Narumitsu Week Days 2 And 3: Truth And Free Day

Always remember, kids, Spiders are ambush predators!

Yea, wonderful tactics guys. You sealed yourself in a dark cave with a man who doesn't need to see and can stick to any solid surface. Amazing Spiderman 14

I do love the trope of 'the character with the most fear also has the most experience dealing with it.'

The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries #7 - "Night of the Scaredy-Bat!" (2024)

written by Ivan Cohen art by Puste & Carrie Strachan

One guy doesn't know about the mutual dune buggy building! From his perspective his Nemesis just one day started thinking he's An Okay Guy, actually!

I mean Johnny has every reason to get a dressing down. He's acting like a jealous neanderthal. Amazing Spiderman 21

In more joking terms: every Soulmate AU that insists that its non-consensual One True Predestined Love setup is right every single time with zero exceptions is being disrespectful to the long history of people poisoning their way out marriage for fun, freedom, and/or profit. 😔🫖🍵

Knew the history, needed the lingo, passing it on :D

Yknow what I LOVE about the Star Trek fandom? It’s ANCIENT. I had a talk with a nice old lady at the old persons home that my great grandma is in and she noticed my Spock shirt and was like “oh I love that show I thought the premise was lovely” and you all know THE PREMISE is trekspeak for spirk and I was like “do you accept the premise because I do” and she looked at me with the eyes of someone who is reliving their otp moments and she said “the premise is all I wrote about, dear” and we just talked about spirk for a hella long time and I just love how age doesn’t matter in this fandom you can be ninety and still be the biggest spirk bitch ever how rad is that

someone in the comment section on todays' page mentioned this and i couldn't get it out of my head.

The administrators at my school did this with Justin Beiber's "baby" (fundraising for a sketchy charity) and the entire student body rallied to sabotage all speakers over and over again until the bureaucrats could take no more and yielded.

Hands down one of my worst experiences in high school was when the seniors decided to extort the entire school by using tactics that were banned by the UN to get them to pay for the senior party! If that sounds like a wild sentiment stay tuned because this shit got crazy.

I was living in Arizona at the time and I was a freshman. Our campus was largely open air, with walks between class room buildings and some covered outdoor tables. Our event began with a morning announcement. The seniors were collecting donations for the senior party, and when they reached their goal, their fundraising method would stop.

Their fundraising method:

To pipe the entire schools speakers with "If You're Happy and You Know It" on loop. To this day, I cannot hear this song without experiencing a degree of rage and madness that is frankly alarming. One of the worst parts of the entire thing was that the recording they chose had the female singer do a little clap and say "Yay-ha-hey," at the end. So it wasn't just the song, it was this awful little cooldown stinger at the end.

If this sounds a lot like psychological torture you'd be extremely correct! This practice has been banned in some countries, but the good old US hasn't ruled it a human rights violation, and what a fun silly way to raise money, that definitely wasn't damaging to adolescent psyches!

Every morning for 15 minutes before school began, every passing period, every lunch, and after school for another 15 minutes they blasted that fucking song on unceasing repeat through every speaker in the school. Everyone found different ways of coping with this and mine was to observe my classmates descent into madness and categorize the stages.

The first stage was almost completely consistent, and it was a smug almost exasperated eye rolling phase. Often accompanied by derisive comments about the song or the tactic, this phase was extremely mildly annoyed. Most people figured it would blow over soon, and no one anticipated this continuing for a week and a half, creating a miasma of fraught tension.

The second phase was elevated annoyance, starting to snap and be less amused characterized this level of irritation. People would try to cover their ears or put on headphones, humming aggressively to block out the syrupy repulsive children's performer with her loathsome little clap. This phase had people picking their absolute least favorite part of the song. Her inflection on certain words, her timing between verses. I think it's pretty clear already which part I hated most.

The next phase was a bounce back out to absurdity. It became funny how annoying it was and people would sing along as if to challenge the song's authority over their psyche. This paired exceptionally poorly with people in phase two as they'd often lash out at the people giving more voice to their hell.

The fourth phase was a dead-eyed madness. People would stare straight ahead and their lips would silently mouth the familiar words. The song had pounded its way into their very soul and was inextricably linked to auditory output. They often didn't even realize if they began chanting along.

