lazyfestivalheart

Latest Posts by lazyfestivalheart

evan 'buck' buckley core

Fem andreil

maybe this is just me idk

nothing in my mind except neil josten doing those gimmicky interviews

lie detector interview? he lies flawlessly. they ask him what team he’s on to test it and he says the trojans. the needle doesn’t move. no one knows what to do

answering the internet’s most googled question? neil doesn’t give away shit. (“what is neil jostens favorite hobby?” “lying to cops”) every question is answered with some version of your mother or an anecdote about something illegal

hot wings but neil and kevin do it versus each other. it quickly devolves into psychological warfare. neil adds hot sauce to kevin’s wing when he’s not looking

neil takes a buzzfeed which exy player are you the most like and when he gets riko he just walks out

literally any gimmicky pr stunt just dissolves into chaos

Thinking about Wymack putting up with Neil, alone, during his senior year. None of the other foxes are there to deal with his antics. Kevin isn’t there to talk about everything Exy related. Andrew isn’t there to keep him grounded and sane. Allison and Nicky aren’t pushing him out of his comfort zone with his style, appearance, etc. Matt isn’t there to be a friend. Dan can’t help him captain his team. Aaron isn’t there to annoy him. Renee isn’t there with her gentle, reassuring smile.

I know that some of the freshman from the EC become Neil’s friends, but it isn’t the same as the OG Foxes.

So, he turns to one of the few people he trusts, Dad Wymack™️. Neil joins him in his office for lunch and tells him all about Andrew’s most recent Exy game. “Did you see how many saves Andrew made last night?” 38. It was beautiful.” *heart eyes* Coach returns his attention to the paperwork he was working on when Neil walked in. He half listens as the striker explains a movie that Nicky said he needed to watch to understand current trends.

After a game night, Neil goes home with Wymack, who now lives together with Abby, and stays for dinner with the couple, yapping about everything that plagued him that day. “I talked to Andrew last night and he was telling me about this drill his pro team does at practice. He thinks it’s stupid, of course, but I think it could help us get through the other team’s defense easier.” He goes on to explain the drill between bites of pasta and sauce.

When Neil leaves, Coach looks at Abby, feeling slightly dumbfounded, “I never knew the kid could say so many words in such a short time.” Abby lets out a chuckle.

“I don’t get any paperwork finished anymore with him around so much.” He explains with fake annoyance. She gives him a soft smile, “He just misses Andrew and the rest of our Foxes. I think it’s says a lot that he trusts you with the details of his private life. We all know how hard that is for him.”

Dad Wymack sits in his thought for a quiet minute, thinking back to the locker room in Millport with the brown-haired, brown-eyed boy who was scared to live. To the airport before the new year with the red-haired, blue-eyed boy who was fighting for his family. To a cheap motel in Baltimore with a boy covered in scars who fought to stay and live. Neil has come a long way and Wymack’s chest swells with pride and love for the striker.

Two days later, on Monday, Neil shows up right on time for Wymack’s lunch hour, but the older man doesn’t mind the sound of Neil’s chattering over their shared lunch. “Allison told me my hair is getting too long, but the shampoo she sent me is making my curls look “delicious”. I don’t know what she means by that, how hair can look edible, but Andrew says not to worry about it. Speaking of Andrew, do you know how much he has been bench pressing in the gym? He’s up to—“

Wymack lets out a quiet, exasperated sigh as he leans back in his chair, accepting his fate for the next year as Neil continues talking. He may act annoyed about his new lunch time guest, but it means a lot that Neil feels safe with him, even if that means learning about pop culture and Neil’s distaste for broccoli.

Me: *Goes through ao3 tag*

Me: *Reaches the end*

Me: *Goes through ao3 tag with lower standards*

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

Yea I know thank you darling 🙃🙃

hey its me your immune system. looks like we caught somethin here. try sneezing real fast see if that gets rid of it. yeah no dice, huh... alright lemme try filling your lungs with fluid. no yeah i do it all the time dont worry works like a charm. hmmm... still no good... alright well just hold tight here for a minute maybe it just needs time to start working. in the mean time ill go fire up the ol' neuron cooker n see if that helps

saw a video abt how the “toxic boy mom” thing is just emotional incest/enmeshment and i was like yeah correct. then i looked at the comments and it was all ppl blaming the sons??? mocking them, saying they should just get over it, saying no woman should ever date them, that if their mom is like that then it’s their fault for “allowing” it and like. y’all i do not know how else to explain that a parent abusing their child (bc that’s what emotional incest is) is not the child’s fault. if you realize your partner is a victim of enmeshment/emotional incest, you should handle it the same way you would with any other abuse victim, with care and tact and offers of support. not mockery and blame. jesus christ.

i do find it very interesting how different the foxes and the trojans go about caring for and supporting each other. well, actually, i mostly find it interesting how differently people seem to feel about it, especially in regards to kevin's drinking problem.

