After 5 years living in The Loud House, Lincoln lost his motivation to lend a hand as he suffers a burnout where he is tired with his living conditions. After all, he cannot stand living with 10 sisters who mentally exhausted him, fair weather friends who hardly helped him, and parents who finally neglected him. But before his fire can die completely, Lisa offers a solution: Multiverse Visitors. Why? There are others who has it worse than him.
"You have it easier, Lincoln Loud! We deal with death, demons, destiny, family, and trauma every day!"
n. purification or purgation of the emotions (such as pity and fear) primarily through art; a purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension
Sometimes, you just need to feel things. A really good cry, a really good laugh, or a really good scream – whichever it is, it’s good for the soul. Sometimes you can get it through art, maybe a tragic play, or a comedy movie, or a romance novel; other times, you just need to confront your nemesis, or stand in the woods and scream, or laugh until you cry at something that isn’t actually funny.
How do your characters find catharsis? Do art or music work for them, or do they need something a little more concrete?
Write a story about catharsis.
BONUS GOAL: “Are you okay?”
If your submission features this line, it will earn an extra point to be tallied in voting!
Challenge ends Monday, December 8 at 9:00PM EST.
• Post submissions as new entries using the template in the profile • Tag this week's entries as: [#] submission, 282 – catharsis • If you have questions about this challenge, please ask them here
Congratulations to all this week's participants, and thank you to everyone who took the time to cast their votes! autobotscoutriella will be making this week’s banners, so keep an eye out for those.
You may now post your Challenge 281 entries to any additional communities, blogs, archives or sites as you'd like! We also have a FandomWeekly AO3 Collection if you'd like to add your stories there!
Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.
Commented on dw_news. Dreamwidth hasn't increased their prices since 2009 and was going to do so this year, except that the situation out there is pretty bad so they decided to postpone a bit longer. The request is that IF you feel you can afford to, buy more services or gift points to another user this December while the holiday point bonus campaign is happening. For me, this means I was also able to get paid time for the bnha_fans comm for the next year, at current prices. Which is great. Yay Dreamwidth <3
Last night I was not tired. 3 AM I'm still wide awake. Finally drift off, wake at 630. I mean 3 hours is enough, right? Fell asleep grading tonight, big red line straight down someone's test.
My stomach is higher acid now than it has been and I have more sore in my mouth. sigh.
Left here with a weird call from my dentist. We had to bill something for the comprehensive exam (which my insurance doesn't allow more than 2) What comprehensive? You didn't even take X-rays and Aspen only did a follow up. I'll need to call my insurance. Came home to an even weirder call on the messages, something about medical mutual making a referal to Anthem Blue Cross...um WHAT? Insurances don't refer to each other. I have no idea.
I had to do a make up lab in the middle of the faculty meeting about all the forced Republican laws we now have to follow in OH (where in universities must bow to Republican rule or be closed more or less, fun fascist times)
What I Just Finished Reading:
Haunted Cemeteries of Ohio
A Twist of Murder - Charles Dickens is the detective, yes another real person fanfic mystery. So far I am unimpressed.
Spellbound: A Graphic Memoir by Bishakh Kumar Som - boring AF memoir theoretically about a trans journey, mostly about watching her building alcoholism and whining about how hard it is to make a living as a graphic novel artist
What I am Currently Reading:
Death at the Door - a meh paranormal mystery
Wyches - a graphic novel horror I got from the library
Ripped Tide - short mystery I got at the WV book festival. It is...bad.
What I Plan to Read Next: To die Once, Poorly Made and Other Things
November's readings. You know how I like to talk books so if you see something interesting.
I mostly post about: I don't use it to post anything right now, I forgot I had this journal to be honest lol. I am going to turn it into a fandom/graphics blog though, with some other stuff sprinkled in probably. I don't usually post personal stuff online but have no problem discussing it with people in PM/DM if they're interested learning about me, etc..
