#ask a brain problem

[mybrainproblems]

please tell me more about the destiel barbershop quartet.

Okay so first off. It's a curse. How do 'our' world and endverse collide? Idk y'all. Curse. Supernatural. Whatever.

So obviously endverse!Cas is the baritone and our Cas is the bass. Dean and endverse!Dean get into a lil slap fight over tenor vs lead.

The fight is over the fact that neither of them wants to be lead and wants to be tenor. Dean has had enough of subjecting himself to being mainstage Barbie and the mortifying act of being known and endverse!Dean just wants a damn break from leading.

(Dean ends up letting endverse!Dean be tenor bc he starts crying and that's just uncomfortable)

(he compensates by being as out of tune as possible. Crowley is blowing him kisses (and pantomiming blowing him) from the back of the theater)

[mybrainproblems]

THE SCISSORS WORK AND THEY'RE CONVENIENT

RENU. YOU ARE CUTTING. YOUR PIZZA.

WITH. S C I S S O R S

look I have one pair of scissors I use for everything so maybe I can give this a pass if you specifically have kitchen scissors for use with food only but this is STILL insane behavior to me. scissors! to cut! pizza!

[mybrainproblems]

📓

there are... so many fic that i am daydreaming about and not writing. this feels a tad bit like cheating bc it's only been in my head for about 12hrs now but i'm gonna be thinking about it for a bit. i also know i'm never going to write it bc it would hurt me too much :')

disclaimer that i know next to nothing about DTA. however! inverse version where endverse!cas is flung into s13 instead of cas being resurrected.

endverse!cas being jack's john. a barely-known presence corrupted in the aftermath of a traumatizing death. alienation from your remaining parent who was supposed to love and care for you. dean being happy to have a cas back even if it isn't his cas. a cas whose wings are clipped closer and one who he knows never left (to his own destruction). sam and cas being total strangers, sam knowing nothing about endverse and the fact that this cas has seen him say yes to lucifer. has seen a world destroyed bc of it.

cas finding himself alongside a dean who is hurt but nowhere near as broken as the one who lead him to death. a dean more like the dean he fell in love with.

i absolutely cannot bring myself to write it bc i cannot hurt jack like that. i just cannot.

[mybrainproblems]

All of supernatural in THREE WEEKS?? I’m in awe and slightly terrified

SO. FUN STORY.

I mentioned that I was like "haha gonna drink and watch a few eps of a bad show bc finally done with this mega stressful thing at work"

Well.

Being done with said Very Stressful Work Thing meant that I had fuck all to do for work and since this was Feb 2021 and I have a desk job that didn't require me on-site, I was working from home every day.

Which.

I was sold on finishing s1 by half way through 01x01... By 01x03 I was committed to watching the entire show.

Now. Remember how I said I had fuck all to do for work?

Literally, I got paid to watch Supernatural.

(I kept an eye on my email etc but nothing came in for a couple weeks that I couldn't deal with in 10-20min)

Watching 10-12 hours of spn per day for three weeks is like putting your brain in a blender and liquifying it, then adding gelatin and putting it in a brain shaped mold in the fridge to set. Yes, it looks like a brain again but the very nature of it has changed.

[mybrainproblems]

thoughts etc vis-a-vis the finale?

my brain is literally just dial-up noises right now. i've basically been liveblogging every thought in my head but i guess here are some summary points of those dial-up noises:

dean's dying monologue was terrible and completely asinine. i was checking my phone to see how much time had elapsed bc it Just. Kept. Going. i was laughing my ass off by the end. i cannot imagine watching that live.

wi/ncest shippers and bronlies must like it just out of spite bc there wasn't any destiel...... right? bc that was objectively a bad episode with bad writing.

yes i have the bias of being a freaky little dabbfan but also bc of that i'm very familiar with his work and that just was not anything i'd have ever expected from him and is the opposite of everything he has ever set up as an endgame for dean or the show as a whole

i am full-on "this was an old script and dabb just put enough changes on it to take the writing credit" that or written with the sniper breathing down his neck about it

OR! it was written as-is, but intended to be a tragic ending and then at the last minute the CW got all hand-wring-y about covid making ppl sad and we need you to make it happy but no you can't make any changes to make it an actual happy ending

15x10 made literally rather than metaphorical is an insanely cathartic ending..... and is a dabb ep.

i am maybe more insane about this bc last night i watched 15x01 -> 15x04 -> 15x10 -> 15x20 which is an Experience

i have more thoughts but like. those are the immediate ones. mostly it's just bafflement and feeling adrift bc it was so bad and even at his worst, dabb is a competent writer.

[mybrainproblems]

ohhhmygosh i've been meaning to ask you from an ask game from forever ago but can i know more about the midnight radio wip!!!!!!!!

i fucking love hedwig & the angry inch so much and i'm so bummed i was living on the other side of the country when it had a broadway revival. however! nothing to actually do with the fic really! i just took the song title bc the fic is vignettes of dean making the Mixtape late at night... hennyways here's an excerpt:

Tonight they're somewhere in Pennsylvania where the corn stretches from the crumbling edges of the parking lot into eternity and the blacktop of the road winds off to nowhere, heat shimmering above. With the sun set, there's a smudge of orange-brown on the horizon in the direction of town but otherwise the sky is a cloudy worn-velvet black. It's just past midnight and in spite of the ten hour drive Dean hunches over the radio, bowed down as though in prayer with the sound turned low and barely-audible over Sam's breathing. He can feel the ache in his spine from the long drive and the throb in his shoulder from last week's ghost and a crick is starting to form in his neck but –

oh yeah and he makes it oldddd school calling in requests to local stations and waiting for it to play to record it off the radio bc i'm a child of both the 90s and grassroots radio supporters

