Anyways, I just realized that one of the decades challenge blogs I follow had a really similar idea for a storyline during the 60s/70s (I’ve been planning out stuff up to the 60s bc I’m in the 40s in-game rn), so if it seems like our stories are similar, that’s bc we had similar ideas at the same time and our games happened to throw some similar personalities/things at us.
Luckily though, at the pace I’m going, I’ll probably have graduated college by the time I get to the 60s storyline-wise, and they’ll have probably finished their challenge completely
The first day after Catherine had found his wallet, she found him pouring over the letters, trying to feel the penstrokes in an attempt to decipher each word.
“Are those letters from your family?” She asked.
“Yes,” he sighed, running his finger repeatedly along a single letter that he couldn’t quite feel.
Francis heard Catherine approach him, and leaned over his shoulder.
“Do you want me to read them to you?”
Francis figured he must have had a rather strange look on his face, as she paused and continued, “Oh, not if they’re private, of course, or–”
“No, please do.” Francis asked her. “It’s not as if I’m getting anywhere with this,” he joked, gesturing to the papers in front of him.
“Alright,” she said, smiling. “Is there one you’d like me to read first?”
Francis almost nodded, and then stopped himself as pain shot up his neck.
“Yes,” he said, gritting his teeth. “The one from my mother. From August?”
Catherine obliged, and Francis finally relaxed into his bed as he listened to the letter.
From that day on, Catherine read him his letters, and Francis cracked jokes or told her stories about his family almost every day. Catherine joined in with stories of her own about her family back in Britain, and the pair began to spent more and more time with one another. Eventually, Francis asked her to write a letter for him, after several failed attempts to get his mangled hands to hold a pen, and they spent half of the time laughing at the crude shapes Francis had drawn by accident as he had tried to write the letter himself.
Okay I kinda forgot abt this post so um. This is a reminder to myself to. Y’know. Actually add pictures
I really wish the sims community was ok with putting up mods folders for dl bc I’m downloading 35+ pages of cc for the 1950s in my game rn and uh…I’m In Hell
So uh. Not to get political on main, but something I’ve never seen mentioned before is that part of the reason why Americans are so interested in geneology (i.e. “oh yeah my great-great grandpa was from Sweden!”) even when they’re several generations removed from the time their family immigrated is that:
a.) we want something that is unique to us; American culture seems widespread (to us, at least) bc of colonization and imperialism so we latch onto things that make us different or unite us in a smaller group bc we live in a culture that highly values individuality
and b.) the alternative is being from America
which is an idea that a lot of people see as Bad bc of rampant nationalism and bigotry that’s often associated with “patriots” in the US
Anyways. One day a long ass time ago some Norwegian dude decided he didn’t want to live in Norway anymore, and now I have the right to face crippling student debt and healthcare that costs more than my house
i learnt to gif with this blog and i didn’t have hd files when i started so like i knowmy early gifs look shit but every time i go back to find sets to update i can’t help but cringe djbhc
sorry i’m not done i just keep thinking of olivia growing up with that persistent, unshakable doubt that she’s not loved, not really,and how that feeling is born, at least in part, from the fear that she’s inherited some sort of sickness, and how that fear and that feeling is what shapes the trajectory of her life. it affects everything. it’s the reason she ends up at svu and by virtue of that, the reason she meets elliot. it’s what leads her to this man that will crawl under her skin and make a home for himself in the very core of her being. this man that knows her! that sees her! that gets her! and then loves her unconditionally, in a way she’s never been loved before. this man who takes everything about her as it is and rolls with it – who loves her not in spite of it all but becauseof it. this man who looks after her and who does his best to show her that there’s no weight to those lingering doubts that have haunted her her whole life. this man who she’ll grow to love back just as much.
