A

As soon as I see that jacket again in the first episode I WILL burst into tears like a big ol baby ;A;

thinking about c!phil. c!phil & techno & how they are soldiers who breathe violence -- how that impacts phil's parenting.

thinking about how they canonically fought together as the antarctic empire. thinking about phil & techno as fellow soldiers, both emotionally stunted, & how they found solace in knowing the other is absolutely loyal. an bloodforged unspoken trust deeper than any verbal oath they could've made. thinking about how often they might have pushed through pain & left it festering & unaddressed bc it was all they knew: don't talk about it. carry on & deal with trauma only when it crops up. it's probably the way both of them deal with it best, but that's not... mentally sustainable.

thinking about how c!phil consistently resorts to violence to solve the big problems (wilbur, l'manberg). thinking about how he can't address ~emotions~ for squat. thinking about how c!techno does the same things.

thinking about the probable lessons they learned from war. the ends justify the means. violence is the only language that people respect. pay an insult back a hundredfold to establish your strength; people will back off. trauma is weakness & people will take advantage of it. keep your true feelings & loyalties close to your chest & continually reevaluate the situation. alliances could fall apart any moment, any situation could be a trap, so paranoia is survival. if you need to, make the hard choice & live with it. blunt the emotional pain by bottling up/dulling your emotions--whatever works. (I'm not super familiar with SMP Earth, so please add some examples if you are!)

thinking about how all of this really doesn't translate well to parenting.

but if that's all c!phil knows, we can't expect him to do it differently.

sherlock gets bored between cases (lonely, mrs hudson thinks, but he scoffs when she tells him so), and he starts tinkering with things around the flat. even though he makes a mess, she generally doesn’t mind because when he’s done pulling things apart, he usually puts them back together again, mostly in the right order. and on occasion things even end up put together a little better than before. the latch on the sitting room door no longer sticks. the tap in the bath no longer drips. the door on the oven no longer squeaks.

but then lestrade calls while the pieces of the kitchen lamp are still strewn across the table and the worktop, while dark wires still snake down from the ceiling, precarious and ready to bite. sherlock’s only halfway done with the tinkering and not at all done with the putting back together, but there’s a case, and it’s a beautiful one–a body in a place it wasn’t meant to be, a piece of evidence that leads them in a circle rather than in a straight line to a suspect, a motive, an arrest–and sherlock has no interest in the inner workings of kitchen lamps when he has the inner workings of a murder to pull apart instead. 

it takes days to even begin to solve, and every time mrs hudson comes up to dust or to trade out a fresh sandwich for the untouched one she’d left the day before, she presses the switch out of habit and is greeted by a shower of angry golden sparks. sherlock holmes, she demands around the drum of her heart against her fragile ribs, but he’s too caught up in the labyrinth of the case, in the sticky mire of his own head to even hear her. so she does what any sensible landlady would do when faced with the aftermath of a bored consulting detective: she gets a man in. 

she plucks his name out of the telephone directory because she knew a watson once, and he was a solid and dependable sort. when she phones, the voice on the other end of the line is a little distant, a little sad perhaps, but cordial enough, and he agrees to come round today if she doesn’t mind that it might not be until late. she tries to warn sherlock, but she’s sure he hasn’t heard. at least with a case on, there’s only a slim chance he’ll be sheet-clad when the electrician arrives–they don’t need a repeat of the plumber incident. still, she thinks, the fright would serve sherlock right for leaving her kitchen in such a state. nevertheless, when the man knocks on the door at half four, she leads him upstairs herself, sure to step in all the places that squeak, to knock, to open the door slowly so sherlock isn’t caught unaware. she half-expects him to still be nearly catatonic in his chair, knees tucked up under his chin, a habit that makes him look so endearingly young. but instead she finds him at the window, the afternoon light warming his skin and streaking the dark smudge of his hair with fiery mahogany. oh, sherlock dear, she says as the electrician limps up the last of the stairs, this man’s here to see about the–

sparks. 

the word slips out of john watson’s mouth on a whisper of breath as he stutters to a stop in the doorway. mrs hudson’s brow wrinkles, yes exactly, that’s what… she turns back to sherlock to find him similarly frozen and wide-eyed, a gentle blush blossoming in his cheeks. …i was going to… and back to john just as he starts to come back to himself, pulling his shoulders back and his spine up straighter, looking almost as if he doesn’t even need the cane in his hand.

right, she says, the hint of a smile curling around the word. i’ll just… she slips around john watson, throwing a glance back over her shoulder as sherlock flutters into motion, hurrying off toward the kitchen and offering to clear away some of the mess gathered there. her feet are light on the steps as she continues back down to her flat, the grin across her mouth growing bolder. she shuts her door tight and turns up the telly.

sherlock holmes and john watson. 

sparks indeed.