My hobbies are: Fandom roleplaying (I only play fandom characters, but will rp with fandom or oc characters), gaming (mostly MMO's), reading manga or fanfics, watching anime or anything that catches my interest, getting back into icon/graphic making cuz I miss it, listening to music, watching movies.
My fandoms are: Teen Wolf (MTV show), Trigun Manga/Anime, and various others I'm trying to keep up with lol but those two are my biggest fixations right now.
I'm looking to meet people who: Have the same interests, being near or the same age is not necessary. I have friends from all different age ranges/walks of life.
My posting schedule tends to be: Whenever I have the energy. I work from home due to medical problems, so my hours are roughly 8am-630pm Central Standard time, Mon-Fri. Though I am mostly around a lot of the time.
When I add people, my dealbreakers are: Discrimination, ableism, racism, animal cruelty, transphobia, gay-phobia, bigotry, speaking negatively about LGBTQ+, honestly any of the bad shit lol.
Before adding me, you should know: I am chronically online due to medical issues/being disabled so I am around a LOT. Going to be around even more so due to our work's reduction of hours they're putting into place soon so I'm going to have a LOT of free time coming up to work with lol. I also mostly connect through either Discord or Plurk.
A fun fact about me is that I have a Guinness World Record and a star named after me. :)
All the fail_fandomanon Rules and Information (and Ban Requests): https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/1076.html. The short version: no embeds, don't out people's real names, don't be that much of an asshole, body fluids are off topic, Mods reserve the right to freeze, screen, and delete the fuck out of stuff. FFA discussion covers a wide variety of topics and has a very flexible view of 'fandom' that includes politics, current events, and cooking techniques. FFA is a Choose NOT to Warn experience. Meme away.
Unofficial FFA archive & search: Dememe.info Username/password pairs are nonnie/pony, nonny/seal, or ayrt/velociraptor. As of 2025, Dememe is geoblocked for the UK.
If you have a DW account, you can use DW's content search. Don't forget to tick the box to search in comments. You can also use FFA Rocks.
Warning for mass grave scenes, likely suicide, and overall “humanity sucks” vibes. After establishing themselves as “the funny League,” Giffen, DeMatteis, and Templeton would spend about six issues going dark, and that run starts right here. But before that…
In Action Comics #577, 1986, Keith Giffen broke out one of his AP English vocab words and created Caitiff, the first and now-last vampire. The word “caitiff” means “wretched, contemptible person” or occasionally “villain,” and it shares roots with “captive.” But the word wasn’t generally associated with vampires, AFAIK, until the launch of Vampire: the Masquerade in 1991. It’s possible that VtM got the idea from this. Dialogue by Robert Loren Fleming.
Right from the start, Caitiff lived down to his etymology.
I switched my Fic Updates DW Journal over to “entries are displayed in the journal-specific style” mode, realized for the first time how glitchy it looks on mobile, and spent a good chunk of today fussing with borders/margins/font sizes until I finally felt better about it.
The journal has mostly been “crossposting links from AO3” for a decade now, but in the past couple years I had a resurgence of using it for “behind-the-scenes about the writing” posts (all for Cover of Knight reasons). Finally came around to thinking, you know what, I want them to look customized.
—
Sometimes you post a thing and it just hits, huh? I put that art of “Lydia Deetz singing Gravity” on DA, and overnight it became the most popular thing I’ve uploaded there in years.
“DA doesn’t want live-action superheroes, it wants Cartoon Ladies” isn’t exactly news, but still. Watching those numbers zoom upward sure was something.
Fund artists! Think of how many other cool things they could do!
—
Speaking of support for artists:
Anyone reading this who makes Clip Studio assets? I have points that need to be spent/gifted before the end of the year, so drop a link to yours (here’s a link to mine, for comparison) and I’ll send you some.
I have over 6,000 Clippy to burn, so please share this around. I’ll give some to everyone who responds, until/unless I run out.
