“A divine place that is just as misunderstood as “balance” is. Where Blackness intersects on the realm of sexuality is simultaneously spiritual, political, social, and physical. We don’t have to perfectly understand Black asexuality to make way for it. Asexuality is already valid. We can know this about ourselves, and we can have trouble with understanding it, unpacking it, and feeling secure within it.”

Excerpt From Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown

I’m excited to subvert the “good drow players are all just Drizzt superfans” thing by making a good drow that is herself a Drizzt superfan.

Radical compassion is a will to care for, a commitment to feel with, a striving to learn from, and an openness to be vulnerable before a precarious other, though they may be drastically dissimilar to yourself. Radical compassion is not an appeal to an idyllic oneness where difference is blithely effaced. Nor is it a smug projection of oneself into the position of another, thereby displacing that other. Nor is it an invitation to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes and amble, like a tourist, through their lifeworld, leaving them existentially barefoot all the while. Rather, radical compassion is an exhortation to ethically walk and sit and fight and build alongside another whose condition may be utterly unlike your own. Radical compassion works to impart care, exchange feeling, transmit understanding, embolden vulnerability, and fortify solidarity across circumstantial, sociocultural, phenomenological, and ontological chasms in the interest of mutual liberation. It persists even and especially toward beings who are the objects of contempt and condemnation from dominant value systems.

Most urgently, mad methodology primes us to extend radical compassion to the madpersons, queer personae, ghosts, freaks, weirdos, imaginary friends, disembodied voices, unvoiced bodies, and unReasonable others, who trespass, like stowaways or fugitives, in Reasonable modernity.

How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind by La Marr Jurelle Bruce

let's talk about the fish/water/christ symbolism in the game of kings. with spoilers

fish (as ιχθυς) is an acronym for christ, and it's the first food jesus eats after being resurrected, right? it symbolizes rebirth, life, and christ himself. i personally think fish are slippery and cold-blooded too, but that's neither here nor there.

now look at how the game of kings starts: "lymond is back". we immediately know this book is about returning, it's about rebirth. in fact, the first thing we see is the man himself submerged in a body of water and coming out on the other side, after a baptism of sorts, as the character he will play for most of the book: lymond the outlaw, lymond the traitor.

the first words out of his mouth are "i am a narwhal": he identifies himself as a fish right away, and not just any fish but the unicorn fish; the unicorn of course being scotland's national animal. in perspective, he tells us everything we need to know about him: his status as a christ figure, his destiny to be reborn, his complicated relationship with his country.

the next time he's in a body of water, it's the second chapter and he's dying from a head injury in a bog. he's washed clean, this time, too: from his own identity. he's free to inhabit another character from the lymond constellation. it's also pretty funny that he's found by sym while he's going fishing ("you’ve hooked a twenty-pounder this time, my lad"), and he's nursed back to health by someone named Christian. not subtle.

lymond seems to be pretty into this whole fish and rebirth thing, does he not? he wouldn't lie to us. he wouldn't pretend to embrace life while actively seeking death, right? anyway, no relation at all, when the baby queen mary tries feeding him a fish he pretends to eat it and secretly throws it away. the fish is described as struggling and barely alive, which again i am sure is a coincidence.

then some stuff happens, and the next time lymond is offered fish he doesn't have it in him to keep pretending. he doesn't want the damn fish. newsflash, asshole (richard): he really, really wants to die. this is my favorite scene for many reasons, and one of them is the perfect juxtaposition of its literal and symbolic meanings: richard says he wants to see lymond hanged, but what he does is to drag him away from the tomb-like dovecote and towards running water, makes him eat the damn fish again and again until the miracle is complete. he's holding on to his brother with both hands and teeth before he even realizes he's doing it.

when it comes to an end the fish is off the hook, christ is off the cross and for once he's not sacrificed for the sins of others, and we close on him in his mother's arms in a beautiful literary pietà.

there's so much stuff i purposefully didn't mention and probably didn't notice, this is just a tiny example of the gorgeous figurative and thematic cohesion in this novel. i love it. thank you dorothy dunnett.

folks tonight we discovered what hitting my breaking point looks like and it is: impulse three day vacation in palm desert for ahl hockey in february by myself. does anyone have any recommendations for stuff to do in coachella valley?? like restaurants or hikes or museums or anything. i don't drink and i love museums and i will have a car and my only two commitments are evening hockey games. i should probably buy my lesbian parents alcohol, snacks, and/or spices for looking after my dog and i would like to buy local. also love a local ice cream shop or creamery. literally any recs you have would be great!! no recommendation too great or too small!!