The fifth and final phase was pure uncut pubescent rage. Kids would scream, attack each other, and in a truly epic end to the event hurl a cafeteria chair with such force at the speaker in the cafeteria to irreparably damage the sound system.

The seniors got funding for a party, but some of it had to go to repair the damages, which were substantial.

YOOOOOO I JUST GOT MY FIRST LIBRARY CARD SINCE LIKE 2007 IT WAS SO EASY???

Like they literally just needed any photo ID with an address, I thought they needed like unopened mail and paperwork and crap, it took 5 goddamn minutes, I did it on my way home from work

And was NOBODY gonna tell me libraries have websites now with ebooks and audiobooks and documentaries and British TV and shit???

Why the FUCK have I been paying Netflix

GO GET A LIBRARY CARD

I am frantically pushing this huge box of feels under a carpet labeled 'lol gay' and you waltz by and slide it off like a magician with a tablecloth. The nerve!

Recognizing that the "Unnecessary feelings" comment isn't about gay thoughts makes wrightworth better in my honest opinion.

"Seeing you gives me an extreme carnal reaction and I want to kiss you stupid"? WRONG. "Your being here makes me remember a time when I was truly happy. Your presence forces me to acknowledge the icy waters I am submerged in. Your fires make me realize how cold I am, and I'm too scared of reaching out. I'm scared that the moment I reach out, I will douse your flames because I am colder than the darkest parts of this trench I find myself in and I don't think your fire can handle it.

Your warm smile makes me realize how sad I truly am. I look into your bright eyes and feel the dark bags under mine sag. I am tired and I so badly want to rest my head, if only for a moment, on your shoulder, my oldest friend. My dearest friend. My only friend. I want nothing more than to cry in your arms, but my tears are so cold that I may snuff your embers when I wet your sleeves. You open your hands to me to take my burdens, but you don't understand how hefty it is. I will crush anyone under the weight of it, including you.

It would've been better had we not met, you are too earnest, too persistent, too kind for me. You will break yourself for anyone. I don't want to be the one you break yourself on. Because you are the only one who understood me.

Don't ever show your face in front of me again."

NOOOOO! DAMN IT, BILLY-BARD! I love Shakespeare so much, but this one play just will not stop haunting me. I'll never reach the ends of it. It's like a puddle that goes down far enough to have angler fish.

I have been exposed to this more than any other of The Bard's work, and never once by choice. I have been forced to read this play cover to cover four times in school, including for one exhausperated highschool teacher who got the lot of us engaged by giving extra credit to whoever found the most dick jokes. I've seen it performed by every kind of troop from school kids to the actual globe theater. I once got roped into playing a bit part in a performance art street production because I happen to be walking by, and I NEVER CAUGHT THIS?!?

I tip my hat to you, thank you for showing me yet another facet to the peerless jewel I am repeatedly clubbed over the head with whether I like it or not.

It's a perfect sonnet.

14 lines. 3 stanzas in ABAB rhyme, and a rhyming couplet at the end.

It starts off with each of them speaking a whole stanza. Romeo offering up a self depreciating metaphor (a pilgrim at a holy shrine, sinful for wanting to place a kiss on her hand), and Juliet returning it (it's not a sin for a pilgrim to touch the hands of a saint. Pilgrims and the saints hands can touch. )

Then they share a quatraine, keeping the rhyme and rhythm steady, the flirting turning even more overt. (Saints and pilgrims both have lips, yeah? Well, sure, for prayer. Well if a pilgrims hand can touch a saints hand, then their lips...)

Then they each speak half a couplet (the saints dont make the first move, but if its a prayer....well, here I am, praying....), and share their first kiss.

It's flirty and silly and a little irreverent, and they become more and more in sync as they speak.

This is a heightened, fantastical, almost reality bending moment. This is a moment where two lonely teenagers, one who is having her future decided without her and the other fresh from an unrequited rejection, feel the world shift around them.

And the foreshadowing sits at the end of stanza 3. This is an act of faith, but if it cannot be, it will turn to despair.

And I just. The craft of it. The poetry of it. How the form and the rhythm mirror the metaphor and mirror the emotion of it.