I never quite got Brian De Palma. An unquestionably talented director, he knew how to make a hit — see Carrie and the first Mission Impossible film — and if he was going to fail, he was going to do it on a scale so grand that people would write books about it (The Bonfire of the Vanities). He was brash, steeped in film lore, and more than happy to make sure you knew when he was showing off, which was often; what were Body Double and Blow Out other than him paying homage to, and then trying to one up, Hitchcock and Antonioni? The chutzpah! The actual brass balls on this guy!
Some people loved it (Pauline Kael, for one, seemed to eat it up, and who was going to argue with her), but I was, and, I have to say, still am, largely unimpressed. Scratch a De Palma film and you’ll very often find there’s no there there — it’s mostly just surface flash and thrill and some very intentional shock and subversion, all very mannered and very little with any resonance. Outside of Carrie — which made household names out of De Palma, Stephen King and Sissy Spacek all in one go — it’s debatable that De Palma ever made a truly classic movie, a world-beating piece of celluloid that is studied for its quality over its kitsch.
(And yes, my dudes, I see you standing up on a table full of cocaine, beating your chest over Scarface and telling me to say hello your little friend. Grand Guignol as it is, what it has going for it is excess. It’s a lot, and I found it tiring, and when Tony Montana finally ended up face down in the water, what I remember thinking was good, now I get to go home.)
So: Brian De Palma. Mostly, not for me! Maybe for you, fine, okay, you do you! But not for me!
Ahhhh, but then there’s The Untouchables. And suddenly, for length of this one single film, Brian De Palma is indeed very much for me.
Come with me now to 1930 Chicago, smack dab in the middle of prohibition, and Treasury Officer Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner, stalwart) has come into town to take on the bootleggers and gangsters, two groups with, shall we say, a rather substantial overlap. Ness has little success at it until he comes across beat cop Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery, the most Scottish Irish cop ever), who knows where all the bodies are buried around town, and where the rum is being run. Together with their small and select team (Andy Garcia, in one of his first big roles, and Charles Martin Smith as comedy relief, until he isn’t), they take on Al Capone (Robert De Niro) the celebrated gangster who is loved by the press, despite the fact that he’ll happily blow up a kid or two if that’s what it takes to keep his grip on the town.
It’s a rich setting, and of course this film is not the first time the prohibition era had been essayed — heck, The Untouchables itself was an update of a late 50s TV series starring Robert Stack. The film was treading a path that had been trod upon many times before. This reappraisal and reinvention of film and television tropes was nothing new to De Palma, who had by this time had homaged directors and source material, including Scarface (originally a 1932 movie starring Paul Muni), and he would go on to retread Mission Impossible. The Untouchables, as a property and as a mode of storytelling, was old hat, both for De Palma or for the culture at large. So what is it that sets this movie apart?
Weirdly — no really, weirdly, because this is a film where one character bashes in the head of another character with a baseball bat — I think what makes this film work is restraint. Brian De Palma is Brain De Palma-ing himself all over this film, with all his stylistic tics and touches and his oh-look-do-you-see-how-I’m-referencing-Eisenstein-aren’t-I-so-very-clever-ness, but he’s doing it at about an 8, rather than an 11. Yes, there is that (rather famous) scene involving a baseball bat, but here’s the thing: what makes it shocking isn’t the assault, it’s the context. De Palma shows us enough of the assault (and the aftermath) to make the point, but, unlike, say, Scarface, there’s no lingering. De Palma gets in, gets what the scene needs, and gets out.
Now, I am going to accept there is skepticism for this thesis of mine. The Untouchables does not exactly skimp on the blood or the occasional shot of someone’s brains all over a window pane. This is a movie that rather handily earns it “R” rating. But my argument is that in these cases it’s not about quantity, it is about quality. Those brains on the window pane are actually in service to the story. They are just enough to fill in the scene, and then we’re moving on. For De Palma, for whom so much of his directorial style is basically more, of whatever it is, not just blood although certainly blood too, this sort of restraint in the service of story feels a little revolutionary. Turns out you can do a whole lot, if you’re not trying to bludgeon your audience into sensory overload.
