#also tangentially

[closetcasefranchaela]

them: i like [my special interest].

me, already trembling: like… a normal amount or????

[attex]

ok i know i joked abt making subspace more bald but i wanted to doodle the longer hair thing going on with these two bcz of the rustic waters 2 art

[crimeronan]

need more chronic illness horror tbh. at this point i don't really care if it's ableist or has bad implications. woke up this morning to half my cheek randomly peeling off in what's almost certainly an allergic reaction to Something i've never reacted to before & i'm just calmly lying here like damn. that's weird. i wonder if i should call my doctor or if peeling faces are just part of the whole being sick thing. guess i'll take a benadryl and see if i still have a face when i wake up.......

what i'm saying is that chronically ill people make the greatest horror protags of all time bc 1) we've been dealing with horrors beyond an able-bodied person's understanding for longer than you can imagine, which means we are ruthlessly competent, and 2) more importantly, we have been dealing with these horrors for so long that we're super complacent, which means we ARE the guy who ignores the weird sounds from the basement n goes to bed n gets murdered. like one minute you're cheering on the protag who responded to a stab wound by going "LMFAO, you think THIS hurts??" n killing the slasher, and then the next minute you're throwing a shoe at your TV bc he follows it up with "anyway the EDS skin makes me bleed all the time so i'm pretty sure i'm, like, fine. plus i don't wanna deal with the ER it's friday night and i've been three times this month. fuck that. i've been anemic before i don't feel anemic now. most of my blood is still in me. for the moment. g'night"

like. we're perfect. send post.

[artistredfox]

i saw this post of yours, so may i request…… your take on the stan quadruplets au? since its on my mind rn lol

as for thoughts uhh uhhhhhh………. uhm. do you have any fun headcanons (gravity falls or anything else) you wanna share ? 👉👈

My take on it? Do you mean like. The vanilla version? I'm kinda. Evilly fond of the idea mentioned offhand with Filbrick deciding to get rid of "the worst Stan". (To save money? Because he's tired of having 4 teens running around? Take your pick.) And then Stanley deciding that means He has to leave, packing up in the middle of the night and driving off.

And then the last three Stans team up agaist him and mutiny.

Or did you mean like. The 4 of them in my aus?

Cuz thinking about it like. My amnesia shifter Stan would be very interesting with four of them. Cuz the question becomes like. Who's the shifters. Was Ford the only human one, and the rest were packed up into one egg like a can of sardines? Is Stan the only shifter? Were they two and two, and each shifter has their base brother, their shifter brother, and the other one? Did they both pick the same brother to latch onto, and are now super possesive and territorial about him?

I like the idea of two pairs personally. But then the question is who's the second guy. Is it Stanley and Tristan, leaving both shifters on the other side of the portal, trying to bring their bases back? Or is it Stanley and Justan, two shifter trapped with the other's base. I can see the draw of the former, but I think I like the latter better. Two shifters, raised together, trapped on opposite sides of the dimensional wall with their brother's base.

This would especially make the trans Stanley and Justan hilarious, because they definitely both were just like. "Gender? I hardly know 'er." During boot camp And then just. Switched presentations entirely. Pretended that Stancy had always been a girl and Justan had always been a boy. There's 3 boy Stans, and one girl. What's the problem? Clearly you're just misremembering whose name is whose.

Ford calls for help, the fight happens, Justan and Ford go into the portal, Stancy and Tristan are stuck outside. Stancy and Tristan sticks pretty close with Darklord's timeline, I think, with Stancy only a bit less of a molewoman because she leaves the house sometimes to check in with Maurice and stalk the rest of the family.

Justan and Ford, though... Hm. Justan is probably pretty fluid with his shifts. He and Stancy would practice together, I've decided, and they're on the same level. So I think Justan comes clean on the other side. Cards on the table, they have to work together. He explains he's a shapeshifter (but doesn't out Stancy). They use Justan's shifting abilities to help them survive, and Justan gets even more fluid with Ford there helping him. They get the offer from Better World to go back home, and the two of them are disagreeing. Justan wants to go home, Ford wants to kill Bill. (Roll credi- oh shit, wrong movie.)