(also podcast recs that aren't true crime or horror since i have two 7+ hour drives and if i listen to my sports podcasts the entire time i will become a worse version of myself than we started with, which is already bad lmfao)

people on tiktok are so casual about oh I have 300 unread books in my house let's read them before I buy more like bro? I don't even have 300 books in total in my house maybe you should realize that's not normal???

Finished binding volume 1 of Becoming Whole!

@pikapeppa thank you for being so lovely and sharing your writing with the world! (And for hyping me up and sending me pretty photomode screenshots)

why does consuming content destroy me. i am so bad at this. why can't i just read books and play video games like a normal person

I've been thinking about the tragedy of Elizabeth Woodville living to see the death of her family name.

I don't mean her family with her husband, which lived on through her daughter and grandson. I mean her own.

Her sisters died, one by one, many of them after 1485. When Elizabeth died, only Katherine was left, and she would die before the turn of the century as well.

All her brothers died, too. Lewis died in childhood. John was executed. Anthony was murdered. Lionel died suddenly in the peak of Richard's reign, unable to see his niece become queen. Edward perished at war. Richard died in grieving peace. For all the violence and judgement the family endured, it was "an accident of biology" that ended their line: none of the brothers left heirs, and the Woodville name was extinguished. We know the family was aware of this. We know they mourned it, too:

“Buy a bell to be a tenor at Grafton to the bells now there, for a remembrance of the last of my blood.”

Elizabeth lived through the deposition and death of her young sons, and lived to see the end of her own family name. It must have been such a haunting loss, on both sides.

I decided to re-read the bendy books because it's been a while since I read them.

BTW if you haven't already please take a minute to look up what venomous snakes are local to you and familiarize yourself with them

I have a problem…

ThriftBooks and girl math is a fatal combination

I'm having Wingfeather thoughts all of a sudden. Spoilers for book/season 2:

So I'm wondering if maybe one of the reasons the people working on the tv show decided to have Sara appear in season 1- beyond the obvious purpose of letting new fans get to know her character a bit and become emotionally attached to her- is so that we could see how bright and happy and spirited she was before the Fork Factory. Because even in the book we only get like one line from Janner about how he remembers her before the Factory, which isn't a lot to go off of.

But, now that we've seen her in season 1 they've set it up to be emotionally devastating to see her in the Fork Factory (unless they change it but I hope they don't). Sara is depressed in the Fork Factory, she has no hope until Janner arrives and starts hatching an escape plan with her, until he leaves light behind for her. And for people watching the show to have seen what a bright, cheerful, friendly little girl she was before, that's like a gut punch. And that's... really clever writing, actually. I hope that's what they're going for because I feel like it's just going to make her story more meaningful.

see if i actually do end up going to liverpool again i’m gonna need to spend the least amount of money as possible. so the cheapest hotel, the cheapest trains and the cheapest tickets. plus i’ll need someone to go with or meet up at the con because i doubt anyone from my family would be willing to go again, i’m already going to crossroads 8 by myself but that’s in birmingham so it’s just a 1 hour train.

anyways. point is. who would come to the next comic con liverpool???

If it’s pre-existing plans that you mention in your interview that’s kinda different, it’s when you’ve already got the job and started working then ask for a week off.

Also, specifically for leisure time - illness etc. are fine.

some terrible indescribable things happens and you come back wrong from it and you can't tell what it is ..... and the world curls away from you in disgust and helpless admiration because you came back Wrong and you shouldn't exist at all but you do ...... you did something you can't remember and it turned you inside out because you've come back Wrong and your own skin is revolting against you ..... yeah