[moszertone]

William Teason - book cover for "We Have Always Lived in the Castle"

by Shirley Jackson

[artemissoftstepper]

need a bad sleep reset

this is a very delicate operation which involves not falling asleep until the late enough tomorrow that i can get a normal nights sleep

[voxelfoxkae]

[aspenspeaks]

If you want to actually fix your sleep schedule you need to consistently go to bed half an hour earlier than the night before AND either keep your wake up time the same OR consistently wake up half an hour earlier as well, until you are sleeping at the times you actually want to be asleep at. This is of course, very difficult to do but does actually work.

[gothiccharmschool]

This is the first time I've seen the Insomniac's Gambit post with instructions on how to fix your sleep schedule.

Will it work for someone who has Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder? No idea.

Will it absolutely suck to try it? Oh yes.

[recreationaldivorce]

fantasy authors love to daringly ask: what if racism was correct

[tragicwaif]

these people really don’t like being told that people simply didn’t like their art enough to reblog it

[tragicwaif]

this was my bitchy answer but my real answer is that no matter what less people are going to reblog your post that are going to like it, and less people are going to like it than have seen it, and that’s just inevitably how engagement on literally anything at all works. And expecting otherwise is setting yourself up for failure LOL

[funkyfeefee]

The thing about American "leftist" comedians is that they aren't actually leftist, they are the Imperial Court Jesters. They stand on a stage, point directly at the blood-soaked gears of the war machine, make a little tee-hee noise, and the crowd erupts. Not because they are critiquing the machine, but because the laughter is a pressure release valve for the people inside it. Take the video of that stand-up asking the defense contractor if she helped Trump bomb those 160 Iranian school girls, and everyone laughing, including the contractor herself. That laughter is ritual absolution. The contractor laughs because she knows she will never face a tribunal. The audience laughs because they get to feel "self-aware" without having to actually stop anything. The joke doesn't condemn the contractor; it humanizes her, turns her into a lovable scamp who just happens to have a job graphing the velocity of shrapnel through children's bodies. By making it a punchline, the comedian sanitizes the atrocity. The blood is scrubbed off the stage. The audience gets to say "wow, we are so edgy for talking about it" while the person who builds the bombs gets to chuckle and order another drink. It is not satire, it is a team-building exercise for the empire.

Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

Americans don't hate the machine; they love the output. They hate the mess of it. So they turn it into jokes, into aesthetic, into "whatever." Because if they stopped laughing, if they stopped scrolling, if they actually looked at the 4K drone footage of the aftermath instead of the cool explosion CGI in their movies, they would have to realize that the lithium in their phones, the gas in their tanks, and the comfort of their suburban cul-de-sacs are all greased with the fat of foreign children. And they can't handle that. So they laugh. They turn it into a vibe. They call it "the Iraq war or whatever." You can't deconstruct the master's house with the master's jokes, especially when the punchline is the corpses holding up the floorboards.

[koinottsumi]

Just so you know, the words ‘just’ and ‘cramps,’ they don’t go together.

Ginger Snaps (2000)

[ebogosian]

ASSAD ZAMAN as ARMAND in The Vampire Lestat • 1.01, Detroit

[astrlgray]

"I feel him"

[hollowwaveremnant]

Happy Assad Zaman Day! I cannot wait to see Armand this weekend!

[crithir]

Yanno who would never be a dick to trick-or-treating children, even while dealing with PPD in the middle of an apocalypse?

Yeah that’s right

[tavina-writes]

People have real issues understanding why the absence of romance and sexual desire is such a big deal. "No one bothers you over your sexual orientation! You're basically a straight person!" No wrong. The older you get the more your life is considered a failure for failing to find a life partner and get your 2.5 kids in.

Like people make fun of middle aged women for not getting married or being divorced or "always the bridesmaid never the bride" and all like "oh she's desperate! No one wants her! Old maid!' but they become straight up hostile and upset when you tell them you never want to date.

Being unpartnered after your mid twenties is just like "oh what's wrong with you" and "don't worry you'll find your guy" "aren't you afraid of being alone" "who will take care of you" "you're running out of time to have kids" and no matter what you are or aren't people straight up don't understand that you don't want them.

