be a problem with movies compared to on going comic or a cartoon, that it doesn’t have the time to show lounging and hanging out, but CA:CW truly throws any chance of that out.
I know what the dynamic between Steve and Natasha is, and what Steve and Tony is, but I don’t what Steve and Bruce relationship was like because it was never. Truthfully these characters only one single movie to be friends before Civil War happened breaking them up and in Infinity War they have rebuild from scratch and this time all in separate groups. Civil War meant that there was no time for characters to developed relationships off screen.
There are plenty of friends amongst the group, but I’d be hard pressed to ever call this a true friend group. They spend more time apart than they do together and again factor in-story mean there wasn’t a lot of time for even off-screen development to have happened.
The Avengers ended up being co-workers that had a nice party one time
I will FOREVER maintain that they did Civil War too fucking early.
That Cap3 should have been a buddy cop flick with Steve and Sam looking for Bucky, while Bucky was trying to piece together who he was and what was taken from him without getting caught.
The addition of Zemo and the “OMG we have to beat him before he gets to the 5 other Winter Soldiers who are way worse than me” plot was stupid- especially since we spent the whole damn movie on it, only for us to make it to the bunker, only to find that he’s killed all of them before they even left stasis. It’s a Deus Ex Machina except worse, because there was no hint at any point in the story that Zemo wouldn’t use the Soldiers. He went to great lengths to get Bucky’s notebook, so he could activate him. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t have used the others.
The narrative we’re given sets this up as the final conflict, only to yank the rug out-
to say, “actually the final conflict is Tony (the guy who started the movie claiming we need guardrails to stop us from making bad and dangerous choices) getting his feelings hurt and deciding that’s reason enough to commit the extrajudicial murder of someone who he KNOWS was a brainwashed captive (because he just made a joke about Bucky being a brainwashed captive five minutes earlier), and Steve trying to stop Tony from committing that murder… and we’re going to narratively frame it as Tony being the one who made the morally correct call.”
Civil War *hurts* in the comics and it has oomph specifically because the Avengers ARE friends. They’re not just coworkers, or people who mostly tolerate each other’s presence because they all have superpowers. And when they’re ripped apart, it fucking hurts.
It didn’t hurt in the movies because they weren’t fucking friends. It wasn’t earned.
Cap3 should have been the search for Bucky, and AVENGERS 3 should have been CW, not Infinity War. Save IW and Endgame for its own fucking mini-saga and phase of films, that way it wouldn’t have felt so rushed or had all these disparate parts thrown together.
Tony wasn’t Steve’s friend, I don’t care what he thinks. Every time I see the scene at the end of CW where Steve says “he’s my friend” and Tony says “so was I”, I’m always like “bitch WHERE?!” Where in the last half dozen movies were you Steve’s fucking friend?
When you treated him like an idiot in Avengers 1, despite him having far more combat experience than anyone at the table save for Thor? (Nat has years of experience, but her expertise is espionage and assassination, not combat. Same with Fury’s.) Or maybe when you consistently let your jealousy over your father’s adoration for Steve color how you saw him?
When you told him that the team needed a safety valve and needed checks and balances, because “a kid died” (who was 22yo, a fully grown adult, who made the choice to go to a war-ravaged country, fully aware of the risks, and ended up dying because TONY couldn’t stomach being told he was wrong about his Ultron idea)…. but the second it suited you, you blackmailed a fucking 15yo to fly halfway across the planet and threw him into the deep end of a fight between adult supers and metahumans?
Mr “how dare we put children in danger” Stark, who had zero fucking problems actively putting a child in danger the moment he was losing control of the narrative, is wondering why Steve might not trust you?
In order for CW to have the emotional payoff it needs to, it doesn’t work if the Avengers aren’t friends. It’s not a betrayal if they never trusted each other. When you set up these sweeping arcs, the dominoes have to be in the right order.
We desperately needed a movie or mini-series between WS and Ultron which is just the slash and burn out of Hydra around the world. This could have been where we see them be friends and developing some of the dynamics that we see at the beginning of Ultron, cause that is the closest we get to seeing them being a friend group. It could have had the secondary plot of Bucky figuring himself out and partly leading them to different Hydra based cause Hydra is trying to get him back under control but he isn’t letting that happen, so the Avengers come in from behind, allowing Bucky to continue to slip away and still be of use in CW.
I just needed like one film about them actually dealing with Hydra and the rebuilding of SHIELD or whatever to have made the rest better. Hell, we could have gotten more build up for Ultron that way, seeing Tony and Bruce talking about it more than just the very brief scene we got. I want to see more of the failure for developing Ultron.
no matter how bad it gets it cannot possibly be as bad as it was this time last year when i was using all my free time to replace the music in captain america the winter soldier with 2000s pop hits
This is such great fight choreography. I love how you edited the song in especially the part where WS sticks the knife in the van and it goes to the side. Perfect timing with the music!
The events of The Winter Soldier trial told in a series of tweets. Inspired by two amazing mixed-media fics that play with the possibility of what might happen if Bucky was put on trial after the events of CATWS:
- United States v. Barnes by fallingvoices and radialarch
- cross this river to the other side by defcontwo
This is more of a re-mix than actual fic illustration, though all credit for the idea and the tweets goes to the respective authors. Stylewise I was going for a mix between actual pictures and courtroom sketches. References used courtesy of Getty Images. And thanks to johanirae for being my art-beta.