everyone loves to talk about liv’s growth in the post-elliot years but the fact of the matter is that it’s elliot’s acceptance and support and stubborn, steadfast belief in her that helps her get over that first hurdle and start the journey of self-acceptance, without which a lot of the later developments could never have happened organically. i remember in april last year there was an article or interview where mariska said that elliot was the love of olivia’s life but then followed it by saying he was the “only man she ever trusted”, and it was the second part that truly knocked me on my ass because, like. so much of why liv’s feelings for elliot are as intense as they are can be distilled down to that sentiment. she’s never let anyone in the same way she let elliot in and she never will; she doesn’t trust anyone else enough to, even if she’s come close. like they really nailed it with that brian quote. she was never going to bare her soul to him and it is, at least in part, because of the way her relationship with elliot has (canonically!) shaped her ability to be intimate with people. (and there is something to be said here about how the way he left + how he fractured that trust affects all of this as well, but i’ve already written thousands of words of fic and meta on that, so i’m not getting into it here.)
what i mean is like. it’s no wonder he left such a big hole in her life when he vanished. she’s got all this love for him that’s intrinsically tied to her own self-image and there’s no way she can let it go. there’s no where she can put it. it’s why i think liv’s defensiveness when it comes to elliot always hits so hard for me. it’s like she takes (sometimes very valid) criticism of him as a personal affront, even if the criticism has nothing to do with her, and i mean. i get it. how can she explain to someone that it’s not just that elliot was her partner, it’s not just that they were best friends, it’s not even that they were ‘like a married couple’, it’s that for thirteen years they were quite literally two halves of the same whole. how do you explain that by the end of it everything was all so messy and intertwined and complicated and (disgustingly, gloriously)co-dependent that sometimes it was hard to discern where one person ended and the other one began?
this era of eo makes me insane literally the way olivia looked at elliot and said you were it you were the most important person in my life and you left & the way the show looked at elliot and said you had a wife and you loved her and you put her first and it doesn’t change the fact that olivia is was will always be the one true love of your life & the way elliot looked at olivia and said i did what i had to but if the circumstances where different it would have been you, it is you, in a parallel universe it will always be you and i & the way everyone is looking at olivia now like your unconditional love for this man is seeped so deep inside of you it’s affected every intimate relationship you’ve had in the last twenty years and it will continue to do so until you finally confront it. my god.
thinking about the last l&o eps and tbh i don’t like how noah and elliot were introduced. i wasn’t really vibing with it when all the bts stuff was happening because something just seemed off & after watching the Mother’s Day scene i think i’ve realised what. aside from noah already knowing who he is (liv…. Girl….) i think they fucked it up. like it’s another example of (a) inconsistent characterisation across shows but also (b) writing from someone who clearly does not care for elliot or his history with liv or even, at minimum, his influence on olivia as a character in general (one of the many reasons i’m counting down the seconds til we don’t have to deal with warren’s writing. but lol). it has literally been established that olivia sees introducing noah to elliot as this like, definitive thing that’s representative of accepting him back into her life for real. it’s something to demonstrate that she trusts him again & clearly something she wanted to do on her own terms (and elliot knows this! he keeps offering lil family dates and when she says not yet, he listens. he gets it!) and they took that decision away from her by making it an accidental run-in, which takes away a lot of the weight the moment is meant to have. like idk it’s just left a bad taste in my mouth lmao
the ww2 in real time youtube channel just went “well we’re getting pretty into 1943 and our War Against Humanity side series is going to increase frequency from biweekly to weekly to keep up with everything”
the incredible fakeness of positive online reviews is one problem but it’s also so difficult to parse bad ones, because it’s often hard to tell if the people writing one-star reviews have any idea how to use the product in question.
is this cute teapot badly made or did the reviewer try to use it as a stovetop kettle?
is this keychain carabiner incredibly flimsy or was the reviewer trying to use it to tie down a literal horse?
ok figured it’s time to retire the book rec post since my to-read pile is quite full now. so! time to get some new tunes. my music library hasn’t had an update in ages, and modern algo recommends give me the feeling of circling the drain.
much like with books, I don’t have much direction since i’m trying to find stuff I wouldn’t find on my own (that said do not underestimate the degree to which i live under a rock and have not heard of shit. I used to play tbone at a pretty high level but I do not like Know About Music beyond what was required for that. basic shit that has played on the radio is as on the table as something from the ass end of youtube bootleg uploads) and generally just inject some novelty. other than that I pretty reliably don’t like metal w/ growly vocals, or parody/comedy songs.
