QUESTION. i watched season 1 of shadow & bone during my rest week directly after my top surgery when i was on vicodin and falling asleep every 30 minutes. should i rewatch it before watching s2 or just go in blind
so i watched season 1 like two years ago when it came out and then read the books that summer, ive just now jumped into season 2 and let me tell you: i barely remember anything and i am very confused. however i think the show is written in a way thats kind of confusing regardless so it might not matter lol. go in blind itll be fun.
currently my bestie and i are staying at their mom's while we apartment hunt and my bestie works weird hours so i've been hanging out one-on-one with their mom a lot in the evenings. we watched all of guillermo del toro's cabinet of curiosities together. i'm coming to think of my friend's mom as a friend herself
what's ofmd about u keep posting and it looks intriguing
It's Our Flag Means Death, which is a new half hour comedy about pirates on hbomax. It's about a fancy rich guy who's always dreamed of being a pirate so he buys a ship and a crew but in reality he's a big softie so he is very bad at pirating. It's super charming and funny, and yes it is gay, and co stars taika watiti as the dread pirate Blackbeard. The ensemble cast is great, the misfit pirate crew are my favorites :) Highly highly recommended, there's 8 episodes out right now so that's a clean 4 hours to get caught up.
I did manage to get BOTH of these in! So we have a combo of "You called me, remember?" and "It's too early for this". Much like the others, the MINUTE I read this prompt an idea popped into my head that I just HAD to go with! This is actually based off a real life incident I had with a friend (They know who they are...) but it fit both Jmart and the prompt PERFECTLY! The names have been changed to fictional characters to protect the innocent. (Hint I was the Martin in this situation) Anyway this was super fun and cute to write and I made myself all squishy a lot. HOPE YOU ENJOY! <3
There were precious few reasons why Martin’s mobile should be ringing at exactly 5:47 am on a Tuesday, and precisely none of them were good. Still, the anxiety inducing sound alerting him to something ominously, ambiguously amiss struggled to worm its way through a rather lovely dream of his acceptance speech after being awarded poet laureate. The poem he had prepared for the occasion was marrow-deep and hauntingly beautiful, or at least he remembered it that way until suddenly he was reciting the lyrics to Abba’s ‘Waterloo’ instead and sweating profusely as the audience began to murmur in disgust amongst themselves. Waterloo was indeed blaring, but from the ringtone of his phone, not from his lips, and his stomach performed a cold somersault with the force of the wave of anxiety that had begun in his dream and crested up to lap at the base of his barely functional brain. The few synapses he needed for basic motor function and reading comprehension crackled to life as he clumsily batted the buzzing device on his nightstand into his hand and squinted blearily at the name.
It was small. That was an immediate relief. If the care home had been calling about an incident with his mother, either her health or the staff’s as a result of her, it would have been the full moniker of ‘Sunrise Acres Care Home’ ticking across the caller ID. Yet small implied a name, a person, someone he had in his phone and not just a random spam call, and anxiety spiked again as Martin scrubbed at his eyes until ‘Jon’ appeared in white hot letters on the screen. Sleep dissolved from him in an instant and he sat bolt upright in a tangle of covers as he smashed the green answer icon with his thumb and threw the receiver to his ear.
“Hullo?! Jon? R’you okay? What’s happened?” he demanded, voice still slumbery thick and groggy.
“Martin!” Jon’s silky, prim voice, thinned out to a tin can vibrato over airwaves, answered, “Good, you’re awake. I need your help. Urgently.”
Martin was already out of bed by the time ‘need’ reached his ears, yanking on the first pair of jeans he spotted in the laundry heap on the floor and hopping on his free leg to the en suite with his phone pinched between his cheek and shoulder.
“I’m on it!” he assured him despite having no clue what ‘it’ was, exactly, “I’m coming to you as soon as I can. Where are you? Are you hurt? Should I bring a first aid kit? I don’t think I have a first aid kit… should I buy a first aid kit? There’s a Boots just down the block from my flat, I could-“
“Martin, stop! What the hell are you on about?” Jon’s annoyed tone cut through his panic like a scalpel.
Martin stopped in the doorframe of the bathroom, brows knitted, jeans puddling around the one leg he’d managed to get through and left once again in naught but his boxers as he gripped his phone back into his hand.
“Huh? What are you on about? You said you needed help!” he snapped.
“I do! But not like… not like THAT. What kind of mortal peril do you imagine I would find myself in at a quarter to six in the morning?”
