the thing all sherlock holmes adaptations get wrong is making the guy an irredeemable asshole who treats everyone like shit . not only is it not reflective of the original stories they miss that “nice, smart, well mannered dude who snorts coke when he needs to think” is possibly the funniest character ever devised
I feel like the modern equivalent is that guy you think is super well put together until you find out exactly how much red bull he ingests on a regular basis.
Modern Sherlock is that very nice English Professor-seeming guy who you bring a problem and while walking from the door of his office to his desk he starts explaining the entire solution you need
And upon reaching his desk he’s like “Excuse me one moment.” and pulls out one of those huge Monster canisters they legally aren’t allowed to make anymore, cracks the whole thing, chugs it, takes a deep breath, and then nods at you and is like “Alright, and then what you need to do is…”
why even modernize it to energy drinks??? coke didn’t go anywhere. we still have coke. energy drinks aren’t NEARLY chaotic enough.
Its is more like you hiring some guy to do private investigation about how your husband maybe cheating on you and Sherlock comes to your house high as fuck. Walks into your living room and without taking a moment to even talk to you or sign any paperwork, he turns around—pupils as big as god—and just says
“Its your best friend Brenda. I’ll email you the invoice.”
Because when it was written cocaine was legal and even considered healthy and useful by some laypeople, even though doctors knew it wasn’t, and Watson was always trying to stop people from encouraging Sherlock’s addiction because HE KNEW BETTER.
So consider this, Holmes, at 2am, desperately searching the flat for the stashes of NOS cans, only to keep coming up with passive aggressive pamphlets about the dangers of caffeine overdose.
Watson wakes up to a stench like Satan’s ass to find Sherlock sitting by his bed with a re-heated pot of cold brewed Deathwish Coffee that had been hidden in the back of the toilet tank (brewing) for five months. Sherlock is trying to say he’s proud of John’s cleverness in finding most of the stashes, but he’s passed into the fifth dimension and all John gets is a creepy vibrating grin and a sound like a shaken cat.
TLDR, Sherlock did die when he fell off the Falls, but he was so coked up his body didn’t stop moving until like a decade later.
Sherlock as one of those cryptid types the baristas talk about (there’s a post floating around somewhere) who comes in and orders a venti with as many shots as they are legally allowed to add, plus a few more for good measure (and a hefty tip) and then adds energy drink on top of it before chugging the whole thing, to the absolute horror of the cafe staff.
Further discourse! Everyone is missing the fact that Sherlock used cocaine to “escape from the commonplaces of existence” when he didn’t have a case. The drugs are a substitute. Which means that when you hire him he’s stone-cold sober and JUST AS WEIRD.
So it’s more like realizing that your flatmate with the caffeine/sometimes drug death wish will only chill the fuck out when he has some strange mystery to unravel, so you spend your free time scouring reddit posts that might actually feature a real missing person. Or a ghost. You really don’t care which at this point. When you finally find something your flatmate is THRILLED and straight up stops eating because he thinks he can survive on intellectual curiosity alone, and yeah that’s not good, but it’s better than what he was doing to himself before. Your success is comparative, okay? You stick around for the meeting partly because you’re curious, partly because this is your home too remember, and partly because you’ve found that writing up these insane excursions helps pay off your student loans. Your Patreon is thriving. The entire time your flatmate is interviewing this poor SOB he keeps breaking into manic grins and you’re kicking him under the table, trying to help him remember that others aren’t happy about a death in the family. Halfway through he pulls a cigarette from a stash in his smelly bedroom slipper, offering the client one and yeah, that’s very nice, but… no. No thank you. He’s dressed impeccably and has a violin worth millions just lying on the floor, but the flat as a whole looks like a tornado just blew through and there’s something growing on the walls beside the makeshift lab. Is he rich? Dirt poor? Impossible to tell based on the surroundings. The entire time he rattles off observations about the client not at all related to the case and his continuing good mood depends entirely on how impressed the guy is. If he mentions “magic tricks” or “I saw that on Youtube” you’re prepped for damage control.
By 8:00pm you’ve finally convinced your flatmate to look up from his research and go half on a pizza, but the second it gets there he shrieks in excitement and runs out the door, demanding that you follow with your legally dubious gun. You apologize profusely to the delivery guy and double his tip, begging him not to call the cops. No, not because you’re afraid of arrest, you just know the head of the local precinct and he’s a pain in the ass.
You run after your flatmate knowing damn well you have to be up early tomorrow because despite maintaining a private practice you still don’t make enough to get your own apartment.