I would strongly prefer recommendations for full albums, rather than a single song (not enough!) or an artist/band (too much!).
still no power, so time to cook through everything that was left in the fridge i guess. something of a reckoning for everything we were kiiiinda sorta on the edge of throwing out. im normally a bit ambivalent about cooking with gas but it’s certainly flexing its advantages rn.
(screenshotting because the context makes me assume that OP would find this addition to their post unwelcome)
See, this is what gets me so up in my own head about interacting with people on this site! I assume this attitude is more common for people with a ton of followers, but like. The way that sort of, unidirectional interest, affects social norms, is so weird and uncomfortable for me. Social media with follower mechanics makes things WEIRD.
This is why I like discord! Everyone’s on an equal footing, conversation is *expected*, I don’t feel like I’m constantly running the risk of hitting “how DARE you interact with me” because I said words at the wrong person in the hierarchy.
I kind of wish there were a more formalized version of softblocking? I want to be able to count on “if I’m bothering someone, they have tools available to easily and frictionlessly make me go away or otherwise stop.”
this is interesting because I feel the exact opposite. I feel pretty much completely free to respond to people on this site, like, I might still avoid responding for whatever reason but it’s more likely to be about the drama of the content itself or the individual user than the idea that chatting on a post is inherently some kind of faux pas (with the exception of personal posts). Like I just think that poster is wrong and that if they want a private friends-chat then a public blogging platform is not the place?? I wouldn’t violate this preference where I knew about it, but expecting people to assume that as a norm seems like acting at cross purposes with the fundamental design of the site, which is really really good at showing you the thoughts of random strangers you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.
and I feel the opposite about discord servers or chatrooms of all kinds. I tend to just feel inherently excluded unless someone is making an active effort to draw me in to conversations. Like, this is the cool private friend chat, and violating that would be a grievous offense and I could be punished at any time for stepping over an unknown line. If anything I say isn’t clever or thoughtful everyone is surely cackling at me on the secret more-insular server. (And to be clear this is insane on my part, I have never been kicked from a discord server for something I’ve said, but I have been kicked for inactivity. deeply maladaptive assumption.)
I feel the idea of some preexisting hierarchy in both places, but on tumblr I just don’t care so much, like if someone doesn’t like me being on their posts that’s their problem and they should block me. Whereas something about real-time chat fucking activates my social anxiety to a degree unequalled even by being around irl strangers.
Possibly I am just not on twitter enough but trading one oligarch overlord for another who is maybe slightly more up front about how annoying he is seems like a sidegrade at worst
Genuinely kind of hope musk does a bunch of weird experimental shit trying to reinvent the website, I feel like that could be really interesting to watch. Genuinely! The ways a website’s structure affects how its community behaves is a very interesting subject to me. And I mean, it seems unlikely that he could do much to make that place much worse (and, hey, if he manages to crater the site, all the better)
I dunno. I am also fascinated to see what’s next. twitter certainly isn’t so bad it can’t get worse, but it is bad enough that it almost seems like rolling the dice on completely random design changes has a decent chance of turning up positive.
it’s hard to balance between the fact that like musk has a lot of money and a clear desire to do??? something??? with the platform, some of which i might like (looser moderation focused on restricting spam, not speech) and some of which are repulsive to me (verify all human users??); but also he is a massive blowhard and it is impossible to trust any specific individual thing he says, so all we can really do is wait and let it play out.