Justan could 100% just strongarm Ford through the portal. Pick him up, toss him over a shoulder, and just walk through. But would he? I don't know. Would he be just as opposed as regular Justan to fighting Bill, or would he take a deep breath, sigh, and tag along, because there's nothing quite like having a shapeshifter on your side in a battle. I don't know.

And then there's the Shifty problem. Bc if Justan's a shifter, and he's working with Ford, then Shifty is definitely Justan's son. Thats his boy. His little bug he didn't spawn, but raised from an egg. And now Shifty's dad is gone :( ate up by the portal :(

I don't think anything would change in MFA with having two more brothers, except that Justan got bit by Fiddleford early on, so Stanley's got a roommate from the start. Maybe Ford and Tristan are working together to make the cure? If that's the case, Ford's reputation in town is slightly better bc everyone likes Tristan. He's personable.

House Stan nothing changes except Justan is also there. He's standing in Stan's doorway wanting so badly to research Stan the dollhouse, but all Stan's dna is normal as a human(HE ASSUMES. HE HASNT TAKEN STAN'S BLOOD RECENTLY.)(That you know of.) And he cant test the dollhouse until the full moon.

Also Justan and Stanley snuggle in their huge cot under their pile of blankets. Its like two kitties hanging out in the same little cathouse. Shine a flashlight in the hole and two sets of eyes will gleam back at you

Lfbp au is the kicker. Like, do we also portal Tristan here, switch the pairs entirely? Or do we just put Stan and Justan through it? I feel like either situation is a mess. If Stanley and Justan are both portaled, then Tristan talks the unicorns while Ford works on the other steps. He talks them into giving up their hair super easily. They get Stanley and Justan back before Ford can fall asleep. Justan pulls Stan from the unicorn side of the portal, either saving Stan's arm entirely, or making it so Stanley only loses his hand. I'd say we go with the hand so Stan can still have Lefty, but Tristan and Ford probably rescue them before Ford even falls asleep, so Lefty is a lost cause. Poor guy :(

Ok that's all I got

[rvspecter]

love how worrying about his hair is part of harvey's character summary

[hildred-rex]

The Maker of Moons: A Series of Complaints

I know I vanished for a while from my externally observable King in Yellow bullshit, but I assure you all it has been going on in the background. For one potentiality I recently reread “The Maker of Moons,” the eponymous story of Chambers’s next collection of short stories, and holy God do I have opinions.

Or rather, holy God do I have an angry rant.

Because “The Maker of Moons” has so many good elements—what do you mean, a colonel in the Secret Service has begun vigilante-killing forgers of three-element gold in the woods of upstate(?) New York, and this doesn’t even seem to mean he’s gone rogue?

The elements of a larger conspiracy? The secret country of sorcerers, if you ignore everything else about it? The horrifying ubiquity of the Secret Service men throughout daily life? The fact that your semi-comic-relief upper-class fop has multiple friends in the Service, who answer to your other friend and kind of your girlfriend’s dad, and just doesn’t know? Something, something, the Stranger TMA.

And you have all of that, Mr. Chambers, and you still decide to derive most of your horror from “Oh God, there’s Chinese people in the woods!”

…

I’m not kidding. This story runs on Orientalism, both the fear and demonization of Asian people and cultures (the obvious literally everything, plus the specific manner of the comparison of the half-finished hairy crab-spider to a Japanese grotesque) and the exoticisation of them, or specifically of one specific artsy, sheltered mixed-race woman.

Ysonde, I love you, but what the hell is your backstory in this one?

Really long rant below the cut.

So, the Big Bad, of sorts, of “The Maker of Moons” is called Yue-Laou, who is lord over a bunch of dark sorcerers in a beautiful country in the Chinese interior, ruling tyrannically over what is asserted to be untold millions of people.

Our three protagonists, whom we meet first, are Roy Cardenhe, Col. Franklyn Barris of the Secret Service (still in its days before protecting the president, so he hunts counterfeiters), and a fop (who owns a gold mine and rejoices over the hushing-up of the news that one can synthesize gold! the conspiracy vibes are immense and Chambers does nothing!) called Billy Pierpont.

We can ignore Pierpont from here on out. Sorry, buddy.

The other two are implicitly in their twenties, but Barris is maybe in his sixties, forties at the youngest.

