a home for wayward mobs

he said, “you have to stop doing that.”

“i know, i know,” because it’s even more embarrassing to be embarrassed about writing fanfic, considering how many posts i’ve reblogged in its defense.

but i misunderstood his original question: “fanfic is just the genre. i asked what you’re writing about.” 

i did the conversational equivalent of a spinning wheel cursor for at least a minute. i started peeling back the setting and the characters, the fic challenge and the specific episode the story jumps off from, and it was one of those slow-dawning light bulb moments. “i’m writing about loneliness, and who we are in the absence of purpose.”

as, i imagine, are a lot of people right now, who probably also don’t realize they’re writing an existential diary in the guise of getting television characters to fuck. 

“that’s what you’re writing. the rest is just how you get there, and how you get it out into the world. was richard iii really about richard the third? would shakespeare have gotten as many people to see it if it wasn’t a story they knew?”

2&3 / 30

It was just so natural, amiright??

The Deal with Byakuya (which I have no idea how I am ever going to get to, short of making this a Long Boi) is that, as per Clariel, Abhorsening follows a family line… until it doesn’t. Byakuya was supposed to be the 28th Kuchiki to hold the post and instead, on his first solo Abhorsen-in-Waiting job, this peasant girl stole his bells and then had the GALL to be better with them than he ever was. But, like he’s lived in the Abhorsen’s House his all his life and now it’s hers by right Ginrei is gonna fliiiiiiiiiiip (unless he’s dead. maybe he’s dead. I can’t decide). Y’know, I was gonna have Ichigo be sort of Mogget-like, but no, Yoruichi is absolutely Mogget, that tracks. Ichigo is honestly more Disreputable Dog anyway. BTW, if you’re wondering where B is at the moment, he’s standing vigil over Hisana’s frozen-over body while she’s in Death and at this point, he knows she’s not gonna make it back, but he’s gotta keep holding out as long as they both can. UGH, my dingdang heart, maybe I should just make it a ByaHisa AU instead.

Also, THANKS, I WILL!

lol yeah there is a definite ‘sometimes explodes into a much scarier version of themselves’ Ichigo/Mogget connection, but I feel like Mogget has about 90% more impulse control and 100% more of a delight in fucking with people? (sure, some of the impulse control comes from other people stopping him with ancient magic, but he’s patient.) actually Ichigo as someone Aizen made monstrous with free magic, frozen in Holehallow for his own good but maybe crucial to stopping him, is kind of a charming inversion of Rukia having the Hyogyoku?

anyway I wrote a tribute to the concept of Byakuya’s Tragic Vigil, because 1) wow yes good tragedy and 2) it is good that when you go walking into Death in this setting your living body freezes.

!!

!!!

This is perfect.

Not only have I dragged someone back onto Tumblr (bwahahaha!) but I have tricked them into writing something extremely specific, and it is so, so good, it is 100% what I had in mind.

lololol surely yes. but how? I guess it depends how Byakuya & Rukia know each other. Hisana was once savvy enough to know this overly fussy teenager was The Lawful Good Kind Of Necromancer but reckless enough to nick the tools of his trade despite there being a statistically pretty high chance of deeply fucking up and dying; Rukia was a younger sister... but if the two of them were estranged he might not have known she existed at all for a pretty long time.

I guess we know Hisana’s alive here until like, a few weeks before Rukia shows up looking steely-eyed and determined to meet Renji at the wall, so presumably in this setting, there could be a time of Hisana & Rukia enabling all of each other’s shitheel ruffian tendencies and causing Byakuya emotional distress by  being 100% less invested in being Proper and Decorous.

It was just so natural, amiright??

The Deal with Byakuya (which I have no idea how I am ever going to get to, short of making this a Long Boi) is that, as per Clariel, Abhorsening follows a family line… until it doesn’t. Byakuya was supposed to be the 28th Kuchiki to hold the post and instead, on his first solo Abhorsen-in-Waiting job, this peasant girl stole his bells and then had the GALL to be better with them than he ever was. But, like he’s lived in the Abhorsen’s House his all his life and now it’s hers by right Ginrei is gonna fliiiiiiiiiiip (unless he’s dead. maybe he’s dead. I can’t decide). Y’know, I was gonna have Ichigo be sort of Mogget-like, but no, Yoruichi is absolutely Mogget, that tracks. Ichigo is honestly more Disreputable Dog anyway. BTW, if you’re wondering where B is at the moment, he’s standing vigil over Hisana’s frozen-over body while she’s in Death and at this point, he knows she’s not gonna make it back, but he’s gotta keep holding out as long as they both can. UGH, my dingdang heart, maybe I should just make it a ByaHisa AU instead.

Also, THANKS, I WILL!

lol yeah there is a definite ‘sometimes explodes into a much scarier version of themselves’ Ichigo/Mogget connection, but I feel like Mogget has about 90% more impulse control and 100% more of a delight in fucking with people? (sure, some of the impulse control comes from other people stopping him with ancient magic, but he’s patient.) actually Ichigo as someone Aizen made monstrous with free magic, frozen in Holehallow for his own good but maybe crucial to stopping him, is kind of a charming inversion of Rukia having the Hyogyoku?

anyway I wrote a tribute to the concept of Byakuya’s Tragic Vigil, because 1) wow yes good tragedy and 2) it is good that when you go walking into Death in this setting your living body freezes.

Now he starts every phone call with a Pokemon update. He gets all the names wrong and asks me what a Dragonite is called every time he brings up the “fat fighting orange dragon”

“I have a cool pineapple head now!”

“I was down to my last stripey ball trying to catch the blue dragon snake. I told him if he ran away I was gonna be so mad.”