The initial surge of adrenaline fizzling out uselessly in his veins the more Jon talked, Martin sagged against the doorway and pinched his temples as he strained his words through a colander of civility.
“I don’t know, Jon. You called me, remember?”
“Right, right…”
A terse, lowly hissing silence of dead satellite replaced Jon’s voice, twisting Martin’s nerves as acrobatically as he twisted to avoid the point. He kicked off his jeans and stalked grouchily back to bed where he threw himself face down and unmoving.
“So, what is it then? Wi-Fi gone tits up? Forgot how long to steep Darjeeling?” he hissed into his rumpled duvet, a little nastier than he would have liked given the deadly combination of interrupted slumber and primordial biological survival instinct.
“I uh…” Jon’s voice deflated over the speaker, “I have a… problem.”
“Yes, we’ve so very, very clearly established that. What kind of a problem, exactly…?”
“A problem of an upsettingly… Arachnid nature.”
“A spider…?”
“…Yes.”
Martin propped himself up on one elbow, eyes narrowed with genuine and curious concern.
“Wait like a… like a spooky spooky spider? Or just an ordinary kind of spooky spider?” he inquired with as much levity as he could muster, given one of the likely options.
“Stop saying spooky. And the ordinary kind. I think. No, I’m sure of it. It’s merely the sitting on my kitchen wall like it owns the place and staring at me rudely with all eight eyes, judging me for skipping breakfast again, kind,” Jon answered with clinical pointedness.
“O… kay…?” Martin drawled, suppressing a giggle, “So, what’s the problem then?”
“What do I do?”
Martin opened his mouth to answer, but closed it again as he doubted that he had actually heard Jonathan Sims, the irascible, pompous, only capable of truly looking at him down his nose Head Archivist Jonathan Sims, ask him, a lowly assistant, what to do. With a spider. It would have been almost adorable, had he not scared the life out of him initially, but even that knocked it only down a single peg to helplessly charming.
“I-I mean, the normal thing one does when encountering a spider in one’s home? You kind of only have the usual two options? Er well, three, if you count just leaving it be, but I doubt you’re amenable to that one.”
“No, absolutely not, out of the question,” Jon declared swiftly.
“Didn’t think so,” Martin chuckled, rolling onto his back and sagging in relief into the mattress.
“So?” came the impatient invitation to continue.
“So what?”
“So, then what do I do?” Jon repeated brusquely.
“Well, you either kill it or let it go, of course! What else is there to do? Invite it to brunch?”
“I know that! I’m not an idiot!” Jon erupted furiously, “Good lord, Martin! Do you really think I would have called you because I didn’t know the only two options for dealing with an eight-legged criminal invading my home were kill it or let it go? Really?! Did you suppose this was the very first spider I ever encountered in my life? Is that what you thought? Or perhaps I had my own personal valet to attend to all of my insectoid tribulations, hmm? Just call the bug butler, he’ll attend to it straightaway! Do you ever stop to think before you open your mouth? Or do you customarily just air out whatever inane notions blow through your ears, no matter how puerile? Christ!”
Martin let the phone drop onto the bed beside him, away from the verbal darts hurled directly into his eardrum and taxing the output matrix of the speaker, as Jon launched into an affronted, mortified tirade, smirking and shaking his head.
“It’s too early for this…” he mused to himself ruefully, rubbing both hands over his face and eyes.
Once the phone stopped humming and glowing white hot with remote rage, Martin scooped it back up and yawned into the receiver.
“You alright there, Jon?” he asked in a gentle tone.
A ragged sigh crackled into a blip of feedback from lips too close on the other end of the phone.
“…Not really?” came Jon’s tremulous reply, “Listen, I’m sorry I went off on you. That was unfair of me. I-I just… I really… really hate spiders.”
Something squeezed in Martin’s chest, something about the confident bass flayed neatly out of Jon’s usually assertively solid mannerisms, leaving it abnormally thin and rickety. He sat up on the bed, cradling the phone much more gently to his cheek.
“Hey hey, it’s okay,” he assured him, “If anybody sympathizes about being afraid, you definitely called the right person. Need me to stay on the line with you while you whack it? A good heavy book will probably do the trick, or if you need speed and agility a rolled-up newspaper or a magazine might be better?”
“No! I wasn’t calling because I needed advice on how to murder the damn thing! I’m quite capable of doing that on my own. Frankly, I’ve taken rather a vested interest in honing my spider termination methodology over the years. I called you because… well you were going on about how you thought they were…” Jon trailed off in a series of garbled sounds of disgust, “Cute… of all things.”