Barris, about two decades ago, was a prolific traveler and ended up in that beautiful country in the Chinese interior, which is called Yian; the sorcerers are called the Kuen-Yuin. (More on Chambers inventing fake-Chinese later.) Yue-Laou basically set him up with a woman created out of a white water-lotus bud, and he lived happily for a while and had a daughter with her; when that happened, Yue-Laou came and demanded the (unnamed) lotus woman back, and when Barris refused he killed her (turned her back into the lotus bud from whence she came) and kidnapped their child.

Yue-Laou then raised this girl, almost certainly Ysonde, as her stepfather. (No further mention is made of the lotus woman, so I don’t think he married her and therefore I don’t know where the title comes from. Probably I’ve thought about this more than Chambers at this point.)

He kept her in total captivity, not letting her really interact with other people, but apparently told her a good deal of Kuen-Yuin lore.

At some point, he fell in with a bunch of (American? one’s a ginger) gold-makers, and he moved himself and Ysonde to America (at the height of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which Chambers makes no mention of), and specifically to the New York woods, because that’s of course where you forge gold.

So, then we meet him because the men of Cardenhe’s hunting party keep seeing flashes of him in the woods, and he’s repeatedly described like this:

a horrible human face, yellow and drawn with high-boned cheeks and narrow eyes.

This is so dwelled upon it starts feeling stupid in addition to just racist.

I’m skipping over what there is of a plot here (Chambers is here for the romance, not the government conspiracy and extrajudicial murder going on in the background), but both Barris and Cardenhe turn out to have this Super Special Birthmark called the dragon’s claw (…), which is white and shaped like a little crescent moon.

What this apparently means is “those who are marked with the dragon’s claw are followed by Yue-Laou, for good or for evil,—and the evil means death if you offend him?”

In Barris’s case, well, *waves at lotus woman.*

In Cardenhe’s, this means Ysonde, whom he first meets in a dream.

Also, did I mention this is a Red Thread Soulmate AU fic?

Someday I should make shitpost summaries of the Chambers stories I’ve read. “Reclusive local gentleman attempts to assassinate cousin’s fiancée, but notably not the cousin, with help of man who abuses his cat.” “One of three AUs this man wrote of himself and a fictional wife. Government conspiracy AU, ambiguously human AU, Red Thread Soulmate AU, liberally and unironically mauls Chinese folklore. Some of the plot involves Pondering My Orb.”

So, Barris’s men find out about the gold-makers, and Roy Cardenhe is brought along on the hunting trip that disguises the Secret Service’s attempt to bring the ring down. Cardenhe, naturally, spends his time doing the sensible thing when there’s a government conspiracy going on around you and just goes hunting all the time.

He falls asleep next to a lake, wakes up, and meets a magical, ephemeral woman. This is Ysonde. They have a meet-cute involving her carving things into rock. I actually do genuinely kind of ship it at this point.

Then she vanishes, and they repeat this dance one or two more times. (I read it two days ago; please pardon the forgetting and not wanting to go back and check. I promise I’m more serious about actual King in Yellow stuff.)

She and Cardenhe talk about Yian and her step-father, whom she doesn’t know is Yue-Laou—which implies Yue-Laou badmouthed himself to her, which is hilarious.

Anyhow, here’s how she describes Yue-Laou. Also worth noting that she says multiple times that her stepfather tells her everything she knows.

“All that I know is yours, now, as I am yours, all that I am. Bend closer. Is it of Yue-Laou you would know? Yue-Laou is Dzil-Nhu of the Kuen-Yuin. He lived in the Moon. He is old—very, very old, and once, before he came to rule the Kuen-Yuin, he was the old man who unites with a silken cord all predestined couples, after which nothing can prevent their union. But all that is changed since he came to rule the Kuen-Yuin. Now he has perverted the Xin,—the good genii of China,—and has fashioned from their warped bodies a monster which he calls the Xin. This monster is horrible, for it not only lives in its own body, but it has thousands of loathsome satellites,—living creatures without mouths, blind, that move when the Xin moves, like a mandarin and his escort. They are part of the Xin although they are not attached. Yet if one of these satellites is injured the Xin writhes with agony. It is fearful—this huge living bulk and these creatures spread out like severed fingers that wriggle around a hideous hand.”