the way kevin's clearly unhealthy relationship with alcohol doesn't get condemned or fixed in the original trilogy for example is something that many people in the fandom have been pretty upset and critical about for many years and jean's reaction to it seemed to have really moved people (though that in particular, imo, had at least as much to do with jean's very restricted and in itself unhealthy relationship to food and drinks as with him uniquely seeing and caring about kevin's substance abuse issues. like, yeah, he really, really cares about him, but i don't think he'd have been thaaat much less upset if kevin was coping by eating chips or something. but well, whatever).

but to me, that never really read as no one caring about kevin or thinking alcohol is the ideal way for him to regulate his emotions.

the whole premise of how wymack runs the foxes and how they treat each other is just very built around the idea that all these people have been through awful things and that the way they'll cope with that won't always be pretty. but as long as they cope at all, they'll be around for another day, and another, which'll buy them to actually get better.

which is how you get stuff like wymack, in good conscience, not only tolerating but at times even soliciting underage drinking. and looking past the harder drugs some of the team are doing. and it's how him and the team all accept that neil is definitely lying about pretty much everything but mostly just leave him be. and how they all agreed to let andrew get off his legally mandated medication during games even though that could have terrible consequences for all of them. and how matt's mom said "sure random eighteen year old calling me on the phone, do give my addict son speedballs, you seem to have a higher success rate at getting teenagers clean than me 👍" because they all view life less as you're either doing good or you doing bad, and more as you're either surviving whatever it takes to do so, or you don't, so who cares if you aren't coping in healthy or acceptable ways, as long as you are coping. (and then once they're ready to work on getting better, they do have a support system in place to help them get there)

meanwhile the trojans are mostly pretty normal and well adjusted, so they have a pretty clear idea of what a healthy person who's doing well looks like, and that's what they generally want for other people, especially those they care about. so when they see someone who's not doing well and not dealing with it in healthy ways they are very direct about it, sort of a "your behaviour is not healthy, stop doing it" thing. your eating habits are really restrictive? try eating different food anyways, it's really good, i prommy. you hurt yourself when you're upset? here's how to physically stop this from hurting. you get incredibly startled when you're touched unexpectedly? well, just let me try hugging you again. you drink to deal with your feelings? please don't, it's not good for you.

and obviously that's a lot more normal and straight forward than what the foxes are doing, and it's done with love and support. and a lot of fans find it very moving and beautiful and sweet. but i also know that i'm not the only person who was really put off by this and still finds it kinda disconcerting. to me it feels, especially in contrast to the foxes, who would largely find this sooo overbearing and rude and uncomfortable, kinda like strongarming someone into doing well, with (at least in the context of these specific books) shockingly little regard for personal boundaries.

my point isn't that one's better than the other or anything, i think both approaches are going to work differently well for different people and within the books it makes perfect sense why the different teams would act this way, and it's also perfectly understandable why some people really resonate with one approach and find the other irritating or unkind. it's simply some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head. building up to: nothing really. oh well

Cooked him fried him boiled him alive

straight men have beauty standards for men that are completely different than the beauty standards women and gay men have for men and then they get mad when they conform to the beauty standards other podcast bros set for them and women still don’t find them attractive

happy birthday neil homojosten pretty sure you’re the same age as my mother now

GUYS I JUST SAW THIS ON TWITTER AND I AM DYING

we're running out of scenarios I fear

telemachus’s gorgeous parents, odysseus and penelope

the queen’s gaze is as sharp and cunning as her husband’s, perhaps that is why he overlooked the beautiful helen for her. her bright eyes only seem to soften for him

there is something to be said about how the the two major “socially inferior” characters—wei wuxian and jin guangyao—were shown to be extremely skilled at people-reading and cognizant of the social, hm, dynamics throughout the story. not in the same exact way, of course. wei wuxian’s social competence was about knowing how to approach people and endear them to him and knowing what to ask to receive what he wants, usually in terms of information. jin guangyao was amazing at anticipating other people’s needs and what they want to hear and thereby delivering things in a way that would placate them.

i bring this point up because these were two characters granted the least amount of social grace and yet the expectation was that they must maintain the niceties or be deemed singularly arrogant (we see this happen with wei wuxian because he does end up going openly against the sects; where behaviour previously considered unobtrusive is now labelled as attitude problems lol). i mean, while i do commend wei wuxian’s attempt to present his request about the wen remnants to jin guangshan with politeness, it’s also so bafflingly out-of-place in a situation where he’s rightfully calling out the unfair atrocities the wen remnants were being subjected to. jin guangyao’s entire character is built on his specific method of rising through ranks using his honeyed tongue and ability to not let the naysayers get to him. “son of a servant” and “son of a prostitute” are thrown at them and these tags can reduce everything good they have done for the cultivation society in the blink of an eye because they are, infact, considered to be valid criticism of their character. it’s the dichotomy of it where jiang cheng and nie mingjue and jin guangshan can be crude and aggressive and predatory and receive, at most, hushed criticism but have their authority intact, while wei wuxian and jin guangyao’s very standing is threatened by the callback to their social status. how they are forced to be so aware of people and their ways of thinking and make all these interpersonal considerations while the other characters are allowed to be way less self-aware about their behaviours in social settings because their position was never threatened to begin with. how wei wuxian’s “manipulative” abilities and jin guangyao’s “cunning” were products of their treatment by the cultivation world in the first place.

