leitmotifs never get old to me like holy shit dude there’s this melody that corresponds to this one guy and if you hear the melody it means the guy is there. holy shit. and sometimes it refers to ideas too not just guys. has anyone heard about this

me: hmm i havent made any new posts in a while

also me: made these months ago and just. immediately forgot about them lmao

[more here]

underrated part of petting a cat is when you reach over their head to scratch their back and they bonk their head on ur arm

that’s the stuff………………

kitty cat (and some guy idk)

WIP BIG BANG SIGN-UPS ARE LIVE!

The 2024 round of WIP Big Bang is now open for sign-ups! Any fandom is welcome, as long as the fic is 500 completed so far and will be at least 7,500 words upon its finishing. Signing up is easy: just fill out the form linked below after you read the FAQ and take a look at the schedule.

The thing I keep coming back to, with all the *gestures expansively* is that real life doesn't have peaceful epilogues.

Every single win has to be defended. Forever. I'm sorry. It sucks. The Nazis lost until they stopped losing. The US had abortion rights, and then 50 years later it didn't. Empires fall, and then they invade other countries again. Oppressive regimes are overthrown and replaced with other oppressive regimes. You will never finish the work etc etc etc. Which is why it's so fucking important to be able to acknowledge and celebrate progress, when it happens. The people who came before you didn't put in all that work for nothing, and you aren't, either. You can't save it all for the Ultimate Victory because there is never going to be an Ultimate Victory. There's no such thing as a time when everything is good, and ours shall not be the commune of Heaven.

Random writing tips that my history professor just told during class that are actually helpful

Download all your sources or print them so you can turn off your wifi

Give your phone to someone

Just. WRITE. Writing is analysing, you’ll get more ideas as you write. It doesn’t need to be perfect, for now you can just blurt out words and ideas randomly. You can fix it later.

Create a skeleton/structure before writing.

Stop before you get exhausted. It’s best to stop writing when you still have some energy and inspiration left, this will also motivate you to get started again next time.

Make a to do list

Work in bite sizes. Even if it’s not much, as long as you put some ideas on paper or do some editing.

Simple language =/= boring language, simple language = clear language.

Own your words. If they are not your words, state this clearly in the text, not just in the footnotes.

STOP BEFORE YOU GET EXHAUSTED. Listing it again because it’s easily one of the best tips a teacher has ever given me.

We sometimes treat avoiding Annoying Queer People as if it’s essential to the LGBTQ community’s self-preservation. We agonize over event descriptions and identity-based admittance policies, wondering how to discourage all the Annoying (and often, it’s implied, fake) Queers from attending without restricting any actual queers. (This always fails, because it turns out that actual queer people are humans, and therefore pretty annoying. And being annoying, by the way, is not a crime.) In order to fortify ourselves against Annoying Queers, we mock all their signifiers and regard them as massive social red flags: straight husbands, bolo ties, sexual inexperience, ukuleles, rainbow pins from Target, misconceptions about what hormones do, and Picrew avatars all somehow get treated with equal venom, no matter where they are coming from and why. The problem is, none of these traits tell us anything about how safe a person actually is to be around. Only observing their patterns of behavior can do that. By demonizing “cringey” and irritating attributes as the signs of a deep character flaw, we ignore the fact they tend to cluster among the closeted, questioning, or newly-out for a reason. When a socially isolated queer person in the suburbs feels that nobody sees them as they are, they might cover themselves in rainbow swag from the local big-box store to an ‘annoying’ degree. When a closeted lesbian teen hasn’t had the chance to form genuine relationships with LGBTQ people, all her reference points might come from shows like Our Flag Means Death and Heartstopper which yeah, might seem fangirlish and irritating to a more seasoned adult. When a profoundly repressed trans divorcee still believes the misinformation about hormones they’ve been fed by the press, they might repeat some downright offensive myths about pelvic floor damage or body hair being disgusting. This too, is incredibly exhausting to help someone process again and again. I don’t think any of us literally believe that the more irritating a person is, the more of a pressing political threat they are. But we behave as if we do. We devote huge amounts of time to complaining about the types of queer people that irritate us, and develop complex taxonomies for describing why they are so annoying and why defeating that annoyingness matters. This person is a tenderqueer, that one is a tucute, and in their style of dress and annoying mannerisms we can tell that they represent all that we hate most about ourselves and how we are seen. It’s easy for us to wind up directing more attention toward the queer people that annoy us than we do to our shared enemies. It’s not a good use of our time. It’s not good for our shared futures. And it’s all rooted in internalized shame.

I wrote about biphobia, acephobia, transphobia, and the troubling respectability politics of hating the "Annoying Queer Person." The full essay is free to read (or have narrated to you!) on my Substack.

survivor’s guilt except it’s about the fruit quietly and prettily rotting in my fridge

me normally: i'm not personally a huge fan of modern art

me around right wingers: I love modern art sooooo much and I think there should be litter boxes in schools also

Firefly is one of a very few shows I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a reboot of, if it was done with the right intentions by the right people. because the bones and aesthetic and premise of the show are incredible but I think maybe it was just kind of. created too early to actually fulfill the potential it had. like idk what if Firefly, but it was less weird about its female characters and half the cast was actually chinese. I just think that would be cool and interesting to see. and I want more space cowboys and frankly am not terribly picky as to how that happens and reboots are in. get all unknown actors to do it because I’m tired of looking at the same five people.

plus if it gets released on a streaming service we can even get the truly authentic Firefly experience of watching it be cancelled for no reason after season one.

More stories from hell (retail) today I was ringing up this lady and she goes oh I want to do part of this on a gift card and the rest on normal card and I go ok and then she hands me a folded piece of paper. I think oh OK it must be folded around the gift card, right? Wrong. It is a folded sheet of 8×11 printer paper with "$40" written on the inside in ballpoint pen. I go what is this. She says a gift card. I say this is not a gift card. She says yes it is. I say this is a piece of paper with "$40" written on it. She says "well it's a gift card." I say it absolutely is not. I am grinding my teeth. She says well I want to use it. I say you physically cannot do that bc it is a piece of paper. I cannot scan or swipe it. I apologize, as if this is my fault, and not because she is completely insane. I hate it here

I fucking hate this "capitalism is when you make money, the more money you make, the more capitalism it is" mindset people have gotten. No, an artist selling their own work is not them engaging in capitalism, it's literally a worker owning their own means of production.

Remember capitalism is someone profiting off of someone else's labor though owning capital. It is not simply the act of profiting at all.

Eau Claire Leader, Wisconsin, January 30, 1915