(As an aside, Wikipedia quotes a description of the actual Yue Lao, supposedly from the 1898 Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, matching literally exactly the underlined portion above, but the Bartleby link they give as citation is dead and I can’t find an entry on Yue Lao or any variation in this Archive.org scan of a later edition. Either Chambers ripped from Brewer or Wikipedia ripped from Chambers, and I don’t know which is funnier.)

(Later update, found the page it links on the Wayback Machine. Looks like Chambers copied it exactly. Lovely little plagiarist.)

Back to the story. Cardenhe still thinks he’s dreaming all this, but he tells Barris—who admits in a horrifyingly blasé fashion to having been hunting down and killing members of the gold-making ring—about it, and Barris recognizes it and infodumps his past.

Also, there’s a wizard orb in here, described thus:

“Barris,” said Pierpont, “I can’t believe in sorcery while I am wearing one of Sanford’s shooting suits in the pocket of which rests an uncut volume of the ‘Duchess.’” “Neither can I,” I said, “for I read the Evening Post, and I know Mr. Godkin would not allow it. Hello! What's the matter with this gold ball?” “What is the matter?” said Barris grimly. “Why—why—it's changing color—purple, no, crimson—no, it's green I mean—good Heavens! these dragons are twisting under my fingers—” “Impossible!” muttered Pierpont, leaning over me; “those are not dragons—” “No!” I cried excitedly; “they are pictures of that reptile [i.e., the crab creature] that Barris brought back—see—see how they crawl and turn—” “Drop it!” commanded Barris; and I threw the ball on the turf. In an instant we had all knelt down on the grass beside it, but the globe was again golden, grotesquely wrought with dragons and strange signs.

Ysonde also has one, which Cardenhe recognizes.

The climax of the story is Cardenhe and Ysonde watching Barris try to kill Yue-Laou for killing his wife, and then being eaten by the Xin in the lake.

It’s a really good summary of this story, actually: beautiful images and very good ideas, along with effective foreshadowing (of the Xin, which is presaged by crab-creatures I’ve completely neglected to describe), intermixed with completely pointless and frankly abhorrent racism. And stiff dialogue; Chambers was no Machen.

“What is all this damnable jugglery!” I whispered angrily, but my anger vanished as the words were spoken, and a convulsive shudder shook me to the feet. Standing on the shone of the lake, a stone’s throw away, was a figure, twisted and bent,—a little old man, blowing sparks from a live coal which he held in his naked hand. The coal glowed with increasing radiance, lighting up the skull-like face above it, and threw a red glow oven the sands at his feet. But the face!—the ghastly Chinese face on which the light flickered,—and the snaky slitted eyes, sparkling as the coal glowed hotter. Coal! It was not a coal but a golden globe staining the night with crimson flames—it was the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin. “See! See!” gasped Ysonde, trembling violently, “see the moon rising from between his fingers! Oh I thought it was my step-father and it is Yue-Laou the Maker of Moons—no! no! it is my step-father—ah God! they are the same!” Frozen with terror I stumbled to my knees, groping for my revolver which bulged in my coat pocket; but something held me—something which bound me like a web in a thousand strong silky meshes. I struggled and turned but the web grew tighter; it was over us—all around us, drawing, pressing us into each other’s arms until we lay side by side, bound hand and body and foot, palpitating, panting like a pair of netted pigeons. And the creature on the shore below! What was my horror to see a moon, huge, silvery, rise like a bubble from between his fingers, mount higher, higher into the still air and hang aloft in the midnight sky, while another moon rose from his fingers, and another and yet another until the vast span of Heaven was set with moons and the earth sparkled like a diamond in the white glare.

See what I mean?

-------

A few other notes.

Chambers made up a shitton of Chinese for this, and he didn’t even do it well.

The common romanization used for Chinese at this time would have been Wade-Giles (or ma-a-aybe Postal), neither of which uses X. Pīnyīn, the form we’re used to today and which does use x, was first published in 1958.

