Latest Posts by willowyandcerebral - Page 2
Home Alone Gothic
You lock all the doors day or night. You tell yourself and others it’s so no person can break in, but you know you’re protecting yourself from something much worse.
The house ghost watches you from the top of the stairs, disappearing when you look in it’s direction.
It’s eerily quiet.
You thought you shut the basement door, but it’s always open when you walk by again.
What is that sound?
Your dog stares down the hallway and whines at nothing.
You know there’s something.
You go down to the basement to get something. There’s a being at the end of the hall. You are paralyzed. Its eyes stare into your soul as it approaches you. When it gets close it disappears.
You feel different and go back upstairs without grabbing your item.
You don’t even bother shutting the basement door.
There’s blood on the kitchen counter. You ignore it.
Suddenly it’s dark out. How long were you in the basement?
You close the curtains and blinds, knowing they don’t stop anything that truly wants to see inside.
The front door isn’t locked anymore.
Your favorite show goes to commercial, so you go to the kitchen to grab a drink. You come back to the TV playing static. The channel hasn’t changed. You sit and watch anyway.
The being from the basement has replaced the house ghost’s spot at the top of the stairs. It doesn’t let you go.
There’s a knock on the door. You realize every door was knocked on at the same time.
You haven’t seen your dog in a few hours, but you hear it whining from a location you can’t get to.
Your family member gets back home, they look different from when they left. An entirely new face.
They shut the basement door.
The dog greets them, tail wagging.
The TV plays the news.
The kitchen counter is blood free.
“Why are the curtains closed?”
They open them. Sunlight pours in.
It’s the middle of the day.
Witchcraft for the Home : Cleaning Edition
So for me cleaning in and of itself is a ritual. Cleaning my home is how I destress and organize my life, and how I help good energy flow into my home. For me clean counters are as important to my craft as Sage. So hear are a small list of things I do when cleansing my home.
🌱First things first. Open the GD windows. You have no idea how awful the stale air in your home is until you let some fresh air in. Especially if you live in a small apartment like I do. You’d be amazed how quickly that alone can lift the bad energy in your home. 🌱I wipe down my counters and such with those little wet wipe cleaning things. When I buy them I add a tiny drop of Frankincense essential oil and orange blossom essential oil to them and shake them up (I buy the none scented ones so that it doesn’t get all weird smelling) 🌱Same goes for floor cleaner. Add a small drop of whatever cleansing oil you like to clean your laminate or tiles floors. DO NOT ADD ANYTHING WHEN CLEANING REAL HARD WOOD. If you have real hard wood floors adding oils to your hard wood floor cleaner can mess with the ph and screw up your floors 🌱Put some moon water in your oil diffuser while you’re cleaning to help balance out the energy in your house 🌱Sprinkle some salt in the carpet right before you vacuum it up to pull up those bad vibes as well as the gross stuff in your carpets. 🌱Tidy up your altar. I don’t know about you but for me I could have a perfectly clean room and if my altar is a little cluttered then the room doesn’t feel clean. Making sure my tools are put away and my offering dish is clean is important. 🌱When sweeping, sweep the dust out the front door if you can. (Don’t sweep like, trash or anything out). 🌱Once everything is clean and fresh light some incense. I normally choose clove or vanilla to make my apartment feel cozy
favorite video essays:
Why the Shining is terrifying
Why Perfect Blue is Terrifying
The VVitch explained
What makes a movie scary?
Decolonizing Games
Everything ACTUALLY wrong with Silent Hill 2: Revelation
The naked Lady that changed the rules of art
Rogue One vs Star Wars: the fault in our Star Wars
Sandra Bullock & the White Savior trope
Why the costumes in Little Women did NOT deserve an oscar
Why the music in the live action disney remakes is worse than you thought
Coco's feel-good oppression
Disney Princess: reality through fantasy
Pan's Labyrinth: the disobedient fairytale
The mythology of Princess Mononoke
some video essays that make me go absolutely bonkers fucking yonkers:
how media scares us: the work of junji ito
control, anatomy, and the legacy of the haunted house
joel schumacher’s phantom of the opera: a video essay
who’s afraid of modern art: vandalism, video games, and fascism
the most disturbing painting
whiplash vs. black swan — the anatomy of the obsessed artist
van gogh’s ugliest masterpiece
a brief history of the dead in art
the nightmare artist
horror books have lost their identity
gone girl — don’t underestimate the screenwriter
random video essays i like
pathologic analysis; themes of a dying classic - a video essay
heroism in futility; pathologic, the void, and the hero narrative
the manga that breaks people
evil queens: a gay look at disney history
monsters in the closet - a history of lgbt representation in horror cinema
the complex problems with mental illness in fiction
elon musk
the ideology of the marvel cinematic universe
zootopia, umasou, and the failures of racial allegory
sinbad and the death of pirate cinema
brave was a disappointment
5 favourite Youtube Documentaries
Because I like making lists.