Martin grinned and had to put the phone on his bare chest a moment, as if Jon might somehow perceive his giddy glee through the receiver.
“To be fair I’m a little odd that way. Most people feel much the same as you do about them,” he commented as he picked it back up.
“True, but that’s not even the whole of it!” Jon went on exasperatedly, “I also overheard you talking… must have been to Tim or Sasha but… you were explaining about how helpful they are to the ecosystem and what a vital role they play in that natural order of things, and how we always see images of them eating butterflies and beautiful things that make them look sinister, but how really they mostly control pests and the like… how you thought they got kind of a bad rap?”
“Wow I uh… I can’t believe you remembered all that,” Martin muttered, freckled cheeks dusting a light pink, “But what does that have to do with your unwanted houseguest in particular?”
“It was the last part, mainly. That’s what got me. The part about fear. That they’re afraid, too… You said there had been studies that showed a clear fear response in spiders… to us. They’re afraid of us, demonstrably more so than we are of them…”
One word of all of those slipped between Martin’s ribs and into his heart. Too. They were afraid, too. His thumb stroked and consoled the edge of his phone unconsciously as Jon blustered on, unbothered by his own unconscious admission.
“And now I can’t do it! Now I have to set this bloody spider free because you think it’s cute and want to make friends with it, and I can’t make it an innocent victim of my fear and I have no idea how!”
Martin couldn’t help but smile, imagining how Jon must be in his flat on the other end, scrunched in a corner all hunched up shoulders and furrowed brow with hackles bristling, squaring off with a creature who was possessed of no knowledge of the fear she symbolized, or the grace to understand the iconographical divorce to her salvation. Only Jon, quivering and still bed-rumpled and frazzled, could understand the magnitude of cupping that fear in the palm of his hand while reaching out to him with the other. And now Martin understood it, too.
“Hey alright, I’ve got you. Steady on Jon, we’re gonna get through this together. I’ll talk you through the steps, you just follow what I say, okay?” he instructed in his best 999 operator performance.
A beat of silence ensued, followed by a much more robust and emboldened, “Okay.”
“So, what you want to do first is get a glass.”
“A glass?”
“Yeah, like a water glass. And a stiff piece of paper or cardboard or something. If you’ve got a bit of post lying about, flyers and coupons and the like, those usually work well.”
There was a period of distant shuffling, clattering, and indecipherable muttering as Jon gathered his weapons, then sucked in an audible breath through his teeth.
“Alright I’ve got them, now what?” he asked, sounding a bit winded.
“Now you very carefully put the glass over the spider, then slide the paper under the glass so you trap it inside. Then you can take it out without touching it or worrying about it scuttling off on you and set it free wherever you think it’ll be happy!” Martin answered sweetly.
“Okay, okay. I think I can do that,” Jon chanted for steadiness, “I’m putting the phone down so I don’t louse it up, but d-don’t hang up, stay on with me, okay?”
“I’m not going anywhere, Jon. I promise. You’re okay.”
“O-Okay… Okay… Okay…!”
Martin listened as Jon’s voice grew distant, but somehow stronger, more like a war cry, with the soft pad of socked feet on tile, then a short stretch of silence, and then a chorus of oaths and yelping, rising to the crescendo of a door being messily flung open, shut, then opened and shut again. A drumbeat of returning feet rolled mutely close and melded into the scratchy rustle of the phone being picked back up.
“I’m back,” Jon announced.
“Is it done?”
“The deed is done… your little friend is enjoying some lovely pink dahlias out front as we speak.”
“I’m pleased for her! And… for you, too,” Martin said, voice melting into lilting tenderness, “I’m honestly really proud of you, I know that wasn’t easy for you.”
“I… Ah… No, it wasn’t. Thank you, Martin,” came the sheepishly measured rejoinder.
“You’re very welcome.”
Martin smiled privately to himself, and ran a loving thumb down the edge of his phone once more.
“So then may I rightly assume I have permission to come in an hour or so late today so I can go back to sleep?” he continued, already knowing the answer as he flopped back down on his pillows and rolled up into the covers.
He was relieved to hear a husky chuckle rumble through the phone.
“Yes, yes. I think you’ve more than earned it.”
“Brilliant, see you in a bit then? And for lunch?” he added hopefully.
The brief silence as Jon calculated his response hung thick and palpable in the digital airwaves.