Dzil-Nhu is completely made up, as are “Xangi, which is God,” which comes up later, and the Kuen-Yuin. Shoutout to the Yellow Site, which makes a valiant attempt to link them into the Empire of Tsan-Chan, which comes out of Lovecraft (a far-future dystopia from the late days of humanity, basically; a dissident from it is incidentally kidnapped by the Yithians in The Shadow out of Time; apologies if this is out of nowhere, but @valhahazred does great things with the concept; theirs was one of the few blogs I routinely checked well before I had a tumblr, though I’ve fallen off now; here is one related to the King!). I love the Yellow Site for many reasons, but I really, really don’t think these guys go in for Cthulhu.

If I really cared I could go try to pin down what dialect of Chinese Chambers was most likely trying to ape, but I don’t. He most likely didn’t have one anyway.

Others:

If one strips away all the faux-Chinese trappings, the Maker of Moons could easily be another mask of the King in Yellow. Strange moons, yellow as the symbol of faith in Yian, (indirect) association with art, conspiracy to undermine the upper class Chambers loved so much…

I don’t know if it makes it better or worse that Chambers actually references bits of contemporary Chinese external diplomacy (the hell do you call that? like how they interact with the outside world. I’m writing this at an inadvisable hour). Li Hongzhang, cited inaccurately even with period romanization as Li-Hung-Chang, really did exist, and outside of China itself he was apparently more famous than the emperor. > “Now the world knows what Barris thought of the Kuen-Yuin and of Yue-Laou. I see than the newspapers are just becoming excited over the glimpses that Li-Hung-Chang has afforded them of Black Cathay and the demons of the Kuen-Yuin.”

One of the other stories in this collection (“The Silent Land”) includes a really interesting reference to the King in Yellow, which is why I originally read anything from The Maker of Moons the book at all. Thank you to whatever preserved early-2000s website pointed me at that one; I forget which you are, but I love you so much. Anyhow, I’ll be back to talk about both “The Silent Land” and TKIY as a folktale and early 2000s websites, so see you at some point in the future.

The Project Gutenberg edition of The Maker of Moons and Other Stories also reprints “The Yellow Sign.” Interesting; shall have to research in scans on the Internet Archive.

That’s it for this unstructured rant. If I care enough, I’ll be back at some point to format it into a proper essay and compare and contrast it with the (much more effective, and less rams-you-over-the-head) use of sanism as horror in “The Repairer of Reputations.”

If you’ve read this far, thank you so much. Here, have a golden orientalism wizard orb.

[1863-project]

NJ Transit 40th Anniversary Weekend Extravaganza!

Pay your engineers and give them a contract.

Okay, now that that's out of the way...

This weekend I got to spend some time with my dad aboard NJT's 40th Anniversary Express, a special train they put together in conjunction with the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey to commemorate 40 years of NJT's rail service. Normally I'd have just been content to watch, but they hooked me with a GG1 reference so naturally I had to go because I will do anything for a GG1.

The URHS of NJ loaned the Hickory Creek out for the event, along with a few other passenger cars they own. It was weird to see it at Penn Station instead of in Grand Central Terminal, but they still rolled out the red carpet for it as if it was attached to the 20th Century Limited. (This is where we get the phrase "red carpet treatment" from, by the way. It has nothing to do with Hollywood and everything to do with one crack passenger express train.)

I did not ride in the Hickory Creek itself because I do not have that sort of money, but Dad and I were in the Tavern Lounge No. 43, another New York Central car. It was a lovely ride.

The highlight of the trip was in South Amboy. Historically, electrification of the North Jersey Coast Line ended here. Today, it ends in Long Branch. Here's where the GG1s come in. There would be an engine change at South Amboy. The GG1s, electric locomotives, would be switched out for other locomotives to go further south. It was steam at first, and sadly became diesel later. Yesterday, they recreated this engine switch for us, complete with an NJT heritage unit painted to look like a GG1. This is the closest I'll likely get to seeing one running within my lifetime, so I'll cherish it.

The engine change. NJT 4636 stood in for my beloved GG1s, and two of the first locomotives built for NJ Transit, a pair of F40-PH2s (4119 and 4120), took over. You rarely see the latter in passenger service these days because they usually pull work trains, but they're the last two members of their class in NJT service.

Much to everyone's delight, we got to watch some brakeman work in action, because they manually flipped the switches. Note the heavy-duty gloves the conductor is wearing for this purpose.

