#notanightlight

[the-stairs-of-koi-tower]

Hi! I cannot tell you how much I love watching your reactions to the Untamed! It made my Mondays and Wednesdays a little bit brighter during a rough time. If you’re looking for a funny corner of fandom try looking up the channel TheStarFell on YouTube. They do a series called Untamed But Weird and it cracks me up every time! I highly recommend it! All the best!

Aw, thank you! 

I’m definitely giving Untamed But Weird a shot at some point, it gets recced a bunch. <333

[tehri]

The GIF game

Rules: Post a GIF that represents you, but it can’t be from a fandom mentioned in your header/bio; then tag some people thank for thet tag. I was tagged by @panpervinca

How I often feel

@maltedmilkchocolate @peggaboo @poplitealqueen @notanightlight

[call-me-schmidt]

The Iron Hills For Me is such a damn good song, I love every cover I’ve ever heard.

[uniasus]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

fic rec! 14K of gen fun-ness

Summary: Crowley deeply regretted agreeing to go to Anathema’s cookout.  He was irritated, uncomfortable, at wit’s end, and to add insult to injury... he had no idea why.  You’d think after more than 6000 years, Crowley would have already been through every indignity a demonic snake could face!  Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

Comments: This is simply a fun read, Crowley’s being grumpy and the Them being written wonderfuly as a cast of well-meaning, but kinda ridculous group of kids.

But honestly, I think what hit me the most was the implications in the last few paragraphs of the story. The idea that Crowley’s first ever shed is a shine of a shift in Hell, and that he’s leading the charge. It’s delightful enough that I really hope @notanightlight plays with that idea more.

[camsthisky]

7. “Why are you aggressively stripping?” Batfamily please! Because if you make a fic with this funny, I’ll laugh, and if you make it dramatic I will be in awe! I hope you’re having fun!

please keep in mind that it’s been literal months since I have written anything but my original story, so i’m a little out of practice. anyways, here’s some angst.

“Shit,” Dick murmurs through his motorcycle helmet, even thoughbreathing is already starting to get hard. “Shit. Shit. Fuck.”

He’s jumping off his bike before he even fully stops, ripping off hishelmet and throwing it to the Cave floor. His fingers are shaking, but thatdoesn’t stop him from clawing at the seams of his torn uniform. Everything’sgetting blurry, and he’s dizzy.

“Bruce!” Dick wheezes out. Prays he’s loud enough. He doesn’t think so.He tries again just as he finally gets his gloves off. “Bruce!”

Bruce is there in less time than it takes for Dick to fall to his assand start working at a boot. The trembling’s getting worse, and Bruce is kindof just a black blur with a head. It’d be funny if this was any other situation.He gets Dick’s other boot off much faster than Dick can, pushing away Dick’s shakingfingers to start on the one Dick had been working on.

Dick goes for his escrima sticks instead, and they clatter to theground.

“What happened?” Bruce asks, his voice low. Dick starts shovingfrantically at his uniform, can’t get it off fast enough. He’s not breathingright, though, and he’s not really in his right mind. He’s too desperate to gethis uniform off, and Bruce has to ask again, “Dick. You need to calm down andtell me what happened.”

“They had—something,” Dick tries to explain. “Gas, I think. I had mymask, but my uniform was already ripped, and it got into the tears. God, it burns, Bruce. I need—I need—”

Dick can’t finish what he’s saying, but luckily, Bruce starts helpingout of the suit quicker than before. The problem is that Dick’s suit is prettystreamlined. Less armor for quicker movements. It doesn’t come off very easy.

The roar of another motorbike approaches, but Dick doesn’t pay muchattention to it until it stops. There’s the clatter of a helmet hitting theground, and then Jason’s voice, asking, “Woah, woah. Why are we helping Dickhead aggressively strip? And what’s with theburns?” even as he moves to help Dick and Bruce.

A dry sob rips itself from Dick’s throat as Bruce and Jason finally get himout of his suit, because even out of the suit his skin just straight up burns.

“Help me,” Bruce barks at Jason as he crouches down to grip Dick’s arm.Jason snaps something that Dick doesn’t pay attention, but his little brotherstill grabs Dick’s other arm, and the two lift him and practically carry him tothe infirmary.

Dick’s pretty sure he loses consciousness a few times, because all heremembers after that is yelling and flashes of different family memberssurrounding him.

When he finally opens his eyes again, fully awake this time, the burningsensation has been somewhat numbed. Not completely gone, but dulled enough thathe’s not thinking through a frantic haze of pain anymore.

“Dick,” Bruce’s voice calls out, cutting through the silence of theinfirmary. Dick’s eyelashes flutter—he’s exhausted—but he keeps his eyes on hisdad. He’s no longer a blur anymore. Dick can see every detail of his face, andit’s relieving enough that tears prick at Dick’s eyes.

“Bruce,” he whispers. He doesn’t have enough of his voice for anythinglouder.

Bruce’s eyes search his face, looking for something, and Dick feels okayenough to send him a small smile.

“I’m okay,” Dick tells him quietly.

“You’re not,” Bruce says. He’s quiet, too.

Dick hums. “Better than before. Alot better.”

Bruce doesn’t say anything to that, but he does sigh slightly as he sitshimself down in a chair by Dick’s bedside and grabs his son’s hand. Dick intertwinestheir fingers, and Bruce still says nothing. His eyes never leave Dick for morethan a few seconds.

He looks older than he should for a man in his forties. He looks olderthan he had this morning, and Dickhates that tonight, he’s the one to age his dad. Another kid almost died. Anoccupational hazard, Dick might tease any other night. A joke that Bruce neverlaughs at.