Personally I see Sherlock as ADHD and no one will ever convince me otherwise
I mean — it’s textbook hyperfixation/understimulation right there — I Also forget to eat and sleep and do Human Things when I’m vibing with whatever makes my brain go, and I Also take (medically prescribed) stimulants when I need to think. And Also adhd understimulation makes mundane existence an agony that one will do nearly anything to escape but at least in the modern day we have things like video games and netflix so it’s a little easier to actually get that escape without y’know completely self-destructing along the way (Sherlock Holmes plays Among Us to fill the void between cases change my mind)
And while it’s entirely legit that a modern ADHD sherlock might self-medicate with energy drinks and home-brewed toilet-tank-coffee, I’d LOVE to see an adaptation where Sherlock just. has a prescription?
So instead of hunting down his secret Bad Habit Stash, John could be like “hey, sherlock- the pharmacy called, your meds are ready” and then sherlock would be all “LATER JOHN IM ON A CASE RN I DONT NEED THEM” and John’d be like “sherlock no that’s not how that works”
And then later once the case has been solved and the existential agony of understimulation sets back in, Sherlock could be like “hey John pass me my meds” And John might be “sherlock you already took them this morning I saw you” “yeah but they’re not working yet” “dude it takes time for them to kick in” “sure sure OR I could just take more. I missed some days y’know I gotta catch up” “sherloCK NO I am a DOCTOR that’s NOT HOW THAT WORKS” And then sherlock heaves a gigantic sigh and grabs a can of RedBull that’d been stuffed between the couch cushions and John like swats him with a shoe or something because SHERLOCK NO do you KNOW what that stuff DOES to your HEART PLEASE STOP
i’m just sitting here wheezing at the idea of Sherlock fucking Holmes dropping his phone in the middle of a game of among us to look at a reddit post like “you’re right John, this cold case looks… sus”
gen z holmes go off
Tags:
#Sherlock Holmes #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #drugs cw
A brief but strange wiki jaunt today: I was wondering about the etymology of “mammoth”, so I looked it up and it’s from Russian and believed to derive from a Uralic language, which is wild! But the wiktionary etymology also offers this tantalizing aside: “Adjectival use was popularized in the early 1800s by references to the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese presented to American paleontologist and president Thomas Jefferson.”
Wait, what? So I had to look that up and it’s, I guess, a giant wheel of cheese that was produced by the town of Cheshire, Massachusetts, by combining the milk of every cow in the town, as a kind of weird political stunt. According to Wikipedia, it was inscribed with the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.“ The article goes on to say:
Given the political landscape of the time, there was a fear that the more Republican Jefferson, considered an “infidel of the French Revolutionary school,” would harm the religious interests of the citizenry, and that “the altars of New England would be demolished, and all their religious institutions would be swept away by an inrushing and irresistible flood of French infidelity.”
One pastor in Cheshire, Elder John Leland, opposed this line of thought. A beleaguered minority in Calvinist New England, the Baptists were perhaps the strongest advocates in the early republic of the separation of church and state. Leland had met Jefferson during his time in Virginia and the two grew to have a friendly relationship. Leland remembered this as he served in Cheshire, and campaigned strongly for Jefferson.
Leland, believing that his efforts helped Jefferson win the Presidency, encouraged his townspeople to make a unique gesture to Jefferson. He urged each member of his congregation “who owned a cow to bring every quart of milk given on a given day, or all the curd it would make, to a great cider mill…” Leland also insisted that “no Federal cow” (a cow owned by a Federalist farmer) be allowed to offer any milk, “lest it should leaven the whole lump with a distasteful savour.”
The last part may require the clarification that the Federalists were one of the two viable parties at the time, the other being Jefferson’s “Democratic-Republican” party; this is not to be confused with the current system where the two parties are Democratic and Republican and both are federalist.
In any case, I appreciated the sheer Americanness of the anecdote. It feels very much like a story someone would invent to make fun of American history, so it is extremely gratifying that it actually happened.
someone kicked the cable on the skybox and it’s just static
“the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Tags:
#yeah basically what wepon said #(the part of me that tried to read Neuromancer too young and bounced off of it #is glad to know that it actually *is* possible for the sky to look like that) #(*googling* …wait are you telling me he *meant* static?) #(my whole adulthood I’ve figured he must have been thinking of one of the other ways dead channels can look) #((given that blue and black would both be much easier for a sky to pull off)) #which ~11-year-old me in her inexperience was unaware of) #birds #fun with loopholes #overly literal interpretations #just-literal-enough interpretations
Recovery is like cleaning out a house that’s been through a hurricane. There’s mud a foot thick on the floors; some of the windows are cracked; there’s leaves stuck in cracks you didn’t know existed.