It takes quite a bit of setup...

All clear!

Once the locomotives were swapped, we all boarded again and went on down to Bay Head. Since it was cold and rainy out, a few of us had some hot chocolate, which hit the spot and was incredibly wonderful.

Eventually, we made it to Bay Head. This is how I found out the president of NJ Transit was on the train with us, because the NJT engineers are ready to strike because there's no contract right now, and a group of them were protesting down at Bay Head because they knew he'd have to see them. Excellent move.

At Bay Head, we got to go around the loop in Bay Head Yard, something passengers don't normally get to do.

So we had views that most people don't get to have, and that was really cool.

At Bay Head, they fed us and gave us NJT swag. There were also some vintage buses from Public Service there, which was great because nobody stopped me from getting into the driver's seat of them.

My right hand is on the gearshift in this photo - it was huge and came out of the floor. Neither bus had power steering - that's a relatively new feature in motor vehicles.

I can and will attempt to drive anything.

Back to trains - after lunch, everyone got back aboard and the 40th Anniversary Express made its way back up north to Newark Penn Station. Whilst we were at Newark, we were allowed to get out and take some photos, so I investigated the staff car and was delighted to see that it had a conference table with a PRR K4 pictured above it.

You know me, I love my 4-6-2 Pacifics.

Eventually, the train came into Hoboken Terminal, and that was the end of day one.

Today, the entire heritage fleet was on display at Hoboken Terminal, so I made my way back for more photos.

I love GG1s and wanted to thank my new friend for giving me the opportunity to come so close to that experience yesterday.

4101 and 4109 are the surviving sisters of NJT 4100, a locomotive I'm rather attached to. It was nice to get good photos of them instead of the ones I usually have to snap through the window when I'm actually out on the rails!

Erie-Lackawanna 3372 is a labor of love for the URHS of NJ. They've done a beautiful job restoring her so far, but there's still a lot of work left to do.

The thing that really did me in was this old Pennsy diesel here, an E8A numbered 5711. She's in incredible condition for something built in 1952, and they had a cast of an old Penn Station eagle next to her, too, just to break my heart into a million pieces because I'll never be over what happened to Penn Station.

In all, I had an amazing weekend, and NJT and the URHS of NJ knocked it out of the park with this. It was just wonderful to be surrounded by other railfans for a couple of days.

Some other highlights:

Talked about trains the entire ride with the folks in our car. At one point we all got to sharing cat photos. An older couple had a cat named Lake, short for Lake Shore Limited. I cannot tell you how much that delighted me.

I love being around other railfans. It's one of the rare places I can be myself, since there's inevitably going to be a lot of other autistic people there besides me so I don't have to mask. I cannot even begin to articulate what it means to me to be in a place where I don't have to mask.

The hobby has actually changed a lot since I was a little kid - and in a good way. I wasn't the only woman there, for one. I was still greatly outnumbered gender-wise, but there are a lot more women in the hobby now, and it's also a lot more racially diverse than it was back then. Additionally, I saw a LOT of young people - it's going strong! It doesn't feel like it's being gatekept by the old white men anymore. It's really wonderful. Trains are for everyone. They always were, but now you can visibly see it.

When we were on the platform at South Amboy getting set up to take photos, someone yelled "Everybody smile!" behind me and I nearly died. Because, you know:

Whoever you are, give me your phone number.

As a final addendum, of course I brought them with me, as per usual when I go out to do railroading stuff. Here they are seated in Tavern Lounge 43!

This was just an absolute banger of a weekend and I hope more events like this happen because it's so fun to engage with history hands-on and see other people who care about it as much as you do. It's the best! Perfect!

[msfeatherfreckles]

So i just saw a video on tiktok about the "new way" to soft launch a relationship on Instagram. It apparently used to be you post a picture of your two (or more, polyamory is a thing) drinks, no people in the shot. (This is what started my wheels turning re Rob and Ruth.)

But apparently the new way is to do a photo dump of a trip to somewhere with lots of touristy pictures, and then put a selfie with the beau in the middle somewhere.

*war flashbacks to jensen's 2019 upfronts-jib-dubai-ahbl photodump*

*war flashbacks to danneel's 2022 upfronts photo dump*