“Lunch sounds good,” he replied at length, “See you then.”
“G-Great! Great! See you!”
Their phones clicked mutually off without the awkward jumble of sign-offs, pleasantries, and accidentally stumbling over each other’s words. Martin thought glimmeringly of the spider hunting free in plush pink petals, none the wiser, and of Jon, with new and irrefutable proof that not everything ugly or quietly cunning in the world lurked behind to cast its shadow over him. A spider could be just a spider, and Martin back asleep with both hands still clutching his phone to his chest, dreaming of singing Waterloo again, but this time to a rapt audience and thunderous applause.
Here is a sketch for a vulnerable weepy little gay boy drawing that I am terrified to share (not tma) maybe I'll finish it and maybe I won't, I've been low on spoons.
14. How has your art changed over the years?
Hmmmm I don't know how to word it. I used to draw stuff like this
And now I mainly draw men kissing.
I've definitely "technically" improved but I do miss this kinda...thing. Although I never liked any of my drawings back then and I do like my drawings now so idk!
18. Do you have any larger projects you'd like to pursue
Yeah I have a lot of narrative ideas, some that I would like to be comics and one that I would like to be a book! Unfortunately I have pretty bad ADHD and long form projects are really dificult for me, but Im still optimistic that I could make at least one of them.
are you still taking prompts??? if so maybe some of recent events from helen's perspective??
i’m not listening to s5 until it’s over but how about some earlier helen?
this takes place after helen replacing michael in 101
Helen...is. At least it thinks so. Any state of being is complicated, as they were never meant to be a being. Helen was, and then very quickly and unceremoniously and all at once Helen was not. And they were Helen, and Helen was them. So, Helen was, and Helen is.
The Archivist is, certainly. He’s pretending not to see, keeping his two front eyes shut in her hallways but all the rest of them creak open with curiosity. He follows her with his eyes closed, his hand outstretched to feel the bend and pulse of the wall. The way it shrinks and expands, undulating like an intestine. She wonders if he knows it is feeding on him. Not much. Not enough. But it is, it does. She does.
Already she can begin to feel the buzz of static, faint like the electric hum of a tv going dark. “Ask your questions, Archivist.” She says before he can open his mouth.
The breath that escapes him is punched out, surprised. “I-I-”
All at once that static fizzles out, and the Archivist hangs his head.
He is so very tired.
Helen feels something bubble in her chest that once, before, could have been sorrow. She lifts a hand to his face before she understands why she does it. It’s something Helen would have done, and she- she likes being Helen. Helen isn’t sharp in all the dark places like Michael. Michael had been all hard lines and anger in the sharp shape of revenge. Helen was a hand held out in supplication, warmth in the shadows.
(The thing they were before was never any of that, because it never had to be. It was twisting lines, curving shadows, spirals and fractals. Being hurt. Becoming hurt. And it had turned that hurt on Michael, who had not always been anger and fear and sharp stark lines. And it would turn that hurt on Helen. But not yet. Not yet.)
“Don’t,” The Archivist snarls, that static back all at once and overwhelming, jerking his head back. It leaves a fine line of blood along his jaw where here finger had been. All his eyes turn on her and Helen is split open. “You’re not--” The static pops, crackles, dies. “You’re not her. Don’t--” He is all at once small, shivering. She could feed on him, here. She is so much stronger than him.
But Helen does not want to hurt him. Instead she reaches out her hand, and opens a door.
“Here.” She says.
He opens his eyes and the other ones close. She wonders if he knows about them yet. If he’s seen them. He takes a step out of her hallways into the cool damp of the tunnels below his Archives. He doesn’t say thank you.
“Archivist,” Helen says before he can leave. He turns to look at her, face set into a mask of grim reluctance. “Don’t be a stranger.” His eyes widen and then narrow and her laughter follows him as he storms away, turning down a corridor out of sight.
She touches her face, tapping her finger along her jaw, leaving a bloody mark on the nothing skin there. When she closes the door she pretends not to see the spider’s web, nestled gently in the crook of the door frame.
man i just got home from my fifth mcr show in one week (i went to all 5 LA shows 🥴) and i am. wrecked. both physically and psychically. gonna spend the next 2-4 business years processing this
yeah you are wrecked congratulations you will not be a person for a while. i went to four in one week (boston and new york) and i still havent even looked at my videos from those nights cause im too emotional about it. anyway hows it feel to be gods favoritest children
