the confidential garbage dump

Imagine if one day you were given a choice: Become immortal and indestructible for eternity, unable to be harmed by anything ever again, and get to live forever.

However, in order to achieve that you must give up whatever your purpose in life is. Whatever it is that you were always meant to do, what you were supposed to contribute to the overall scheme and future of the life of the universe, your purpose… the whole reason you were even created, even born in the first place. You must give that up. You don’t know what that is. You’ll never know; But, regardless, you say yes.

Perhaps you assume you wouldn’t have made any sort of significant difference anyway. That butterfly effect theory or whatever they call it? Nah, you call bullshit. It doesn’t matter - you don’t matter, at least not to anything outside of your immediate connections - and it’ll all be fine, and you’ll just live forever with minimal (or maybe even no) consequences.

So, yay! You’re now immortal. You’ll never die or get hurt ever again. Wee!

But then, centuries and centuries later (not to mention that by this point you’ve gone through horrible heartbreak and misery and despair because every loved one you ever had, every friend you ever made, ever person you barely got to know, has passed away, died as you lived on long without them, helpless to do anything for them as you watched them perish, unable to ever go with them or ever see them again. But I digress), now, you learn you actually were important in the grand scheme of things. You were supposed to be a key factor in the world’s survival, long ago; but, because of the choice you made (immortality over individual purpose), you were never given the knowledge or awareness or resources or ability to save the world that you were always supposed to obtain, before you unknowingly made the wrongest choice to ever wrong.

Needless to say, you’ve fucked up big time.

The entire universe as we know it is destroyed soon after this horrifying revelation. It implodes, collapses in on itself, essentially forming a massive black hole or something. Stars, nebulae, galaxies, solar systems and planets, worlds and worlds of living people and things, and light-years of time and space and life, all sucked up into absolute, indefinite nothingness.

But you remain.

Just you. Floating amongst, spiraling around, rocketing through, suspended in… nothing. With a feeling of such unbelievable loneliness that your feeble brain can hardly perceive, can’t possibly hope to comprehend. Not only are you the only living thing left, you don’t even have one inanimate object to keep you company. You have literally. Nothing. And you are literally nowhere. I mean, technically, you are now the universe - if it would bring you petty comfort to think about it that way. You. Only you. With nothing, no one, nowhere. Forever. And ever. And ever.

All because you thought you didn’t matter. That you had no real, meaningful purpose. That you could never possibly make a difference.

But you did. And now look what you’ve gotten yourself into, you silly nugget. You’re gonna be pretty bored and lonely for that eternity, huh?

Or maybe it was out of selfishness. Maybe this wasn’t because you felt useless, but because you simply only cared about prolonging your own life and nothing else. Hm.

The moral here? Be selfless, and always know and remember that you matter.

Or else, one day, you might destroy the universe. And be left to suffer, and be tortured horribly and endlessly by the void of nothingness that has consumed you. With no way to escape. Ever.

Other moral because I got sidetracked from my initial point - all things considered, would you choose longevity over purpose? Immortality over meaning? 

OR, IDK, MAYBE SOME IDIOT JUST LAMINATED A STUPID PIECE OF PAPER TOWEL FOR NO GOOD REASON

AND MAYBE I SHOULDNT BE LOOKING FOR THE ANSWERS TO THE MEANING OF OUR SHORT, FRAGILE LIVES IN

A LAMINATED

PAPER

T OW E L

IDK MAN,

and the pages of that book

were made out of

laminated

// FLASH WARNING + EP 8 SPOILER WARNING (obviously)

Song: ARTIST BLOCK by St4ticFilms

ok so i haven't seen the last act yet but like. caine gets resurrected right. right

(i'm in denial. i fear caine's just Dead in the end. this whole edit started as copium and ended up becoming a memoriam. rip caine, you were a doomed existence)

this is my first time editing (and if not, at the very least, in a long long while), but i'm pretty proud of this. lowkey (highkey) was kicking and giggling my feet deciding which circus member gets "useless" and "toothless"

tumblrs not best for quality so i miiight have to get this reposted on,, well, elsewhere. youtube, maybe. i think landscape videos on tiktok are a thing, too, because i... am NOT reformatting all that text for that cursed vertical platform. i'll have to either make an account for those, or ask an irl to do it

here's a caine edit i've been working on! (slight flash + major spoiler warning)

you know what i think this episode will be?

either the cast watches their previous memories in the circus. or, they literally relive it.

there's a lot of allusions to "shows" in these teasers. caine on a stage, the "Showtime." post, the old-timey film intro at the start of the trailer, the TRUMAN SHOW THUMBNAIL, etcetera. and, well. it seems to me that caine’s gonna make a whole show out of these memories.

