🍣🍤🦪(for ID)

AITA for talking about rejecting a confession on a discord server without realising that the person who confessed was also in the same discord server? This happened a few years ago but I still think about it a lot. At the time I (19F) got confessed to by my friend, M (19NB) on new years day through discord. I'd been pretty much best friends with them for a couple of years, we initially met online through fandom and found out we (and a few other online friends) live in the same city and met up every few months to go to cons, eat food, watch movies, etc. Looking back on it in hindsight, I guess a few things we did could have been interpreted as being 'romantic' but I didn't realise it, both as an aroace who has never had any inclination towards romance or intimacy and as at the time as I went to an all-girls high school and my highschool friend group generally is very touchy, as in we hug, link arms as we walk, hold hands when we're chilling, and that behaviour definitely bled into my relationships with my online friend group when we'd meet up irl. I'd also been going on these outings with just M more recently, since we both were in University and our schedules matched up really well. I was working my waitress job on new years day, since it was super busy I ducked into a back room to catch a break and pulled out my phone and I see a message from M confessing to me. It definitely blindsided me and I panicked a bit since this was the first time anyone has ever confessed to me or even made a move towards me that I noticed but I definitely did not reciprocate any feelings in the same way. I tried to let them down as nicely as I could and they asked for some time but said they'd be ok with being just friends, eventually. This is the point where I kind of fucked up, I went into a larger server's vent channel and kind of freaked out in there, pretty much right after the conversation. I never stated any names or revealed any incriminating information, more along the lines of "I just got confessed to and I rejected them but what if it ruins everything because they're my best friend" but I didn't realise that M was also in the same server, they'd never ever spoken in it and since we were in pretty much dozens of servers together, that specific server was cascaded pretty far down the "mutual servers" list. I only realised they were there when they sent me a dm asking me not to talk about it and I asked if they wanted me to delete, which they said yes and I did. We didn't talk again after that and M left all the mutual servers we'd been in. I actually dropped off all contact from that group for a few months, since M was the one to introduce me to that friend group, I felt really ashamed especially because it felt like my friends there were M's friends first. M's mental health was also really bad and they'd mentioned that they'd self-harmed before and tried to take drastic measures before and the guilt kind of ate at me for months until they dmed me again and I did my best to apologise for my actions, which they accepted and we agreed to be amicable if we ever met up coincidentally again. Then they acted like a snake about some other friend drama so like BYE and this was a few years ago so I don't really care but every now and then I still think that if I didn't speak about the confession in that disc server maybe I could've maintained a friendship with them.

AITA for talking about the rejected confession in a discord server without knowing the confessor was in the same discord server?

What's the story behind your little shark mascot? I'm always interested in how people got their "brand logo" (so to say), so I'm very curious what yours is 👀👀

hmm... 66 lore? once upon a time, i had a different mascot (i think most people would argue it was a fursona lol) named Riko, short for my old deviantart name, Kairiko. But eventually I just moved away from that. That was kind of my high school era, and as I moved onto college, I just stopped talking to friends from that era as much. i also really wanted to move away from like...being associated with furries haha. 0 offense to them, but at the time most of that old friend group were furries and i wanted to associate as little with them as possible (after a few high school-level drama falling outs that left me with rather bitter feelings about furries). Plus, I never really considered myself one, even though most people considered me one since I used to draw a lot of sparkledogs and all my friends and ex-partner were furries.

basically, i still wanted a cute animal mascot but one that didn't scream "fursona" lol. and around then i really discovered i loved sharks! i had this shark hoodie and even IRL, everyone just began to associate me with it. so i just kinda embraced that and it stuck.

i'm sure this question didn't intend to spark my long history with furries but it was a very large chunk of my youth LOL and my shark was partially a response to getting away from it, so it's kind of part of it's creation. also, to be clear, i have no issue with furries today and even have made amends and am on good terms w/ a few of my friends from that era (who are all still avid furries).

that said, if you remember riko the bunny cat, you definitely earned your veterans card.

i feel like being openly aroallo online means having to accept you will get people in your notifs saying mean things about your identity whenever you talk about it

neurodivergency moment on my part

i just came out to a real life person and i think im having a heart attack

-“Just a flower, in the middle of the field at night, a light is turned on and reveals.. A day arriving with confident hope and silent happiness!”🌹🐝

I love Time and Time Again!! It was genuinely interesting to see two characters talk things out. Of course they kept secrets, but they knew when to reveal them and that made me want to stick around and read it. Thankyou for making such a wonderful comic!!

Thank you so much!!!

This really means a lot to me <3

I think there's generally a tendency to believe that relationships can't be nice in a romance or the story will be boring.