“And the gym had one of those big fat orange dragons!” (he still can’t remember what a Dragonite is called)

BUT THEN. but then. he’s also like, OUTRAGEOUSLY into it now? He’s level 27 and talks about how “the gym wars are brutal, babe,” and how long it takes to take down a level 10 gym? (LEVEL T E N)

And a couple weeks ago he called me to talk about the merits of the old-style Gyrados (which he pronounces guy-rad-os sorry I can’t stop him) that has the dragon breath move, versus the new ones that don’t because Niantic made a change. And he has like 6 Gyrados because his work is by a Magikarp nest or something? HOW MANY fucking magikarp do you catch for 6 gyrados? He’s about to evolve two more. H E L P.

and he says shit like, “Learning about individualized values really radicalized my thinking.” and he means it. Before he evolves ANY pokemon he googles CP estimates and has a pokemon calculator??

This morning he called me because he finally has enough Dratini candy to evolve a fat fighting dragon and wanted to talk about which Dragonair he should evolve. (One with high CP but bad IVs, one with medium-high CP, but okay IVs, and one with the lowest CP of the 3, but A+ IVs) And at this point he’s so far beyond my skill with the game (he’s been higher-leveled than me for months now) that I don’t even know what to tell him. I literally can’t advise him.

Team Instinct. I told him I was Team Valor when I first told him about the game and he was like, “Okay I’ll join your team babe!”

And then idk he forgot?? And when his account crashed after a week he did a Pikachu restart (that should have tipped me off about the impending obession tbh) and he picked Instinct again.

I ain’t even mad bruh. He so clearly belongs in Instinct. He’s happy there. It’s his natural habitat. Before work he goes and meets up with some other Instinct people to take the Georgetown Cupcake gym in DC. It’s super cute.

Then he goes to work and keeps the game open so he can grab Magikarp every couple minutes. Apparently his work is like ON a friggin nest.

He keeps his Pokemon Go habit a secret at work. Nobody knows. On his lunch break, he says, “hey I’m gonna go for a walk” and goes on a 12-pokestop loop. He makes sure to hit up the local Dratini and Pikachu nests (the presence of which is UNFAIR AF). He also take a few minutes to reinforce ‘his’ gym, by which point has been under attack a few times.

At work, he keeps his phone on data instead of wifi (he has unlimited data. For some godforsaken reason he went through 30GB/mo BEFORE Pokemon Go.) because that means his avatar jumps around a bit more?? He says he opens and closes the app a few times to reset it and get the GPS connection to reset and nab him a few pokemon.

He has 114 Pikachu candy. I hate him. Apparently he’s watching the anime almost every night. He’s on season 2. I think he’s just gonna go through and watch it A L L which is a prospect so terrifying it needs no explanation.

Out of the 6 Gyrados he’s evolved, he’s kept the top 3. He sent me some screencaps the other day of his current top-contender Magikarp and the pokedex entry, where you can see he’s caught 585 of them.

Five hundred eighty five. Who tf has TIME for that??

Apparently he still hasn’t decided which Magikarp to evolve.

Bricked-up windows

Upper-storey doorways that open into empty space

Staircases that lead nowhere

Clean, working, fully stocked vending machines in obscure and inaccessible places

Detailed graffiti on surfaces with no obvious spot for the artist to stand, like the underside of a high bridge, or ten metres up a bare wall

Machinery left to rust because there’s no use for it anymore, but it’s in a weird or precarious location and there’s no way to safely remove it

First, some context: I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but major Canadian cities tend to have a lot of underground infrastructure - particularly in their downtown areas, where train tunnels, parking garages, underground shopping malls, and hotel basements often connect in such a way that you can easily walk for miles without ever seeing sunlight. The interconnections typically aren’t public, or at least not advertised, but a surprising number of them are accessible if poke around; I once followed a maintenance tunnel in a shopping mall parking complex and emerged in the basement of a nearby casino!

Anyway, I was snooping around in the maintenance tunnels below one of the larger local hotels - legitimately, mind you; I was working for the local telecom at the time, trying to track down an errant network cable - when I rounded a bend and noticed that the corridor a few dozen feet ahead of me was brightly illuminated by something. On top of being filthy and difficult to access, the tunnel was also unlit (I’d been navigating by flashlight), so this really stood out.

I couldn’t see any obvious light fixture to account for it - the light seemed to be emerging from an alcove off to the side of the tunnel - so I went to investigate, and discovered… a Coke machine.

Spotlessly clean, fully stocked, and apparently in full working order; the illumination was coming from its interior display lighting.

In a grimy, unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level.

This was the crossword puzzle in the New York Times yesterday. 

Tausig’s crossword is a so-called Schrödinger puzzle, named for the physicist’s hypothetical cat that is at once both alive and dead. In a Schrödinger puzzle, select squares have more than one correct letter answer: They exist in two states at once. “Black Halloween animal,” for example, could be both BAT or CAT, yielding two different but perfectly correct puzzles. Only 10 such puzzles have now been published in Times history.

It’s the theme of Tausig’s puzzle, though, that makes it special. Four entries in Thursday’s crossword can include either an “F” or an “M.” Both are correct; neither is wrong. For example, “Part of a house” can be either ROOF or ROOM. The long “revealer” answer, tying those select entries together and spanning 11 squares smack-dab in the middle of the puzzle, is GENDER FLUID.

BUT ON THE OTHER I SPEND MULTIPLE HOURS A WEEK READING, WRITING OR REVIEWING CODE THROUGH A VERSION CONTROL REPO, AND I CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL LIKE LINKING TO GITHUB IS A DELIBERATE EFFORT TO PUT PEOPLE OFF.

the two new sentences are: