reblog to give prev a fUCKING BREAK in 2026
Anonymous
you mentioning mandy being oblivious just makes me think about ian coming back from “using the toilet” in that scene in s1. the whole sequence makes me smile with how silly and sweet it is.
ian is doing his homework, and mandy is snuggled up to him with her legs on his lap.
mickey comes back looking like a dirty raccoon and burps, insults them and then goes to his room. and ian is like yes please give me a slice of that.
ian just can’t help himself and follows mickey after 0.5 secs. (nearly as long as he waited to go shag mickey at the docks (our boy doesn’t get enough credit for his self restraint really))
mandy is like “cool i’m going to make food.”
ian comes back completely dishevelled, hair a mess, clothes all askew. after what must have been at least 15-20 mins depending on how quickly mick and ian get it on. and however long it takes mandy to make pizza bagels
mandy must have thought “damn ian must have been shitting his ass out in there.”
then comes out mickey also wearing fewer clothes looking satisfied and soft.
(note: mandy doesn’t react so this must have happened before. and she MUST realise that are kind of friends. as she mentions ian visiting mickey in s2. it also shows that mandy and mickey hang like that too and that warms my heart. also it must click once she knows. oh! they are best friends AND boyfriends.
and as much as i wish she had been more gentle with mickey instead of calling him a pussy when he couldn’t stop ian from leaving, i can see she’s as frustrated with him throwing away his future as he’s one of the good ones like she does with lip (like ian gets frustrated as they love mickey).
which also makes me want to weep that the writers took mandy way from mickey and mickey away from mandy. they spilt my babies. they must have been bereft as mickey and mandy talk to each other as mandy is ian’s no1 mickey milkovich source. and mandy probs called ian in s6 as she couldn’t call mickey.
there is a fan fic where mickey never gets to celebrate his birthday as terry is a bastard and he realises it’s his 8th birthday. he gos home and no one gives a shit expect mandy, who sings happy birthday to him as they hide from terry, using a cigarette as a candle. and it’s the only fan fic that’s actually made me properly cry for those two who i just think suffered more than anyone else in that show. anyway sorry i got derailed into my feels)
yeah, that whole sequence is gold 😂
unfortunately, i think mandy being recast and becoming a lip love interest changed the “purpose” of her character long before she was written off. her screentime ends up being utilized for lip, and we don’t even get things like what does she think about ian getting mickey a job??????????????? why is she not questioning that ian is going to sleep at her house with mickey???????????? why are ian and mickey not involved at all in the plot with molly????????????????
yeah, i imagine birthdays aren’t much of a thing for the milkovich kids. terry doesn’t even have to be a piece of shit for that — they’re poor, and there’s at least four kids. they’re lucky if he’s not using their birthdays as an excuse to get free things (used to be pretty common in the US for stores/restaurants to give out birthday goodies).
i always wonder how close mickey and mandy are meant to be. i guess they’re kind of like debbie and carl in terms of being more similar in age/development than with their other (older) siblings (which bonds them), but the opposite gender (which divides them). kind of funny that like debbie and carl they also have a big “into the same person” thing going on (with kelly and ian respectively) lollllllllllllllllllll.
fire emblem: three houses: dimitri (for @saphrxn)
after his coronation, dimitri spent his life reforming and ruling justly over fódlan. he focused particularly on improving living situations for orphans and improving foreign relations. he was known for listening intently to the voices of all, and for instituting a new form of government in which the people were free to be active participants. he lived for his people and alongside them, and was thusly dubbed the savior king.
random HR + hockey women nonsese
people also out there acting like the PWHL is the first women's league?? like actual time period of HR would also land you right into the same secret relationship + closeting + nasty homophobia era of women's hockey.
but you are soooo right and you should say it. and I'll throw in another one that everybody loves to forget too—if one (or both!) was transfem. like!!!!!
yeah, everything you said!!!
i don’t go here for the rest of the book series but i know the other couples are all hockey player + not a hockey player, and at least one situation is with a feminine dude as the non-hockey guy. the tension of that vs. hyper masculine jocks of hockey is perfect with a trans woman love interest vs. the reality of teams like the frost.
like if people want to actually seriously dig into the issues of women’s sports in a romance book, uh, they’re there!!! they’re there!!!!! they cause tension!!!!
(in my experience it’s harder to find F/F romances that are serious about misogyny/homophobia/transphobia the way so many M/M are. you WILL find that in abundance in literary novels, but those don’t have the structure and promise of a romance book!)
Anonymous
ian was confident in mickey’s love. but monica managed to destroy that with her hypocritical, poisonous words like it was nothing.
I assume you’re referencing the breakup but Ian’s insecurities go beyond that moment, and even in this specific instance Monica’s involvement is already a chicken and egg situation.
you’re nothing but a warm mouth to me -> ian wonders if mickey even likes him, questions mandy
mickey marries svetlana -> ian runs away
mickey hides and denies their relationship -> are we a couple or not?
mickey doesn’t show up when ian is released from the psych ward -> i think mickey is done with me
mickey is there while ian is humiliated in front of the MPs -> ian calls monica to pick him up
You’ll notice how a lot of those situations are either not Mickey’s fault or are completely understandable from his perspective. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. Matters of the heart are rarely reacted to logically, they’re reacted to emotionally. That’s exactly what Ian does in these moments. These moments make Ian feel like shit. He cannot extend empathy and understanding to Mickey because he is in too much pain over what is happening.