[lesbianmarrow]

although how do you say iwtv transcended gender struggle when louis & lestat’s relationship is in many ways an allegory for an abusive heterosexual relationship and the book is using it to comment on how the patriarchal family structure is inherently violent toward the wife and children. did anne do all that on accident?

[pinayelf]

white europeans calling race an "american construct" when their ancestors invented it to justify chattel slavery always makes me feel insane

[weepingwidar]

Casey Weldon (US-American, 1979) - Curtains (2026)

[murfpersonalblog]

IWTVL S3 Ep2 Musings - Pimping Lestat? (Vulture Recap)

This Vulture reviewer is SO off the mark (not just about this topic; but up & down the article). I just need to clear things up, since clearly folks are confused AF at how power dynamics actually work here. 🙄

1) Christine Claire is NOT whoring out Lestat

She does not own him; he does not owe her any debt. She is NOT his pimp, she's his EMPLOYEE. She is his LAWYER shark (and an incredibly unethical, offensive, & hypocritical degenerate). Yeah, she's bossy AF (she's in charge of The Brand™), but she's not HIS boss (paying HIS salary/bills/etc).

Yes, as Lestat's lawyer, it's her job to dictate certain actions he takes, in order to stop him from doing anything dangerously stupid that might get him SUED into oblivion or ARRESTED--and put her out of a JOB. It's her job to make sure he pays as little money to anyone as possible, and to weasel him out of any sticky situations, even if he IS at fault.

Because "Thomas Pitt" was threatening to SUE Lestat for damages to the hotel, Christine legally had to agree to the meeting ("That's your job, lover." "I'm doing my job, motherf*r."). The "exclusive fan experience" was compulsory--it's part of the litigious threat, that things would get worse if Lestat wasn't present so "Pitt" could negotiate with him face-to-face. "Do I HAVE to "f**k him?" Do I HAVE to show up to the meeting & do what Pitt says? "YES." It's a LEGAL dispute, not a literal sexual hookup. Christine's not "whoring" Lestat out to anyone for her own benefit--it's for HIS benefit. He MUST go to PRIVATE 2-on-2 meeting and agree to "Pitt's" terms if he doesn't want the CIVIL lawsuit escalated to the PUBLIC COURTROOM in front of a JUDGE. 💀 Settle this out of COURT and do the sit-down whether you want to or not.

2) Louis is NOT whoring Lestat out by owning 45% of his merch

This detail got leaked so many months ago and people were talking about it, Omg, Pimp Louis owns Lestat's band, Louis owns Lestat, omg~! NO. Getting a cut of merch profits is NOT the same as owning Lestat or his band. Louis is NOT in charge of Lestat's band or own them in any way shape or form. He doesn't even manufacture or distribute the merch--he's a SHAREHOLDER who just gets a (very large) cut of whatever's bought & sold, because he helps financially back the businesses that DO make/promote/sell the merch. If anything, it actually proves that FlopStat's TVL Brand™ was next to worthless when Lestat was starting up, that no other investors stepped forward with competitive interest in his merch at all, to outbid Louis' 45%. 💀

Because Lestat IS a flop & doesn't sell out venues, the band's not making much money in ticket sales (let alone album sales). So the merch (which is a separate money source from tickets & album sales BTW!) becomes their main nest egg. All shareholders get a cut of merch sales, them's the brakes--and you can have plenty of shareholders backing merch. But the "nightmarish situation" Lestat's in wrt Louis claiming darn near half his merch profits is that no matter how much money the band makes off of merch sales, half of it's going into LOUIS of all people's pockets for backing it in the first place.

The same guy their songs are cussing out & defaming & slandering is PROFITING off the tour--not thru the songs/albums themselves or the tickets, but thru the MERCH. So every time Lestat's face/logo is plastered anywhere, he's just making Louis money. 😎🤑

[victoria-pedretti]

FORBIDDEN FRUITS 2026 — dir. Meredith Alloway

[oldpaintings]

The end of a dream, c. 1908 by Giuseppe Pennasilico (Italian, 1861--1940)