This isn’t “Documentaries that have been illegally posted on youtube.” this is “video essays people have made specifically FOR youtube but have cinematography and research and editing to categorise them more as “documentaries” rather than just “Video Essay” (I adore video essays as they make up 80% of what I watch on youtube, but they’ll get their own list at some point)
ANYWAY! With all those quantifiers out of the way, in no order;
1: “Mystifying UFO Cases” - LEMMiNO A skeptic youtuber decides to research documented UFO cases and finds a handful of them are at this point impossible to properly explain or rationalise
2: POLYBIUS: The Video Game That Doesn’t Exist - Ahoy Using investigative journalism, Ahoy tracks down the source of the urban legend of the ‘Polybius’ arcade cabinet. A rumoured video game said to have appeared in the late 70s in certain American arcades and induce migraines, insomnia, paranoia and other symptoms similar to the effects of LSD.
3: The Impact of Akira: The Film that Changed Everything - Supereyepatchwolf SuperEyepatchwolf discusses the anime scene of the late 80s, Japan’s painful history during WWII, and the economic situation of the country at this time, all of which lead to the creation of the film version of Akira, and how the movie’s short theatrical run in America opened the doors for the west to start importing anime
4: Down the Rabbit Hole: Henry Darger - Fredrick Knudsen Fredrick presents a documentary about the artist Henry Darger, who throughout the course of his life, every day, wrote about the lives of 7 fictional young girls, complete with elaborate paintings, tracings and collages, all of which was only discovered when he was admitted to hospital in at the age of 81. His writing eventually measured up to 15 145 pages over 13 different volumes. At 250 words a page on average, the story is thought to be 3,786,250 words long and is often thought to be the longest story ever written. (It’s difficult to be absolutely sure as no-one has managed to read the entire work on their own)
5: A Journey Through ‘Rule of Rose’ - Ragnarox A documentary of the often forgotten video game Rule of Rose. Despite its cult status, the game is rarely talked about. Ragnarox explores the game in detail, including its themes of politics and social castes, child abuse, psychological trauma, homosexuality and deep visual symbolism. Content Warning for obvious reasons.
(if you like my long essay length posts and stuff consider buying me a coffee)
me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit
mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters
me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU
Violet Evergarden Novel Index
Masterpost of my English translations of the main story. If you can, please support the creators by buying the official releases here. In case of wishing to re-translate this into other languages, contact me here. If anyone is feeling generous, please consider donating to my Ko-fi or PayPal. ( ╹◡╹)っ’･*
General Index || Chronological Order
Keep reading
My hypothesis is that in like 10 years gen z is gonna have a big cult boom the way the boomers did in the 70s
when i was reading the book entangled life which is about fungi and the author merlin sheldrake said that once he got his first author copies he was going to dampen the pages and use them to grow oyster mushrooms and yeast and then use the yeast to brew beer and then drink the beer with the mushrooms to complete the cycle of fungal knowledge. i was like really and truly this guy gets it
i’m so upset
I just realized that the reason ghosts say Boo! is because it’s a latin verb
they’re literally saying ‘I alarm/I am alarming/I do alarm!!
I can’t
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it a thousand more times: No piece of dystopian fiction has ever been a prediction of the future. They are observations and criticisms of the present.
anyone who told you much ado about nothing is good and worth watching was RIGHT and you should listen to them
This is a comment someone appended to a photo of two men apparently having sex in a very fancy room, but it’s also kind of an amazing two-line poem? “His Wife has filled his house with chintz” is a really elegant and beautiful counterbalancing of h, f, and s sounds, and “chintz” is a perfect word choice here—sonically pleasing and good at evoking nouveau riche tackiness. And then “to keep it real I fuck him on the floor” collapses that whole mood with short percussive sounds—but it’s still a perfect iambic pentameter line, robust and a lovely obscene contrast with the chintz in the first line. Well done, tumblr user jjbang8
Pigeon steals poppies from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Australia in order to build a nest beside a stained glass window.
theyre talking about us again
im just a normal girl . i sit near a body of water and immediately experience the entire range of human emotions
are men okay?
Posted without commentary:
On Sept. 17, 2021, my long-distance girlfriend, Lauren, paid a surprise visit to me while a friend filmed my reaction. Three days later, she set the 19-second clip to a hokey Ellie Goulding song and posted it to roughly 200 TikTok followers. The first commenters—Lauren’s close friends—had positive things to say. But soon strangers—among whom the video was less well received—began commenting, criticizing my reaction time or my being seated on a couch next to friends who happened to be of the opposite sex. “Girl he ain’t loyal.” “Red flag! He didn’t get up off the couch and jump up and down in excitement.” “Bro if my man was on a couch full of girls IM WALKING BACK OUT THE DOOR.”
