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All of these are fics I read (re-read, really) in the past week and added to my fanfic database, and which I flagged for being a favorite fic. (For all fics I added this week, leave a comment and I can make a special post for you, or you can browse the regular posts linked in my master recs post.
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.
To: “frank” <frank@postsecret.com> Sent: Sunday, September 28, 2025 Subject: “it gets better”
Hi Frank,
Sorry to bother you. I was just wondering if, among the sea of “it gets better” sentiments, there are people who acknowledge that sometimes it doesn’t? My failed attempt was 29 years ago and it has not in fact gotten better. I tried so hard for such a long time to get better and be happy, but every year that passes leaves me more and more hopeless. But I’ve never seen anyone express this sentiment.
Everyone insists sunshine and rainbows and self-actualization are all just around the bend. I never express my hopeless sentiment because I don’t want to ruin anyone else’s happiness. Are the others like me just doing what I’m doing, keeping quiet so as not to burden anyone else? Or am I the only one?
I feel like the only one.
I’m so lonely and hopeless and exhausted and I would love to know if there are people out there who also know that “it gets better” isn’t always true.
~~~
From: Frank Warren <frank@postsecret.com> Sent: Sunday, September 28, 2025 Subject: Re: “it gets better”
I do get some of those secrets, I will try to post a few more.
In the meantime, I’ll share your message on social media tomorrow. We can watch the responses you get.
Thanks for your message, but mail me a postcard.
Cheers, -Frank
~~~
“Finally! Someone telling it like it really is. Thank you brave person! Sending you love.”
“Oh man… You are so not alone. I wish I had something profound to say.”
“Hi there, not alone. Thank you for putting what I feel into words.”
“You’re definitely not alone on this one. I’ve been trying to survive one day at a time for more than a decade.”
“Can I just give you all a hug and let you know you are seen? And I hope you choose to stay?”
“I felt this in my soul.”
~~~
To: “frank” <frank@postsecret.com> Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2025 Subject: “it gets better”
What an incredible gift you’ve given me. You could have replied with a simple answer (which I also would have appreciated so much), but instead you gave me a front-row seat to witness the answer unfold in real time. You simultaneously showed me the view from your huge platform while also shielding me with the safety of anonymity.
I’ve read every single comment and am floored at how many others are out there feeling the same as me. For so long I’ve felt so insubstantial, like I could fall in the water and not make a single ripple. This experience made me feel like a real human person who is allowed to feel actual connection to other humans. I don’t have the words for how grateful I am.
Thank you so much for giving me the experience of hundreds of messages in bottles washing up on my shore.
~~~
“Sometimes ‘it doesn’t get worse’ is ok too.”
“I found ‘just take another breath’ more useful than ‘it gets better’.” And I did…
“It hasn’t gotten better for me. I’m in pain every single day. It never ends. But sometimes I find a cool book to read or a game to play, and I’ll want to find out what happens next. So I’m still here.”
“My moto is ‘oh no, it’s tomorrow again’. So you’re definitely not the odd one out.”
~~~
From: Frank Warren <frank@postsecret.com> Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2025 Subject: Re: “it gets better”
PostSecret has shared a secret with me, over and over – no one is alone with their secret.
Your post was seen by over a million people and I know many of them found solace discovering that they were not alone with their secret.
See the postcards on exhibition at the Museum of Us.
Get free passes to see the exhibition plus a signed proof from the first PostSecret book and join the community by becoming a ‘PostSecret Partner’ on Patreon. Details
I started the afternoon by sitting under the shade of some kind of ornamental cherry while my godchild pruned and weeded the sprawling twenty-one-gourd salute of a vine that has taken over the lawn, but then the sun moved to reflect itself directly into my eyes and I relocated to the fire lane on the grounds that technically I was not parked in it.
Highlights of the later afternoon included napping for at least an hour, Japanese-style egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and fleurdelis41 notifying me of the identification of the Sanday Wreck and its four decades of service in the Royal Navy and the Arctic fishery. My godson spent most of the evening repainting and rebuilding a chair, partly by lantern-light out on the deck where he looked like some DIY Tarot draw of the Star.
Wildcat Bus (1940) is the definition of a programmer in that its premise of a small commercial bus line suffering a mysterious string of sabotage is reasonably disposable and in execution it is a thorough delight, starting with third-billed Paul Guilfoyle for once not playing a sleaze, a stooge, or any kind of crook at all, but the steadfast and sarcastic, textually acknowledged heterosexual life partner of the hero, the former oil heir played by Charles Lang who cracked up so badly in the wake of personal tragedy that the film opens with his spectacular eviction from the penthouse he couldn't afford on an installment plan, burrowed avoidantly into his bedclothes until spilled out onto the floor blinking at the receiver like the repossession of Bertie Wooster. Technically the chauffeur even when that 1937 Packard Twelve represents the totality of their possessions, Guilfoyle's Donovan is generally the person in the room with the brain cell, although Fay Wray gives him fair competition as the mechanically minded general manager of Federated Bus Lines who if she has a more feminine given name than "Ted" is never once addressed by it, while Leona Roberts' Ma Talbot does almost as good a bait-and-switch as Why Girls Leave Home (1945) as a criminal mastermind camouflaged as a little old charlady. What looks like a comic bit with a voluble Mexican turns into the lesson that if you want to drive a bus in southern California, you had better be fluent in Spanish. When a Chinese-American passenger sounds like a houseboy, he's doing it to razz Lang's Jerry Waters. There's some sweet if rear-projected footage of the Golden Gate International Exposition, a climactically left-field donnybrook, and the breezily Code-blowing demurral, "Why, no, Mr. Casey, I do my entertaining at the Athletic Club." It's not quite Only Angels Have Wings (1939), but when asked point-blank by Ted about the man he's pulled through more than one wipeout, "You really like him, don't you?" I'll take Donovan's thoughtfully frank, "Yeah, I guess I do." He has eloquently mordant eyebrows and an absentminded habit of tidying any office he's left to his own devices in. The whole thing came off the shop floor of RKO in a month and barely clears an hour in runtime and its attractions are unpretentious but satisfying, especially where character actors are perennially concerned. Guilfoyle may always have had a case of resting hangdog face, but come on, it worked for Walter Matthau. "I've taken an awful lot of guff from you for six years, you can take ten minutes from me."
A father and son have found unequivocal evidence of the heroine's presence, even if the father will misinterpret it slightly.
To keep his son from babbling, he will spin a story of some kind of fae creature.
I just have to figure out what. Especially since it's not a real creature, and the father doesn't even believe it, any more than the father would believe there really was a Jennie Greentooth to drown children in the dangerous river.
I am rereading a fic set in late season BtVS and they just got started being told 'from beneath you it devours' and this time around my brain has decided it's not that deep? well, obviously, the Sunnydale sinkhole was just that deep, but it's not that deep/obscure/symbolic.
Something was yelling at the whole town that it was about to be swallowed.
Then the town mostly evacuated, except people who wanted to fight the being swallowed, which... I mean, it wasn't swallowed into a hell dimension as far as we know? So that fighting maybe helped? Or the fighting triggered it. But in a year when the other outcomes were worse.
But due to the past/reruns/fiction not being something you can have a conversation with I cannot tell the characters that.
Also the show really tried to make it seem like supernatural evil rather than a giant cave collapsing so it's probably not intended to be simples.
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