De Palma didn’t have to drive his audience into sensory overload in no small part because the whole affair is just so incredibly handsomely mounted. The script, by David Mamet before his metaphorical cheese starting slipping off his metaphorical cracker, is sharp and pithy and melodramatic as hell. The set design offers up a version of Chicago that is a beautiful fable — 1930 Chicago didn’t look like this but how wonderful it would have been if it had. The wardrobe — the wardrobe! — is done by Georgio fucking Armani, and by God you can tell, everyone looks so ridiculously good. You can pause the movie at just about any point where there’s not blood being sprayed about, and it will look like a fashion shoot. It’s all so good that the terrific Ennio Morricone score is almost an afterthought. Almost.
And then there’s the cast. Sean Connery won an Oscar for his portrayal of a cop past his prime who decides to do the right thing, even if he knows how little good it will do, and as it’s the film’s only Oscar, it’s not unreasonable that this performance is what the film is remembered for. With that given, I will yet argue that this is Kevin Costner’s movie. It’s hard to remember on this side of Field of Dreams and Dances With Wolves and even Yellowstone, but this is the film that made Kevin Costner an actual star; before this he was playing corpses (The Big Chill, out of which he was mostly cut) and second bananas (Silverado).
In Elliot Ness, Costner found the character he’d carry forward: The compelling square, the do-right stiff you can’t actually take your eyes off of. He’d occasionally tilt off this character, mostly when Ron Shelton needed him to play a gone-to-seed sportsman, but it’s pretty clear that with The Untouchables, Costner learned how his bread would be buttered going forward. He went with it for a good long while.
As for De Niro as Al Capone; well, scenery is chewed, and the chewing is delicious.
The Untouchables is the one Brian De Palma movie I unreservedly love, and enjoy, and rewatch, but this is not to say it is a great film. Even Pauline Kael, famously a De Palma champion, understood this; she wrote that The Untouchables was “not a great movie; it’s too banal, too morally comfortable… But it’s a great audience movie — a wonderful potboiler.” This is exactly right. Not every film has to be great, sometimes “just really goddamned good” is good enough. It just needs every good thing in proportion, and for the director to understand when enough is enough.
For this one film, Brian De Palma seemed be content with just “enough.” It wouldn’t last, and that’s fine. It didn’t have to.
It wasn't exactly a bar crawl or a pub crawl since one was very much a pub and the other was very much a bar, and it was still one of each of those, starting at the pub and ending at the bar. Two drinks in two locations full of the sound of human voices. It counts as a crawl. I've done art crawls before, and this was my first crawl of this type, however you want to describe it, whatever the specific and precise nomenclature. I've never done one before and it'll be a while before I have another one like this again, in large part because there's no chance to repeat it. Because the pub's closing tonight.
I'd read about it closing a few days ago, and went there last night to check it out, indulge in fish and chips, have a cider that tasted like college and a margarita that meant business - and the cider really did taste like the ciders I had in college, sweet and soft, the bottle the same shape on my lips. It brought back a host of good memories of being afraid of new things and doing them anyway, the thrill of being someplace very grown-up and learning how to handle myself in that kind of world. It didn't quite have the smell of some of those places, but this pub was only in its present location about twelve years, and you need at least fifteen to build up that kind of aroma. If there was a scented candle of such an aroma, I'd seriously consider buying one, and while the smell wasn't there last night, the feeling was. My younger brother was on the fence about going last night, but was up for it tonight if it'd still be open. Tonight was its last night, so I called him up and off we went.