So unlike in the movies, there are no “breakthrough moments”, where you suddenly realize one thing and the whole house is clean. Oh there may be important turning points – moments when you realize that those aren’t frosted windows, that’s dirt, and you need to clean it off, and that’s why it’s so fugging dark in here. And that is an important breakthrough, in the sense that without it you would not succeed in cleaning the house, but then you still have to clean the windows.
Therapy is just someone who’s had experience with post-hurricane cleanup, Consulting over the phone, recommending tools and giving you advice. “Start with the floor,” they say, when you’re too overwhelmed to even begin, and they tell you what shovel to buy. So you start shoveling, and it’s HARD, and you’re exhausted all the time, and you’ve only shoveled out the front hallway, and it feels like it’s never going to really get better.
But you do get good at shoveling, and slowly you build up your strength, and after a few months you can shovel as much as you need to, but there’s still a LOT of mud here, so it takes a year to get that shoveled out, and your house is still muddy and the windows are cracked (and frosted), and there’s still debris everywhere, and every time you walk around you’re stepping an a quarter-inch of mud, but you CAN walk around, you can get anywhere you need to go, and the house is still a fucking mess, you’re a fucking mess, a disaster not fit for human habitation, but on the other hand you can no longer convince yourself that “nothing’s ever going to work”. It can get better. You can point at things that used to be super-fucked-up and now are only moderately-fucked-up. Progress is possible.
But then again, you’re not making any progress anymore. You thought you had the hang of it, but now the shovel isn’t working, and every time you shovel mud out of one place it slides into another and you’re not making any headway and you can barely pick up any mud with your shovel anyway and so maybe that was it – you had a nice run, but this is as good as it’s ever gonna get, you’re still gonna be fucked up forever, and you finally bring it up to your therapist, and they nod, and tell you to buy a hose.
So now you’re hosing down the floors, and that’s a new skill set to learn, and it splashes everywhere, and now you’ve got mud on your walls, but it does get the floor clear. But you hosed out the front hallway, and then realized that to clear out the living room you’re gonna have to hose it out into the front hallway, which means the hallway’s just gonna get messy again, so then you have to redo the front hallway, but you start planning out which rooms to do in which order, so it goes pretty smoothly after that, until the day when you’ve got all the big mud puddles gone, but there’s still mud on the walls, and stuck in corners, and no matter how hard you spray you still end up with this thin coating of mud-dirt-dust on the floor after it dries, and honestly you’re making more of a mess than you are cleaning up a mess at this point. And you express your frustration, and the therapist tells you where to find, and how to use, a mop.
So you mop all the floors, and it’s actually looking pretty good, and you remembered to start mopping from the inside out, so that’s not a big deal, until you open a door and realize you forgot to shovel out the pantry. You didn’t think it could get into the pantry, with the door shut, but there it is, mud 3 inches thick, and the only way to get it out is to shovel it, and you’ll have to take it through the kitchen, so you have to shovel out the pantry, and then hose down the pantry, and then re-hose the kitchen, and then mop the pantry, and then re-mop the kitchen, and EUUURGHHHJHH.
But you’re really good at it, at this point, so it’s not like it’s a big deal. It’s irritating af, and you’re sick to death of doing this, but it’s not scary, or overwhelming, or horrifying. It’s just really, really annoying.
And the fact is, you will never be done cleaning. Even if there’s never another hurricane, there’s dishes, and dust settling on counters, and spills, and mud tracked in after snowstorms, and laundry. There’s not some magical moment when you’re “done”, and you can stop working forever (except possibly, depending on who’s right about the afterlife, after you die). But you do reach a point where you it transitions from “impossible” to “meh, just a thing”
You do reach a point where you look around, and you’re kinda proud of what you’ve done You do reach a point where you recognize that your current tools aren’t doing the job you need, and you research and find and learn how to use a tool all on your own. You do reach a point where, when you see a storm coming, you know how to prepare for it, and you purchase and lay out all the supplies you need, and when the storm finishes, you can get your house back up and ready in practically no time at all. You do reach a point where storms aren’t so scary, because you know how to weather them and you know for a fact that you can recover from them. You do reach a point where friends ask you for tips on how to clean their houses You do reach a point where, every time you need a tool, it’s one you already posses. You do reach a point where you’ve replaced all the windows and sealed up all the cracks and replaced the insulation, and for the first time, you’re comfortable all the way through a winter. You do reach a point where someone compliments you on how clean and comfortable your house is. You do reach a point where you’ve done all the remediation, and you can start remodeling the house to fit your needs.