i'm guessing this show thing is an attempt to “solve the problem,” as he so very humanely and empathetically put it. like a "look guys! just look at all the fun you had here! (and also you’re STILL having fun and you’ve BEEN loving my adventures because NOTHING has changed at all about you guys haha NO MIND ALTERATIONS HERE NOPE. I'M INNOCENT PLEASE LOVE ME). you can't just throw that away and leave!!"

he'll even include their first days, and the moments they had with abstracted members, ouch. caine i get you're a lover without a heart but what the hell

obviously, things will not go well. not just from having to rewatch or relive psychological distress and trauma, but also because the circus is literally breaking while that happens.

which, the only other time this has happened, it was when caine was confronted with the fact that he may be bad at the only thing he's good at.

maybe bubble will keep reminding him of his shortcomings. he can zip up the circus members' mouths all he wants, but how about the other ai who can keep appearing and coming back no matter how much he pops him?

(so obviously these are supposed to resemble the buttons in episode 7. wouldn’t it be funny if that was. like. also actually representing bubble on top of that. i don’t seriously believe this with all my heart, but as they say: well, it’s possible!)

though i do question whether bubble does this as an assistant who's purpose is to keep caine in check, an extension of caine who’s supposed to be a literal thought bubble—to keep “unsafe” and particularly unhinged thoughts separated from him—but has become defective due to running for a long time/caine simply having his sanity slip away, OR as a virus who's purpose is to fuck up the circus through messing with caine

oooh, and i think we’ll also get to see caine’s relation/connection with the outside world (or the macroverse, as he likes to call it for… some reason).

we know that he’s absolutely enthralled by it; it’s a world almost entirely foreign to him, the place where all his beloved humans want to return to, the one thing he cannot give them. pretty ironic, while the humans have reluctantly resigned to being stuck in the circus, its the ai desperate to keep them trapped inside that's never stopped yearning for the world out there. i mean, i'm pretty sure that this is how he spends most of his free time when alone. just, staring at those photos.

it’s also been hinted that at some point, he had some level of access to at least viewing it, before he got “cut off”. since we’ll probably get more of everyone else’s backstories in the circus—including kinger’s, who joined the circus the earliest—who’s to say we won’t see some of caine’s backstory, too?

and another thing! pomni's whole thing is her ability to connect with others, even if they're struggling. if she can befriend an ai gummy gator going through an existential crisis, maybe she can at the very least empathize with the unhinged "lover without a heart" ai ringmaster.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: This is an issue I’ve been monitoring and grappling with for a long time, and I feel like while my core philosophy has been the same for a while now, the nuances I’ve held shift every so often. I don’t identify as an anti. I just don’t. I think shipping things - be it incest, adult/minor, or one of the many flavors of abusive - is an ENTIRELY separate issue from wanting to do that IRL. I think sometimes people just want to write taboo topics for various reasons. Because the topics themselves are taboo and that’s interesting, because they offer methods of coping, even because some people are kinda into projecting upon the person on the losing end of the power dynamic and being dominated and kicked around, since that’s not something you should really chase in real life (unless it’s during a roleplay with a network of safewords).

There are many ships I think are gross, but I don’t want people to stop shipping them because I don’t like them. I don’t like ships that involve anyone under 13 with anyone over 18. I don’t like ships that involve anyone under 18 with anyone over 30. (Aging up is a whole different matter; if you write the younger character older and legitimately have them behave the way you think they would as an adult, it’s all good.) I REALLY don’t like ships where a character is either confirmed homosexual or only shown onscreen to be attracted to the same gender in a big-deal reveal sort of way (if the character has crushes on many genders or the creator uses Word of God to say they’re bi/pan, it’s fine) and the ship involves putting them with someone of the opposite gender (shipping them with enbies is fine). And no, I don’t think it’s a double standard that I sometimes like to do same-sex ships for characters who are coded very very straight. But this is all to do with my tastes and beliefs, not with what I think the rest of you all should do. If you like something that falls in my personal no-no category, then go ahead and do it. I’ll decide how much I want to interact with you, and that says more about our potential chemistry as a unit than it does about you as a person. And if you have boundaries yourself - if age-gap ships skeeve you out - then that doesn’t make you a bad person or even an anti! Just block as needed, talk to friends if you feel betrayed by them, and recognize what it is you don’t like and that you don’t have to like it.

Selfshipping? Do what you want. Again, I might personally have reservations about shipping with somebody too young (I actually perceived my own main f/o as in his twenties when I first watched his source, then saw Word of God say he was NINETEEN actually, even though that invalidates many many jokes about how he’s bad at adulting, so I just said “fuck it” and he’s at least 24 to me because that makes more sense and is more of my comfort zone). But what I like shouldn’t dictate what YOU do. I might give you a little side-eye if you’re shipping with somebody young, but I don’t know your reasons for doing so and I don’t have the right to judge. I might distance myself from certain situations if I’m feeling skeeved out. Or I might not feel skeeved out depending on how it’s handled. I also again would raise a brow if you’re selfshipping with an opposite-gender gay character, but same principle: you have your reasons, you shouldn’t stop because some rando (me) has an issue with your ship, and if I have a problem with how you handle it, I’ll just peace out on my end and not make a deal out of it.