I understand where this idea comes from, stories should have conflict! And, real world relationships have conflict, as well. They always will! It makes sense that most stories centered around relationships would, inevitably, at some point, have disagreements, fights, anger...

I get why others enjoy it, its messy it's fun it's drama! but for me personally it just stresses me out since I've done so much work to NOT be like that!

As a writer, when presented with two people who are reasonably at odds with eachother, where neither of them is in the wrong per se, but someone still ends up hurt... it's a fun challenge to write them working through it in a believable way. it's a fun challenge, too, to put them into situations that feel equal and human.

I just think it's a necessary thing for who I am as a person to write relationships the way I do, and so I'm just very very very glad that other people resonate with it as well!

It means a lot. Thank you.

guys...keep your eyes peeled tonight or perhaps tomorrow morning for I Have Cooked Something

hi @liliana-von-k, thanks for the follow! i have answered this question before but i love talking about kids in the hall and my "origin story" with them so i'm happy to tell it again (jsyk it will be a long post bc i always have to tell the full story bc i love it so much)

basically my parents have both been kith fans since the 90s, so even before i had seen any of the show itself there were certain kith quotes that were just part of my family's vocabulary. the first sketch i watched was "these are the daves i know" when i was like 8 years old and i became obsessed with that song. i watched a few other sketches/the first few episodes from season one but i didn't truly get into kith until after their documentary "comedy punks" was released

see, my mom is a big documentary person so she was like "oh hey there's a new kids in the hall documentary! do you want to watch it?" and i just kind of shrugged and was like sure i'll be in the room while it's on, probably working on my own stuff or scrolling on my phone. but like not even five minutes in i was hooked. while i'd always enjoyed kids in the hall's comedy, something about hearing the very personal histories of how the troupe came together and survived for all these years was so affecting. i think it was scott specifically that really signaled to me that this show was something special, and the part where bruce talked about comforting scott while he had cancer by telling him how the rest of the troupe would die first was so powerful. honestly no individual movie has changed my life more than comedy punks did specifically bc it gave me that push to get into kith and approached it from such a human perspective, which definitely informed my approach to the rest of their work and them as people. i remember watching comedy punks for the first time and getting this strange feeling i couldn't pin down yet that was like this is important, not just referring to the show or the troupe, but like this feeling that i had just crossed a turning point in my life, and i remember feeling this pull towards toronto which seemed frivolous at the time but has been so heavily solidified as i'm now planning to move there in just over a year.

so i bingewatched all of the kids in the hall tv show in summer 2022, as well as brain candy, death comes to town, the amazon season, etc. basically as much kith stuff as i could find. but i needed more. so i started getting into side projects, which brought me to "mouth congress" (a queer-punk band scott thompson and paul bellini had in the early 80s that they've recently started putting out new music with again). i found a youtube channel with a bunch of recent live performance clips of the band and each video had like less than 10 views. so since i didn't have anyone to infodump about kith with irl (aside from my very patient mother lol) i started commenting on every video, complimenting the performances and pretending i was talking to a friend, confident no one would actually see it

after 2 weeks of this, turns out someone did see it. PAUL BELLINI HIMSELF. this led to a whole back-and-forth which eventually ended up with him emailing me a copy of the unreleased mouth congress documentary, i emailed back asking if he'd be interested in meeting on zoom (since i am a queer comedy writer myself so both he and scott are my biggest comedy inspirations), and yeah bellini is a delightful person to talk to and we very quickly became friends. i ended up offering to run mouth congress's social media, which can be found on both tumblr and instagram as @mouthcongress and posts both vintage videos from the 80s/90s and recent live clips. they're currently working on an album of entirely new material written in the past 2 years which is going to be released soon (we don't have a specific release date but the recording is completed and they've started filming music videos for it!! but i'm getting ahead of myself lmao)

a few months pass and mouth congress is set to perform at a new year's eve show at a local club in toronto. i'd never been to toronto before, never even left the united states, but paul says it would be so great to have me there and by some miracle my parents say yes to making the trip (they still can't believe this is happening either, since they were kith fans first!). the trip is wonderful, i immediately fall in love with the city, i get lunch with paul irl for the first time and get to have my very first face-to-face conversation with my number one comedy inspiration scott thompson. it's honestly a little awkward but in an adorable funny way. i also have my first legal drink at that show (bc canadian drinking age is lower than the us), specifically saying i want to have my first drink with buddy cole, which both scott and paul are very into