And you're shining

Like the brightest star

A transmission

On the midnight radio

[mybrainproblems]

Hello Alex, I hope you're having a good day. I want to keep an open mind here and I'm hoping you could please explain your dislike for the oxford comma. From your other posts and prior conversations, your strong critical thinking skills are more than evident and it is a primary reason I admire you. I'm hoping that this can be a chance to understand your perspective and perhaps open my eyes to a new point of view. Thank you for your time. Best, Renu

first off, i am a little crosswired on perception of visual stuff like writing or images. chartreuse sounds like a trombone. 5 is a friendly number but 3 is an annoying sibling and 7 is ready to shank me at all times. looking at the number 7 or numbers divisible by 7 makes me skittish. my teachers literally gave up on getting me to memorize my times tables for the number. basically, sometimes i have a weirdly visceral reaction to the way some things are presented visually.

dos! a thing to know about me is that i'm extremely claustrophobic. if it's less than 4 floors, i will walk up those stairs. i've walked up more than that if the elevator looked too small.

So: punctuation is maybe a bit more emotional and personal to me like it's not nuts and bolts it's about Feelings. the em dash is cuddly and the semi-colon is friendly and the comma is a warm hand on your shoulder. however! if someone puts a hand on your shoulder too many times maybe you get uncomfy! maybe it triggers my claustrophobia to see all these letters and words TRAPPED by hands and held in place. WHERE IS THE EMERGENCY EXIT. MAYBE I WILL TRIP OVER A COMMA SOMEONE LEFT IN THE WAY AND BURN TO DEATH.

THREE. i was left unsupervised with david foster wallace's non-fiction essays while in elementary school. nothing makes you want to break the english language like reading DFW while you're also learning how to write a five paragraph essay.

when a teacher fiiiiiinally told us we could stop doing five paragraph format essays i was in heaven.... i still got docked a lot of points for things like "run on sentences" and "overuse of semi-colons" but i was FREE to write one sentence paragraphs to punctuate my thoughts.

F O U R TH... i grew up reading the nytimes which meant also reading the nytimes style guide bc i was a little weirdo and they say not to use an oxford comma. literally i was in middle school and loved reading william safire's 'on language' column.

Cinq du soleil: ezra koenig was my tutor for a bit

VI: something about it having a special name just raises my hackles. oh, you're a comma with a special use? no. we are all commarades here. now stop trying to trip me while i make my way to the emergency exit.

[🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪] i like the little mystery of omitting the oxford comma! it adds a bit of flair! am i saying nelson mandela is an 800 year old demi-god and a dildo collector? didn't i just introduce a little intrigue into your day making you think about it? (also here's how to fix that headline without using an oxford comma)

8. idk man. the oxford comma? the serial comma? are we talking punctuation or jack the ripper?

[mybrainproblems]

Will you be posting your spreadsheetnatural in total? With accompanying graph or pie charts? With commentary and analysis? Any idea of completion estimate? Your musings have been very very interesting so far. (And will the spreadsheet date include all seasons?)

Hello! Yes, I will be posting everything I end up with that is actually intelligible. I currently have three Excel workbooks with multiple sheets of compiled information. I already know I'm going to need at least one more to track ALL episodes and not just Dabb-written ones (which is where my interest started).

My hope is to have what I guess I'd call "initial findings" in the first half of 2022 but also I have a day job (booo) that is going to be taking up A LOT of my bandwidth from now until May 2022. In terms of charts, I'll probably have one or two Gantt charts (horrifying, I do them like 1-2x/yr and have to re-learn it every time) and maybe some really subjective pie charts about destiel content. It's really more of a timeline to draw conclusions from (hence the Gantt charts) based on overlapping timelines and bc of all the info I'm working with, spreadsheets are the easiest way to keep track so I can filter/organize. I'll definitely be posting a written summary of everything and note what is relatively factual vs what I think we can glean from info vs bullshit conspiracies that there's no way to prove but are fun to think about!

For the whole spreadsheetsnatual project, my main "interest" is in looking at late 2015 to present which would be mid-s11 through s15 aka when Dabb would have been tapped as co-showrunner even if it wasn't immediately announced. I've dug into his credits on spn going back to when he started as a writer in s4 and while it's typical for people on shows to work their way up the ladder the longer they stay (starting as writer working their way up through producer titles) he has a lot of higher level producer credits during mid/late Carver era. He'd already been around for a while at that point but it is noticeable compared to others. (But also I think there was a pretty big writer shake up during Carver era with ppl coming and going. I need to dig into that a bit more. Being a fandom newbie means a lot more legwork!)

Dabb really made his career on spn sticking around rather than leaving and working his way up through multiple shows like some other early-era folks. He seems to have had a really solid career on spn and would've been very entrenched in the system having been around since s4. This is purely speculation but having been around that long, I think he'd have had the clout to come in as co-showrunner and ask that the network do market research on making Dean canonically bi.

And thank you for taking an interest in the whole spreadsheetsnatural project! At its core it's just me having a bad case of apophenia and making connections about things that may not actually be connected but it sure is interesting to dig into! I love making bullshit conspiracy theories but being able to halfway justify them even if I know they're probably bullshit lol.