A lot of this comes from the fact that I have mega OCD and I already try to moralize everything I do and hyper-analyze my choices to make sure I am being a Good Person. If I try to follow the “rules” to make my ships palatable to everyone, then I start worrying that any deviation makes me unforgivable. The vast majority of ships in my deck are squeaky-clean and have no problems, but sometimes I’ll get, like...Ventus/Papyrus, where Ven is 15, and Papyrus is in age limbo but I always thought he was at least 18, and then I don’t want to spiral into a moral crisis because I really think it would be cute to put the anime boy with the skeleton and I think they’re both asexual anyway. Or when I aged up Zevon from Descendants in order to make him make more sense as Yzma’s son, and then I had to give him a ship with an adult and I found one I really like (Kamdor from Power Rangers). And this is not even scratching the very complex issue of “The writers of this piece of fiction were ACTUALLY horny for incest and I can see the subtext for it and now I gotta figure out what to do with this mess because I like the series and I do want the characters to have partners who will treat them right.”

That said...up until recently, I looked up to the more extreme proship community, even so far as to kinda be more of an “anti-anti.” But as time went on, that...didn’t seem to fit. I’ve unfollowed a few of those blogs now because first of all, proshipping as a “political party” seems to come with some things I don’t believe in, such as forming a parasocial relationship with AO3 or saying that freedom of fans to ship what they want means the creators of mainstream media should be allowed to portray whatever they want and that being “critical of media you consume” is an automatic dogwhistle for bullies. More importantly: I have at least one friend who I know leans more anti, and I value her a lot and I think it’s valid for her to have her boundaries. After a while, the things that anti-antis did to protect themselves from bullying started to feel a little bit like bullying right back. I can’t really call myself a traditional proshipper anymore, even though I’m definitely not an anti. But I don’t want to be an “anti-anti” either. Because actually, I USED to be an anti on a different social media platform long before Tumblr, and though I can’t tell you exactly why I was that way, I can understand what it’s like to feel that strongly about things that gross you out and want to get them out of your face. I don’t want to say I’m against a whole bunch of people who are probably as varied in intensity as proshippers are.

At the end of the day, what I want is for us all to CHILL OUT. Can we please, PLEASE just focus on having fun in whatever way that comes - problematic ships or no - so long as people IRL aren’t getting hurt? Can we respect that there are probably a LOT of people with OCD on social media who spiral easily if shamed too much (which is probably how the anti movement rose in the first place - I’m sure my anti phase was fueled by my secular scrupulosity)? Can we not assume that people who ship weird age gaps are Actual Pedophiles, which is an entirely separate issue? (Listen...I grew up in the Age of AkuRoku. I hated AkuRoku. But if all the AkuRoku shippers turned out to be pedos, well, the news sure didn’t cover it. I’m saying the majority of them didn’t. And it’s been a decade.) Can we not spread the fear of being cancelled or that having a certain fictional preference will ruin a budding friendship? Can we communicate with one another in private if a friend says or does something that makes you uncomfortable, such as shipping something that makes you question their moral stance? Can actual legitimate creators of media not take sides in the goddamn pro/anti war, thereby making groups of their fans feel alienated from being welcomed by the source? Can we just have fun PLEASE?

Also, just...stop fighting about Reylo. That’s the dumbest thing to fight over and we managed to somehow get the actual SW crew in on that dumbass fight. Some people like Reylo and some people hate Reylo and THAT’S IT. WE’RE DONE HERE.

2. Please enjoy the offical powerpoint presentation of this paper at an academic conference by the original author, complete with Q&A:

CHICKEN VIDEO IN TEN

DAMN YEARS HOLY SHIT

apparently, the communal puzzle club was just a front for document forgery and counterfeit cash, and i had been inadvertently sabotaging them this entire time. which is sad because i support both of those things. but it also explains why they met 12 hours a day, 6 days a week and why they had their own building despite having no profit model and also why i was the only one who seemed to actually care about the puzzles. everyone else was too busy making fake passports to care.

in hindsight, i always knew they were all a bunch of casuals. but i didn't mind because they had so many excellent puzzles. I asked one of the officers if i could at least have the puzzles but he said they were already taken and locked away in the evidence room. the thought sickens me- all those puzzles, gathering dust, never to be assembled again. or maybe the pigs just took them for themselves! so they could have all the puzzles they want while the rest of us ordinary, law-abiding citizens have nothing to do except die of boredom!