As comments accusing me of infidelity rolled in, the video quickly became the topic of fierce online debate, à la “The Dress.” I, an ordinary college sophomore, became TikTok’s latest meme: Couch Guy. TikTok users made parody videos, American Eagle advertised a no-effort Couch Guy Halloween costume, and Rolling Stone, E! Online, The Daily Show, and The View all covered the phenomenon. On TikTok, Lauren’s video and the hashtag #CouchGuy, respectively, have received more than 64 million and 1 billion views.
While the Couch Guy meme was lighthearted on its surface, it turned menacing as TikTok users obsessively invaded the lives of Lauren, our friends, and me—people with no previous desire for internet fame, let alone infamy. Would-be sleuths conducted what Trevor Noah jokingly called “the most intense forensic investigation since the Kennedy assassination.” During my tenure as Couch Guy, I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my “bad vibes.”
At times, the investigation even transcended the digital world—for instance, when a resident in my apartment building posted a TikTok video, which accumulated 2.3 million views, of himself slipping a note under my door to request an interview. (I did not respond.) One viewer gleefully commented, “Even if this guy turned off his phone, he can’t escape the couch guy notifications,” a fact that the 37,600 users who liked it presumably celebrated too. Under another video, in which hall mates of mine promised to confront Couch Guy once they reached 1 million likes (they didn’t), a comment suggested that they “secretly see who’s coming and going from his place”—and received 17,800 approving likes. The New York Post reported on, and perhaps encouraged, such invasions of my privacy. In an article about the “frenzy … frantically trying to determine the identity” of the “mystery man” behind the meme, the Post asked, “Will the real ‘couch guy’ please stand up?” Meanwhile, as internet sleuths took to public online forums to sniff out my name, birthdate, and place of residence, the threat of doxxing loomed over my head.
Exacerbating these invasions of my privacy was the tabloid-style media coverage that I received. Take, for example, one online magazine article that solicited insights from a “body language expert” who concluded that my accusers “might be onto something,” since the “angle of [my] knees signals disinterest” and my “hands hint that [I’m] defensive.” This tabloid body language analysis—something typically reserved for Kardashians, the British royal family, and other A-listers—made me, a private citizen who had previously enjoyed his minimal internet presence, an unwilling recipient of the celebrity treatment.
Mercifully, my memedom has died down—interest in the Google search term “Couch Guy” peaked on Oct. 5—and I have come to tolerate looks of vague recognition and occasional selfie requests from strangers in public. And my digital scarlet letter has not carried much weight offline, given that Lauren and the other co-stars of the now-infamous video know my true character. Therefore, my anxiety rests only in the prospect that the invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather—as tech writer Ryan Broderick has suggested—the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing culture.
The sleuthing trend sweeping TikTok ramped up following the disappearance of the late Gabby Petito. As armchair TikTok sleuths flexed their investigative muscles, the app’s algorithm boosted content theorizing about what happened to Petito. Madison Kircher of Slate’s ICYMI podcast noted how her “For You page just decided I simply needed to see” TikTok users’ Gabby Petito videos “over and over again.” It appears that a similar phenomenon occurred with my lower-stakes virality, as I found myself scrolling through countless tweets bemoaning the inescapability of “Couch Guy TikTok.” One user despairingly reported seeing “five tik toks back to back on my [For You page] about couch guy.” (I assure you, though, that nobody despised Couch Guy’s omnipresence more than myself.)
The most recent target of the app’s emerging investigative spirit was Sabrina Prater, a 34-year-old contractor and trans woman, who went viral in November after posting a video of herself dancing in a basement midrenovation. The video’s virality began with parody videos, but quickly veered into the realm of conspiracy theory due to (you guessed it) the video’s apparent “bad vibes”—at which point I got a dreadful sense of déjà vu. As Prater’s video climbed to 22 million views and internet sleuths came together to form a r/WhosSabrinaPrater community on Reddit, Prater faced baseless murder accusations, transphobic comparisons to Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, and overzealous vigilantes who threatened to go to her neighborhood to investigate further. This incident reveals the harmful potential of TikTok sleuthing. One expert aptly summed up the Prater saga to Rolling Stone: “It was like watching true crime, internet sleuthing, conspiracy theories, and transphobia collide in a car crash.”
Given the apparent tendency of the TikTok algorithm to present viral spectacles to a user base increasingly hungry for content to analyze forensically, there will inevitably be more Couch Guys or Praters in the future. When they appear on your For You page, I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve. As users focused their collective magnifying glass on Lauren, my friends, and me—comparing their sleuthing to “watching a soap opera and knowing who the bad guy is”—it felt like the entertainment value of the meme began to overshadow our humanity. Stirred to make a TikTok of my own to quell the increasing hate, I posted a video reminding the sleuths that “not everything is true crime”—which commenters resoundingly deemed “gaslighting.” Lauren’s videos requesting that the armchair investigation stop were similarly dismissed as more evidence of my success as a manipulator, and my friends’ entreaties to respect our privacy, too, fell on deaf ears.