We stopped for hot dogs first. I got to the pub and saw that they were going a step beyond having the last night in that they were actively dismantling the jukebox - the jukebox that the night before had played the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Kansas, those kinds of bands - and figured that if they were taking that apart, there probably wasn't a kitchen anymore. Myself, I'd decided that I could do pub drinks two nights in a row but not pub foods, so I'd eaten before I left. But he was still waiting on dinner. So we went to a corner hot dog place a block away and he got one with onions and mustard, and another with ketchup, sauerkraut, and relish, plus a papaya drink. That's seriously what it was. Not papaya juice. The menu said "papaya drink." It tasted more like the melon the fruit is than the fruit itself usually does. We hung around as he ate, marveling in the old school accents that wandered through and ordered hot dogs well-done. Armed and ready, we made our way down the block, and down three steps, and into a place full of the human voice. The music was almost gone - sometime during our stay there, someone played "Piano Man", and if that's the last song in a place open until two AM with smokers hanging around outside, it's a suitable one. I had a cider and he had a beer, and we both did a shot of Jameson's straight up. Earlier that night, I saw a guy come in on roller blades, wearing hockey gear and bearing a stick, and during our hour and a half there, we saw people pass on well-wishes and old stories to the bartenders, thanking them for so many years and all the memories they'd helped make.
The only music that played was one song. Nothing else. Everything that I heard was the sound of the bar itself, and the sound of the human voice. Up and down the bar, in front and behind, throughout the guts of the place as the kitchen got cleaned out and the empty bottles taken away. It was a fantastic sound, with nothing getting in its way, and the rarity of it was both that there was nothing in its way and that it was overall quite happy. A place for people to meet and greet and take some of the world away for a while can have alcohol, it can have food, it can be indoors or outdoors, there's a lot of variance and possibilities, and for a moment, while I had it indoors, nothing got in its way. Just this beautiful sound that I could usually only catch a few syllables of at a time. Next to me was my brother, who spoke about his in-laws. Next to me was someone asking for a drink, or someone catching up with a friend and telling him to meet another friend who'd know who sent him, or trying to move through a narrow space to get to the bathroom without making anyone spill.
We had our drinks, and we walked out. It was a few degrees above freezing with an almost full moon high above and we were bolstered to walk seven blocks from a pub in its last hours to a bar comfortably set for the foreseeable future. Even less space, even less overhead, three steps up instead of three steps down. More music, though. A range from the same kind of music as the night before - Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cream - to songs that came out earlier this calendar year. Another beer for him, an Irish coffee for me because I'd wanted one for a while and the first place wasn't equipped to make coffee anymore. Not as many people around, but still close enough to the first place in that it wasn't too loud we couldn't hear the presence of the people around us. It wasn't an overwhelming amount of sound to hide the fact that the place wasn't very good or a lot of screens as a way to keep you from realizing you aren't having a good time. There were screens, but no sound, and none in the back. There was music, but not so loud it cut through the conversations. It was remarkably well-balanced and arranged, and we talked about travel and friends and real estate and made each other laugh until it was time for us to head on out. I might live on the same island, but he had an hour's travel at the very least, and wanted to get back home before tomorrow.
We started at one spot and ended at another. Drinks and talk at both. Two links still make up a crawl. There's other places in both our neighborhoods for us to do it again, and it'll never be quite the same. And I'm good with it having been this way once, because it was the kind of thing that even if both were staying around, wouldn't feel the same for it being something so new. It wasn't college in the bottle of cider so much as it was the memory of how it felt, and now I've made a new set of memories.
Thanks to a donation from fuzzyred there are 35 new verses, and a donation from janetmiles for 9 verses, so there are 44 new verses in "An Inkling of Things to Come." Shiv and his classmates discuss magical weather, magical geography, natural resources, plants and animals, history, and other aspects of worldbuilding.