Hoy me duele Lima

Hoy me duele Lima,

y hoy me duele Italia.

Hoy me duele Argentina,

y también Australia.

Hoy me duele las vidas que no llegué a vivir.

Hoy me duelen las mentiras que no llegué a decir.

Hoy me duelen las noches por las que he llorado.

Hoy me duelen las tardes en que me he alegrado.

Hoy me duele Lima, la Lima con esplendor.

Hoy me duele Lima, la Lima con amor.

Hoy me duelen las noches estrelladas.

Hoy me duelen los días y las tardes desoladas.

Hoy me duele Lima, pero la Lima que me ha amado,

no la que nunca estuvo de mi lado.

(content warning: blood)

Sewed Up Heart

[ID: A Trigun comic done in grayscale with red accents. First, an anatomical heart gushes blood, forming a puddle which shifts into Vash's coat. Vash's gloved hands can be seen sewing up a tear at the hem.

Vash raises his hands, which are now bare and covered in blood. He looks sweaty and distressed, and he raises his coat to his face and cries into it. His clenched hands rip the sewed portion apart, and the red thread leads to a heart whose own stitches are tearing apart. The background gets darker and darker, and the red looks brighter and starker against it.

Then the background returns to white, and brown-skinned hands using embroidery scissors snip a red thread. Wolfwood holds up Vash's repaired coat, grinning proudly, and does a happy thumbs-up in Vash's direction. Vash lifts his head, seeming distant.

Wolfwood holds out the coat. As Vash puts out his hand to take it, the cloth is replaced so Wolfwood is dropping a sewed-up heart in Vash's hand. Vash rubs the coat against his face with a teary smile. End ID] ID CREDITS

To all my freshman babies who are panicking right now about how much your college textbooks cost: Yeah, you’re right, that’s some highway robbery. No, you don’t have to lie down and take it. You have options. Follow my advice and fly on your own debt free wings.

1. Forgoe the bookstore entirely. Sometimes you can get a good deal on something, usually a rental, but it’s usually going to be considerably more expensive to go through official channels. Outsmart them, babies.

2. Does your syllabus call for edition eight? Get edition seven. Old editions are considered worthless in the buyback trades, so they sell for dirt cheap, no matter how new they are. It’s a gamble, sure; there might be something in edition eight you desperately need, but that never happened to me. However, I’ve only ever pulled this stunt for literature/mass comm/religious studies books, so I don’t know it would work in the sciences.

3. Thriftbooks.com, especially for nonfiction and fiction. Books are usually four or five dollars unless they’re really new, and shipping is 99 cents unless you buy over 10$ in books, in which case shipping is free. 

4. Bigwords.com. It will scan every textbook seller on the internet for the lowest price available, and will do the same to find the highest price when you try to sell your books back at the end of term. Timesaver, lifesaver.

5. In all probability, your library offers a service called interlibrary loan which is included in your tuition. This means if your library doesn’t carry a book you can order it for free from any library nationwide in your library’s network and it will be shipped to you in a number of days. Ask a librarian to show you how to search for materials at your library as well as though interlibrary loan; you’ll need to master this skill soon anyway.  If you get lucky you can just have your required reading shipped to you a week before you need to start reading, then renew vigorously until you no longer need to item. I’m saving over 100$ on a History of Islam class this way.

You professors might side-eye you for bringing an old edition or a library copy, but you just smile right back honey, because you can pay your rent and go clubbing this month. You came here to win. So go forth and slay.

Another sketch commission 💜

Dante's last words (a prayer)

I hope that the heavens are kind to you, that your future is bright. I pray that He'll hold you in his arms and that you'll let yourself be saved.

I love you, I'm sorry.

I'll miss you.

happy fucking birthday sad-ist and congrats for carrying this fandom on your back, who would we be without you