Certainly, noncelebrities have long unwillingly become public figures, and digital pile-ons have existed in some form since the dawn of the digital age—just ask Monica Lewinsky. But on TikTok, algorithmic feedback loops and the nature of the For You page make it easier than ever for regular people to be thrust against their wishes into the limelight. And the extent of our collective power is less obvious online, where pile-ons are delivered, as journalist Jon Ronson put it, “like remotely administered drone strikes.” On the receiving end of the barrage, however, as one finds their reputation challenged, body language hyperanalyzed, and privacy invaded, the severity of our collective power is made much too clear.
your man doesn’t have the mental strength to caramelize onions
So apparently, over the summer, Quibi (the shortest-lasting streaming service ever lmao) did a quarantine project called “Home Movie: The Princess Bride” where a bunch of celebrities recreated The Princess Bride in tiny chunks at home.
And like there was no permanent cast, all these celebrities seem to have gotten a scene or part of a scene to do (i’m not sure exactly, I did not ever watch Quibi and thus haven’t seen this yet), and then they just… recreated it as best they could. At home. Under quarantine.
So like, you had Jennifer Garner in a blanket cape playing Princess Buttercup AND the Booing Old Woman with a crowd comprised entirely of stuffed animals:
Or Taika Waititi paying Westley off a badly-drawn Inigo on a piece of cardboard held in front of someone’s face:
And it’s all just delightful.
But my absolute favorite part of this thing that I’ve sadly never seen but assume is probably absolutely hilarious and a treasure and I want to find it some day and watch the whole thing… is that Carey Elwes is in it.
As Prince Fucking Humperdink.
just came up with a really good 4 word cooking horror story but idk if you guys are ready for it
70 horrible questions ... Fuck it
01: Do you have a good relationship with your parents? 02: Who did you last say “I love you” to? 03: Do you regret anything? 04: Are you insecure? 05: What is your relationship status? 06: How do you want to die? 07: What did you last eat? 08: Played any sports? 09: Do you bite your nails? 10: When was your last physical fight? 11: Do you like someone? 12: Have you ever stayed up 48 hours? 13: Do you hate anyone at the moment? 14: Do you miss someone? 15: Have any pets? 16: How exactly are you feeling at the moment? 17: Ever made out in the bathroom? 18: Are you scared of spiders? 19: Would you go back in time if you were given the chance? 20: Where was the last place you snogged someone? 21: What are your plans for this weekend? 22: Do you want to have kids? How many? 23: Do you have piercings? How many? 24: What is/are/were your best subject(s)? 25: Do you miss anyone from your past? 26: What are you craving right now? 27: Have you ever broken someone’s heart? 28: Have you ever been cheated on? 29: Have you made a boyfriend/girlfriend cry? 30: What’s irritating you right now? 31: Does somebody love you? 32: What is your favourite color? 33: Do you have trust issues? 34: Who/what was your last dream about? 35: Who was the last person you cried in front of? 36: Do you give out second chances too easily? 37: Is it easier to forgive or forget? 38: Is this year the best year of your life? 39: How old were you when you had your first kiss? 40: Have you ever walked outside completely naked? 51: Favourite food? 52: Do you believe everything happens for a reason? 53: What is the last thing you did before you went to bed last night? 54: Is cheating ever okay? 55: Are you mean? 56: How many people have you fist fought? 57: Do you believe in true love? 58: Favourite weather? 59: Do you like the snow? 60: Do you wanna get married? 61: Is it cute when a boy/girl calls you baby? 62: What makes you happy? 63: Would you change your name? 64: Would it be hard to kiss the last person you kissed? 65: Your best friend of the opposite sex likes you, what do you do? 66: Do you have a friend of the opposite sex who you can act your complete self around? 67: Who was the last person of the opposite sex you talked to? 68: Who’s the last person you had a deep conversation with? 69: Do you believe in soulmates? 70: Is there anyone you would die for?
the dubious philosophy of salmon
@keuhkopussirotta / fleabag / jamie anderson / holly warburton / richard siken / mitski / aracelis girmay by @heavensghost / philip pullman
Found this reddit post. This kinda makes me feel better. And it’s something I think about sometimes because I always feel like regardless of how hard I work on something I don’t get anywhere.
mizufae replied to your post “Ask meme: 6, 18, 21 - please and thank you!”
my dude i will teach you how to make roasted winter root vegetables that are infuckingcredible just say the word it’s super easy
PEOPLE WHO CAN COOK ALWAYS SAY THIS. LOL. I believe you think it is easy! I am not sure I can identify the vegetables in the store! :D