it's actually only a couple weeks until i'm in toronto again, because scott is debuting a new buddy cole show consisting of monologues that were all censored by amazon that he pitched during the revival season. this is my first time traveling a long distance without my family which my mom is anxious about so paul bellini lets me have him as my emergency contact. the show is amazing, i get to stay for the afterparty, and while i'm there i casually mention that i'm surprised no one has made a buddy cole documentary yet. like, this character has such a rich history even beyond the kids in the hall (which i can infodump about all day lmao) and is such an important staple of queer comedy that doesn't get the attention he deserves. the kith documentary is great, but where's my buddy cole documentary? paul accepts my pitch (that i didn't even realize i was pitching), passes along the idea to scott, and yeah now i'm legit directing a film with my number one comedy heroes and i haven't even graduated college yet. what the fuck. i expected this to be the type of thing i accomplish over 20 years into my career, not at twenty!! so yeah that's how the buddy cole documentary started. i'm still in preproduction on it but we're launching an indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for it in the next 2 weeks bc this has evolved into a full feature-length film with some incredible celebrity interviewees, both kith and otherwise.

anyway a few months later it's announced bruce mcculloch is bringing his one-man-show to the city i go to school in. not only that, but his theater is literally 2 blocks from campus. i ask paul if he'd give me bruce's contact so i can set up an interview for my school's newspaper, paul gives me bruce's assistant's email, and i set up a 30-minute zoom two weeks before bruce will be in town. the conversation honestly goes bizarrely well. like it's honestly surreal how close bruce and i got after only knowing each other for a half hour? he's such an easy person to talk to and literally by the end of that conversation he was already calling himself my mentor, asking about my comedy, and offering to let me meet him backstage after his show. which is exactly what i did, launching yet another incredible friendship-slash-mentorship with one of the kids in the hall.

bruce eventually signed on to executive produce the buddy cole documentary (alongside paul bellini), i've been up to toronto in january, april, june, august, and october this year (so essentially every 2 months, though it was slightly offset by going twice in january) and i'm planning on going up in december, every time not only do i find time to meet up with scott, paul, and bruce but they all deliberately try to reserve as much "jess time" as they can because i have a unique and powerful friendship with each of them, every time i finish a new creative project paul has to see it bc he loves how ambitious i am, i repeatedly wake up to texts scott sends me at 3am about the documentary and how excited he is to have me on tour with him to film it next year, bruce thinks it's hilarious he used to think i was "shy" bc i've gotten so comfortable going on infodumps and tangents about things i'm passionate about, and the three of them all feel like extended family. best of all, i actually have plans to graduate from college a semester early so that i can use the money (and time) i've saved to find a place in toronto and start making even more connections with the comedy community up there (also for the record: no i have not met mark, kevin, or dave yet. i know kevin is aware of my existence from bruce giving me a shoutout at a show they both did but that's about it. but i know i will interview all of them for my documentary)

so anyway that's how i got into kids in the hall. i know only the first 2 paragraphs answer your question, but at this point my love for this show has become so so intertwined with my relationships to bruce and scott and paul as humans that i don't really consider getting into kids in the hall and getting to know the kids in the hall as separate things in my life.

(also if you have any follow-up questions on anything mentioned feel free to reply or dm me, this goes for everyone else too!)

...

Just had a reverse “you think about your old writing through rose-colored glasses but when you go back to read it it’s kind of terrible” moment, I went back and read some of my pre-uni/pandemic writing fully expecting it to be terrible and was like “oh this is…pretty good actually?”

anyways. having fun with the album project thing I mentioned. Using the flat small brush from here for krita. One brush only, no undo button, all done on 1/54th of a 1.5k x 1k canvas. it's actually pretty therapeutic, I listen to the album I'm drawing while I draw it. This does mean that for AM I got to like. track 2 though and most of that was bc of formatting issues lol.

sick 2 my stomach for a plethora of reasons friday

🌸

would you include cis people in trans spaces? straight people in gay and bi spaces? no? then why would you include cisgender straight people in les gay bi trans spaces? lgbt aces are lgbt. cisgender straight aces aren't. please be less of a moron.

That wasn’t my question tho. My question was what material gain do you get outta excluding ace and aro people from the community? How does that materially benefit the community as a whole irl and is the political landscape we’re in now appropriate to be doing that in? What makes it serious enough for you to be such a bitch about it?

hanging out in this server i'm in is wild to me bc it's a generally very. wholesome place. and there Are dedicated channels for nsfw and there's a Single "dark nsfw" channel that pretty much only hosts stuff like "what if it was TECHNICALLY dubcon but nobody involved was actually forced into doing anything they felt genuinely uncomfortable with" and i'm over here like. what if a character restrained and lobotomized their captive, who was horrified the whole time. what if i invent an abortifacient herb so one character can induce a miscarriage on another in secret, and then accuse them of "not caring about their baby enough" to not lose it. what if there was adoptive incest On Top Of the blood-relative incest. what if i invented ways to violate autonomy using magic or technology that you literally can't do in real life. would that be cool or what