This year has been bizarrely light on snow for our area. The weather stayed warm well into November, and our first snow only came last Saturday, as barely a dusting. I'm not complaining - I've joked that I find snow acceptable between Thanksgiving and New Year's only - but as usual ~we need the moisture~. I don't think I ever expected our snow to *actually* hold off until after Thanksgiving, and it's true that I also don't want things to be on fire all next year. (That can and does coexist with the fact that I would be happy to literally never see another snowflake.)
But at least if it is going to snow, this particular storm was very aesthetic!
Yesterday, Alex and I went over to my mom's house for a while to help her sort through some old stuff of hers. A while back, she expressed to me the desire to try and sell off a lot of the "stuff" she has accumulated. I think a combination of her mom passing away, and then trying to help her sister with her hoarded house in preparation for moving, and her own 70th birthday, made her really want to make sure that she doesn't wind up with a lot of junk. A lot of what she has isn't really junk: she has antique tools of her grandfather's, some china, some other genuinely antique things. But she'd rather get rid of it now - and maybe get some money for it - rather than leave it to be dealt with after she's gone.
We did look at a lot of the tools, so many of which are really cool! It's amazing how well some of them were made. Nicely carved hardwood handles, a few with carved decoration, things like that. A few it makes me sad to think of getting rid of, because they are such an example of "they don't make 'em like they used to!" but I also understand my mom's desire to part with things that she doesn't actually use.
Bella and Jaspurr had an accidental face-to-face meeting. I went to the bathroom, and came back to Jaspurr hiding under a chair, and Bella sniffing him. Alex and my mom thought he was upstairs and that Bella was just sniffing around more generally, or they would have intervened. While Jaspurr wasn't loving it, the meeting actually went really well! He didn't hiss or swipe at her, and she was just happily interested. She was easy to call away (though then wanted to go back) and was just mildly excited. He did growl at her the second time she returned, and she left him alone. They later also had a quick meeting in my mom's room, while he was up on a table and Bella was on the floor.
Jaspurr didn't love Bella being there, and ended up spending the whole night in my mom's room after, but it really did go about as well as I could have hoped! We've never gotten to truly test Bella around cats (beyond seeing them at more of a distance), and Jaspurr hasn't gotten to interact with other animals since being with my mom and Taylor. I'm actually quite pleased.
I had a dentist appointment this morning, and since my dentist is only about five minutes from my mom's house, in light of the forecast snow overnight, I spent the night at my mom's.
The birds were happy to have the feeders today in the snow. A towhee and several house finches!
These couple pictures are a little blurry, but of my favorite random bird at my mom's:
This little girl on the right does not have snow on her head - she has a white patch on the top of her head! She's also not a white-crowned sparrow or anything like that, she's just a house finch with a leucistic patch.
You can see more of the patch here, though it blends in a bit with the snow. She's been coming to my mom's feeders for about three years now, she thinks. I'm always happy to see her. :)
My dentist appointment went well! I'd been dreading it a little bit, because I had to have *such* extensive dental work done back around 2020-2021. A decade+ of no dental care, and many years of really precarious living situations, plus probably some general mental health garbage really took their toll.
I missed my last cleaning over the summer because of my grandmother's memorial, and so it'd been closer to a year than six months, and while I hadn't noticed any issues, I was very afraid it'd be worse than expected.
It wasn't! No cavities, which always feels like a big win, haha.
The weird hole in my jaw (where I had an extra baby tooth removed when I was young) has not gotten any worse. It's always exciting when every dentist and hygienist that sees my x-rays has an instinctive, horrified gasp. They assumed this was a crisis that would require bone and tissue grafts... and somehow, it's all very stable. The teeth around the gap aren't unstable or in pain, the jaw itself is not deteriorating. This was my five-year x-ray appointment, and my hygienist was delighted when she said that it looks the same as it did five years ago. "Science would disagree with me, but it really does look like it's just... not causing problems." I love that science can't explain my jaw.
Jaspurr, having returned to the main floor this morning, ha. So regal.
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