Monica exploits Ian’s insecurities and leaves him more messed up than ever, but Ian reached out to her because he already felt like shit. He already felt unlovable. He already was full of shame. It doesn’t matter that Mickey didn’t join in with Ian’s family when they were talking about how crazy Ian is. He was there. He witnessed Ian’s shame. He didn’t deny what everyone was saying.
The audience understands Mickey’s love better than Ian does because the audience witnesses so much more than Ian does. It’s the audience who sees how Mickey is unable to go through with killing Frank. It’s the audience who gets those closeups of Mickey’s facial expressions during the second half of S3 as he struggles with what Terry has done to him. The audience who follows him in the first half of S4 as he tries to find Ian. The audience who sees his breakdown after seeing Ian sedated. The audience who gets all these moments in-between where he watches Ian sleep, takes care of him, expresses his love in all these little scenes Ian isn’t present for, either literally or mentally.
Ian is missing so much even before you factor in the insecurities and shame that have become part of his makeup by S5. Monica might validate Ian’s pain in a way that is destructive to Ian’s relationship with Mickey, but she’s stoking a fire that already exists.
upnextdesigner: EVERYONE MEET @hannichka, the superstar woman behind everyone’s favorite show Heated Rivarly!
when u come up with a tiny change for your story that not only makes the writing flow better but also hammers in the character motivations and story theme
One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.
Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue.
But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticised for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present.
Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system”. But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.”
Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood – in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms – and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per litre of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists.
The doubts amount to a “bombshell”, according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.”
While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyse samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.”
A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporising it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Dr Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia.
“I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.”
“This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy”.
Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolysing the sample – heating it until it vaporises. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them.
The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives.
Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometres can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.”
“It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.”
Whoopsie it was all bad science rushed out the door.
fantasy authors love to daringly ask: what if racism was correct
random HR + hockey women nonsese
Anonymous
ian holding mickey in the van, and breathing him in.
it’s so peaceful.
oh my boy missed him.
that’s his person.
we don’t see him ever holding trevor or caleb that closely or gently. like there isn’t a smidge of space between mickey and ian’s bodies in the slightest. just like in s4. where ian had the whole bed to lie in but he’s pressed to mickey, sharing a pillow.
no wonder he could barely sleep at the beginning of s6.
he was probably homesick for mickey.
no wonder he can only sleep once wearing mickey’s shirt.
in s7 ian is reminded of what it’s like to wake up with mickey in his arms again.
his melancholia lying in the bed, alone, when fiona comes to say sorry in s8 makes sense.
him waking up and immediately going to harass mick in s10 makes sense. because he wants to. because he can. and i’m so glad ian now gets to wake up in the morning wrapped around mickey every. damn. day.
i do think part of the situation around intimacy with those other characters is that they’re kind of plot devices more than people 😬 i think caleb was always meant to be a rebound of sorts used to evolve ian’s character. with trevor he ends up being used primarily as a way to (clumsily) introduce trans issues (tho i think in s8 that changes and now it’s about leading ian to the gay jesus storyline + the bonus awkwardness of somewhere in that season cameron asking to leave so any exploration of trevor as a person is no longer of interest to the show).
SORRY FOR THE DOYLIST LENSE. I just think about it a lot because of how much it impacted everything. I genuinely wonder how the van scene was scripted because it’s pretty fucking wild in action! the sniff! mickey waking up in alarm! ian grabbing mickey’s cigarette and then returning it to his mouth! the upside down kiss! there’s a lot happening that is just. did the writers consider this shit? or is it noel and cameron’s input at work? (who remembered ian would want to smell mickey?????? i owe them my life.)
regardless, it does all contribute to how special ian and mickey’s relationship feels 🥺 i very much have a soft spot for how they’re depicted when they (literally) sleep together. i love that we consistently see that mickey likes to be touching him as he sleeps. feels very much like a comfort thing, especially when you consider the implied trauma mickey has around sleeping (how freaked out he gets when woken up sometimes). i think it’s also cute how they’re pretty set with ian as the big spoon, mickey as the little spoon. it’s just so impossible to imagine anyone else getting away with spooning mickey. it feels like the kind of thing he’d kill someone over fjehdsjsjes. ian being so clingy at first seems like a “of course he would be” situation but when i think about it… yeah i don’t really remember him being that way with anyone else and tbh it’s an interesting contrast to his hyper independence! i also don’t think he would have expressed that trait before mickey? you know how children have nightmares and sleep in their parents bed? yeah i don’t think that was happening in the gallagher household, lol. maybe fiona was that for him but idk — their age gap isn’t that big. i think it’s more likely that he’s only discovering how much he enjoys being a clinger with mickey. (mickey is basically the blueprint of what ian wants so everyone is perpetually falling short.)
ugh I love the physical performance aspect of gallavich so much.
slipping through my fingers