Dick probably shouldn’t, either, honestly.

“You okay?” Dick wonders after a little while. “You seem kind of down.”

Bruce’s mouth twitches downward. Not a frown, but close. “You almostdied.”

“Mmm,” Dick hums again. “I mean besides that. Stuck on a case.”

Bruce stares at him for a long moment, and then he sighs, giving in alot quicker than Dick would have ever expected. “Not a case. Tim’s sick withthe flu, I think. I’ve been worried.”

Dick blinks. “Tim’s sick?”

Bruce grunts.

“Does Alfred know?”

“Alfred’s with him now,” Bruce says with a sort of weary sigh. “And thenyou came home with gas burns. You got lucky.”

“Maybe,” Dick says. “Or maybe I was prepared enough to get myself out ofa situation before it killed me. Just like a certain someone taught me.”

Bruce sighs again. “We’ll talk about this in the morning. You’reexhausted and you need sleep.”

“So do you.”

“Go to sleep, Dick.”

Dick glares Bruce down. “I will when you do.”

They stare at each other for almost a whole minute, but Bruce must bemore tired and worried than Dick had thought, because Bruce gives in far tooeasily for someone who Dick has seen perch on the edge of a roof on a stakeoutfor literal hours without moving.

“Fine.” Bruce moves to get up, but Dick squeezes his hand, stopping him.

“I love you,” Dick whispers. “Thanks for being there tonight.”

Bruce squeezes back. “Good night, Dick. I’ll check on you in a fewhours.”

Dick smiles, a little lopsided, but still enthusiastic. “Night, Bruce.”

[star-anise]

@notanightlight  replied to your post “Stop writing men as if modern Western toxic masculinity were the...”

Whoa, I agree that these are some of the nations most talked about when talking about Europe. But what do you mean, “American white people” by it? That totally depends on the part of the USA (assuming you just mean the USA) you’re talking about. The white people from the states in the area my mother came from are predominantly Swedish and Norwegian. The white people in the area I grew up in were mostly Irish, Polish, Slovakian, Czech, German, and Italian. That is massively oversimplified.

Well, that’s the thing. “White people” is a totally made-up oversimplified category.  But being made up doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Whiteness is literally what happens when you take distinct European ethnicities and feed them all into a sociological meatgrinder.

Here is the actual explanation of this photograph, taken without exaggeration or embellishment directly from its item description by The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation:

Melting Pot Ceremony at Ford English School, July 4, 1917 

Graduates of Ford's English School wearing their "native dress" descend into a large pot labeled "The American Melting Pot." After going through a virtual smelting process, the immigrant's identity was boiled away, leaving a new citizen to emerge from the pot wearing American clothes and waving American flags. In an attempt to address the need to integrate growing numbers of foreign workers at Ford's Highland Park Plant, the company established the Ford English School in 1914. The school focused on training immigrants in the English language and providing civics lessons necessary to become US citizens. Ford's English School provided basic citizenship and language training for so many immigrants, that the US Naturalization Service counted graduation from the Ford English School as meeting most of the requirements needed to take the citizenship exam. 

Whiteness as a culture, a force, an identity, is fundamentally based on the erasure of all other differences between white people. The degree to which someone can be considered “white” is, in many ways, the degree to which they have been assimilated into whiteness, which is not just about skin or hair colour.

So, to link back to the thing being discussed originally: Becoming American, or becoming white, for men, has meant leaving ethnic dress behind and putting on suits in muted colours. It has meant learning to carry themselves with a certain body language, to restrain their emotions in a certain way, to limit their body language, their expressiveness, their interest in arts or culture. This is why different groups--Irish, Russian, Armenian, Italian, Greek, or Latino--have been variously classified as “white” and “not white” over time, without actually changing that much physically; it’s about how much they’re perceived to have assimilated.

When American media wants to depict a light-skinned man as “foreign”, how do they mark him as foreign aside from giving him an accent? They make him too expressive, or too emotive; he makes too much physical contact, or his clothing is too nice or too colourful, or he cares about dance or music more than the American characters. 

That is not to say American men, or white men, don’t do things counter to the masculine stereotype. They do! Of course they do! And I applaud them for it! But they get socially punished for breaking out of their gendered roles. 

A lot of my thoughts about masculinity lately were prompted by watching a performance by a professional Ukrainian dance company, whose men do get to wear colours and be bold and flamboyant and powerful and aesthetically focused. I’ve know boys who were part of the company’s dance school, and I used to be amazed at the difference between them as your average softspoken Canadian nice white boy in English, and confident, self-possessed, brilliant performers when they talked about dance or spoke Ukrainian. It was the difference between an identity kept out of the meatgrinder of whiteness (Canadian authorities resisted Ukrainian immigrants for a long time, dubious that they would ever successfully assimilate into general Anglo whiteness) and the white identities they assimilated into to fit into society.

And yeah, some European traditions are the heart of whiteness, the people who pushed the ideals that got held up as the universal standard, and they’re who gets talked about when we talk about “western cultures” and “western values”, but I do that honestly because this concept of “The West”, of “white”, of “American”, of “European”, has always been constructed to mean “this ideal, and anyone who fits the demographic but not the ideal gets pushed aside.”

[fishfingersandscarves]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!! Hope it was great!

Thanks Nota!!! It was!! :)

[musicalluna]

notanightlight replied to your post: pancetta pasta and roasted broccoli!

Looks yummy!

it waaaaas. PASTA