neil is so cute actually. to me. like imagine him trying to bake smth for andrew and getting flour on his face (all over his clothes rlly) and then showing it to andrew later (it looks terrible. but andrew eats it all and neil just Beams at him) like wow hes so cute :) okay now that you've imagined that please remember his two happiest memories that he uses to fall asleep at night both include someone getting shot in the head. and this is like his counting sheep. this is what he uses as a comforting bed time story. like does this not just make him more cutsie??

Can you share your designs of Hera? I'm really curious and your artstyle is amazing

hera before zeus ruined her life and she became a bitter woman and resentful mother

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

he doesn't deserve this

passages that make me want to hit Xichen with a steel chair

People talk about Max not wanting a competitive teammate but turns out Lewis made Toto promise to not sign Max -https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1064593/1/toto-wolffs-max-verstappen-promise-lewis-hamilton-revealed

No one wants a competitive teammate. There is no benefit to having someone as good or better than you in the same car. This “they push me harder” is a lie and it’s cope. If you need someone to push the best performance out of you you’re probably the type of person who is motivated by fear of not being good enough.

Max and Lewis are probably the two drivers I’d say genuinely believe there’s no one better than them. But it would still be a nuisance to have each other as teammates. For Lewis it would have been absolutely career killer to be next to someone so much younger because everyone would see Max as the one who would carry on after Lewis retires. Not to mention Max cares absolutely nothing for team games and has a pretty aggressive team of people around him. Even if lewis thinks he’d ultimately come out on top why would he want to invite that conflict into his “home”.

Max is probably not scared to lose to a teammate, more he’s comfortable in his environment and doesn’t want anyone rocking the boat. Who wants to come to work with some anxious little gremlin nipping at your heels, or someone with a pompous father complaining all the time, or an ageing champion making imperious demands.

Sacrificing your comfort to prove you can beat people you’ve already cooked is so counterintuitive. Idk why people lay that at Max’s door like he’s “scared” of good drivers. Man just wants a good work environment

sick post i just found online. sorry i couldnt find the source

The foxes asked in the group chat how Neil was doing with the new freshmen, this is the photo they get as an answer (Neil got put in air jail after pissing off everyone that day.)

Tell them the air is halal too

I cannot overstate how much I love Tom Lehrer's story. It sounds so fake but is entirely real.

He's a goddamn genius- he started studying mathematics at Harvard when he was 15 and graduated magna cum laude. He worked at Los Alamos for a few years before being drafted and working for the NSA, where he claims to have invented jello shots to get around alcohol bans.

He then went back to Harvard for a couple years before starting to teach political science at MIT.

Through all of that, he was writing and performing both some of the funniest shit you'll ever hear (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango) and absolutely scathing political satire (Who's Next, Wernher von Braun, Send the Marines). Until the mid/late 60s counterculture gained momentum. He didn't like their aesthetic, so he stopped making music.

Shortly after, he moved to California and started teaching math and musical theater history at the UC Santa Cruz for the next 30 years.

I don't know if non-Californians understand just how goddamn funny that is. It's where stoners and math (and now computer science) kids who couldn't get into Berkeley go. Leaving Harvard/MIT for UCSC is peak academic phoning it in. And by all accounts he had a blast.

Plus the whole putting all of his music in the public domain thing. That fucked.

Nathan stands at his left. Mary stands at his right.

Neil doesn’t turn to look at them, but he can feel them there—one carved into his ribs, the other burned into his skin.

He is made of them.

Of his father’s brutality, his mother’s desperation. Of bruises layered over bruises, of fists and sharp words and the lesson that pain was the only thing he could count on.

Nathan’s voice is smooth, proud, as it murmurs in his ear.

"You were built for more than this, Nathaniel."

Mary’s whisper is sharp, urgent, dripping with every frantic mile they ever ran.

"You don’t understand what it means to survive."

Nathan had tried to shape him into something ruthless. Mary had tried to strip him down to something weightless.

And neither of them had ever asked what he wanted to be.

Neil closes his eyes.

Nathan’s presence is heavy, all iron and control and the scent of blood that will never wash away.

Mary’s is lighter, but just as cruel—a ghost that lingers, a reminder that even love can leave bruises.

They will always be here.

Because Neil is made of them.

Of a father who saw him as a tool, and a mother who saw him as a liability.

Of a life spent running, and a body full of evidence that he was never meant to survive this long.

His shoulders ache under the weight of them.

And no matter how far he goes, they will never leave.