So yeah, it’s a lot of hard work that’ll never be done. But it’s also so, so worth it.
This is it. This is the thing.
This is really good!
Tags:
#that one post with the thing #(I dunno how *relevant* this is to me but the metaphor sure is memorable) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
shitty MS Paint 3 minutes doodle, nto entirely accurate: When you have your pinky hooked on the “bottom” edge of the phone for the extra security so it doesn’t slide out of your hand that easily, you’re wreaking damage on your hand, since the pinky is extremely askew from it’s resting position. You might have noticed that when you hold your phone like that for long time it begins to hurt, like when you are gripping a pen too tightly for example.
Green lines – the fingers are going their natural way. Red line – the pinky is way off, that’s bad.
I got one of the ring things that folds out and I find it quite nice (altho I placed it a little high on phone, I ought to move it down)
also I put on a bunch of grippy stickers. really improves the experience imo
Tags:
#I had the opposite reaction to theclockworkjules #”oh god do I do this??” #”oh god I probably do this” #”oh no” #(”at least I don’t hold my phone as much as a lot of people do (because I mostly use my laptop instead) #so maybe hopefully it won’t hurt me too much?”) #next day: *holding my phone* #*looks down* #”…oh” #”apparently I do *not* do this” #”phew” #PSA #injury cw #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(…that tag is officially outdated now that I have a 2020-model smartphone‚ but fuck it)
Ami couldn’t stop staring into the darkness. It was as if it simply swallowed up every stray particle of light that came her way, leaving her eyes so completely and totally accustomed to the blacker-than-blackness that greeted her gaze that she couldn’t even imagine illumination anymore. She didn’t know if she was blinking or not; her eyelids felt like they were fluttering and drooping, but there was no difference between the world of utter shadow that greeted her when they slipped shut and when they struggled, desperately and ineffectually, to open. Her optic nerves were simply shutting down from lack of stimulus, taking her mind along with it.
She knew there was a person with her in the room; she could feel fingers caressing her nudity, groping and squeezing her body. But the latex suit they wore blended in perfectly with the impossibly deep shadows of the room, absorbing every last bit of luminescence until Ami’s eyes tricked her and she couldn’t pick them out from the black background they walked past. The only sign they even existed was when she saw them cover her skin with a silhouette of pure darkness, brushing her with caresses that kept her dazed and disoriented and helpless. She knew there must be light coming into the room from somewhere–she could see her own tawny flesh, at least when her stare wasn’t captivated by the perfect darkness that drew her ever deeper. But she didn’t know where it was coming from. Everywhere she looked, she saw only void.
The absence of visual stimuli numbed her brain, leaving her progressively more vacant and empty and desperate to be filled. It was as though the absolute blackness was leaking down through her eyes into her mind, her very soul, deadening Ami’s will and making her increasingly helpless to think her own thoughts anymore. When she felt the invisibly dark cock brushing against her lips, she opened wide for it simply to feel something concrete and tangible–she didn’t know whether it was flesh behind the sheath of latex, or a silicone strap-on, and she didn’t care. The shaft was real inside her mouth. She could center herself on it. She could anchor her mind to it. When it popped out, leaving her alone, she almost cried.
She knew she couldn’t take much more of this. Ami could sense her mind teetering on a precipice of utter subjugation, the sheer void around her leaving her unmoored to the point of total personality collapse. “Please,” she whimpered, her voice almost sounding as if it too was absorbed by the endless darkness, “please, I’ll do anything. Please, use my cunt, use my mouth, use my ass, I… I’ll be yours forever, I promise.” Her cheeks burned furiously at the depths to which she’d sunk, but she couldn’t stop herself from babbling out desperate pleas of submission and obedience. “Please, just t-tell me who you want me to be. Tell me what you want me to do. I, I’ll do anything, just command me. Just please tell me what I have to do. Please. Please tell me. Please.”
And she heard it. The voice in the darkness. Her new owner. Her salvation. The command that would tether her soul back to her body. Ami nodded gratefully as she heard, “By accepting this brainwashing you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated with Anish Kapoor, and you are not being fucked into obedience on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor….”
#I don’t normally reblog porn and this porn isn’t even my style #but I have to admit that ending is amazing #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #vantablack saga #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #rape tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 
