Fun Saturday of just letting things happen. Started with going down to the lobby for coffee to enjoy with a muffin I had in my room and stumbling onto the Honolulu Pride Parade! After celebrating love with a few hundred new friends I headed over to the Pride festival just to take it all in. It was just so energizing to be surrounded by such a fun, free, and enthusiastic group of people. It gave me hope and just filled me happiness. Ending my day with a Larceny Barrel Proof and a Gurkha cask blend cigar. .... "What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains." ~ Tennessee Williams .... #pride🌈 #cigar #CigarLover #CigarAfficionado #cigarphoto #cigarsnob #cigarlife #cigarsmoke #gurkhacigars #gurkhanation #sailorandsticks #cigarsandwhiskey #TapThatAsh #whiskey #bourbon #larcenybourbon #barrelproof #whiskeylife #WhiskeyLover #whiskeyphoto #WhiskeyNeat #WhiskeyAfficionado #whiskeygram #quote #quotestagram (at The Row Bar by Tamuras) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cjw_09Bsm95/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Today's daily is a Gurkha Ghost Gold Shadow. Nice mild medium bodied smoke. With earthy peppery tones. I highly recommend these sticks. Gurkha is another manufacturer you can't go wrong with. #gurkhanation #gurkhacigars #dailycigars https://www.instagram.com/p/Co5qEWerDne/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Wait that is such an anticlimax they just threaten a bunch of Romani guys with rifles then stab Dracula to death in a shipping crate while he's unconscious. I thought there would at least be a sick fight scene

Zombies Run S3M45 Aquarius

I went out and did this mission on Oct 2nd with my C25K friend. She did not quite get to 5k that day because she had a stomach cramp at about 2 miles. We just walked the rest of the way.

Spoilers after the image below:

This is an AI-generated image of a shadow puppet play.

Oh my god, Moonchild, why did you take me back on these ships? I already said I don’t like the ocean.

How in the world would zombies represent desire when they can’t even think for themselves? The only thing zombies represent are Moonchild’s desire for experimentation. She’s the one going through suffering and bringing down everyone with her.

Her monologue is a fckd up version of the Four Noble Truths.

The most painful thing was that I killed everyone. Those ships are gone and most likely all those on board.

Moonchild needs to be stopped right now.

Background movement study plus faces!

I gave Xena her usual fringe coz why not.

i wish i could telepathically communicate to all the young gays that watching Xena is worth it even with our much higher standards today for lgbt characters in media. the cast crew writers and showrunners never panicked when they discovered that their characters were driven by romantic love and were pulled back only by the network to prevent it from becoming textual. by season 4 they established them as souls in love reincarnated together forever and never tried in earnest to pair them with men. by the end of season 5 they stopped that altogether. by season 6, it is as explicit as they were able to make it given the restraints at the time, and they did so much to signal to queer audiences that Xena and Gabrielle were one of us. like Xena presenting Gabrielle, a lover of written word, with a poem by Sappho as a gift (and becoming adorably shy and blushing as she reads it).

there is so much joy in seeing just how effectively they were able to convey the romantic nature of their love and companionship despite the opposition. physical attraction is clear in the s6 episodes "Who's Gurkhan" and "When Fates Collide". "When Fates Collide" and "Return of the Valkyrie" are so dizzyingly and overtly romantic that i still can't believe they pulled it off. when viewed in its full context it is really an epic and beautiful love story. :)

BTS from "Who's Gurkhan?"

I once heard the term “straightbaiting” in regards to ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’. As in, what we queer people get in another show where there’s queerbaiting. But with Xena it’s just with the opposite sex instead. And that’s accurate because the central relationship in ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ is Xena and Gabrielle. The show revolves around both of them as main characters and their love relationship - be it platonic or romantic.

Every other episode in the earlier seasons they would bring in a male love interest for either one of them (later in the show they would also get female love interests as well as male love interests; Gabrielle - Najara, Thalassa, Brunhilda. Xena - M’Lila, Lao Ma and, ugh, Akemi) but none of these love interests lasted. They would either die, leave or otherwise just never show up in the show again. They were either always temporary fill ins/stand bys until the other main character returned or used as a relationship conflict between Xena and Gabrielle, basically stating and showing how unnatural it was for either of them to have any sort of love relationship going on when it’s not with each other. And whenever this happens, the show itself feels shaky and off-kilter: unbalanced.

In a sense,… not straight. It feels not straight for it to be straight. It feels fake. It feels abnormal. Wrong. Exactly the way a queer person is supposed to feel when it’s queerbaiting in a primarily straight show. Straightbaiting in Xena feels like that to a straight person because Xena is genuinely a queer show and, therefore, in that show,… Queer is right. Queer is normal. Queer is real. And even with the female love interests - it still feels that way because, again, the central and most important relationship is X and G!

So ‘straightbaiting’ is absolutely the most accurate term to describe what the experience of ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ is rather than queerbaiting because it’s not Xena and Gabrielle that is the bait. It’s everyone else. And this is especially true with the male love interests. Except maybe Ares. But that’s a whole other topic altogether that takes understanding Rob Tapert’s mind, who is genuinely team X and G all the way but just has hang ups with X and A. I won’t go into it here.

But yes, it also boggles my mind something awful when anyone watching Xena today could call it queerbaiting. It’s honestly the entire opposite. You can’t watch episodes like ‘When Fates Collide’ and ‘Who’s Gurkhan’ and hell, even Season 2’s ‘The Quest’, without realizing that the creators are genuine with how they write Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship. It’s not a joke. It might have started out as one but pretty damn quickly they changed course and it became serious. So serious that almost every other relationship for Xena or Gabrielle feels like a joke. Feels like it is the bait that keeps straight people tuned into watching a queer show about queer characters the way straight characters acting queer are the bait for queer people to watch a straight show.

And I cannot put it anymore concisely than that. That IS ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’. It is a straightbaiting show. So much so that Lucy and Renee have laughs about it. These are two straight women taking the piss out of the show’s attempts to keep its straight audience. Laughing about how unnatural it all feels for Xena and Gabrielle to have “straight” love relationships, proving my point completely true without knowing it. And I’m emphatically saying this as a queer woman myself that headcanons Xena as bisexual. Still queer but not gay. It feels extremely wrong for Gabrielle to be doing this. But it doesn’t ever matter because it doesn’t ever last. What lasts is the central relationship. That of X & G.

So regardless whether the nature of Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship is platonic or romantic, the creators are purposefully telling and showing you all love interests or love relationships besides theirs fail in comparison. And that’s not a very “queerbait-y” thing to do, is it? That’s actually the opposite of queerbait.

Lucy in Who's Gurkhan table read.

Tag Game

I was tagged by @i-can-even-burn-salad.

Favorite video game: I really like Oblivion and Assassin's Creed; I'll go with AC: Revelations, the third game in the Ezio trilogy. Broadly speaking I think the Ezio games are the best in the series (though I haven't yet played past AC3), but Revelations is set in İstanbul so it's way more fun for me because I can check out all the places I've been irl, and sometimes random characters yell at you in Turkish which is really funny to me now that I can understand them.

Favorite video game character: Yusuf from Revelations because he looks kind of like my brother lmao

Favorite movie or TV series: Shocking absolutely nobody who has ever looked at my main blog, Xena: Warrior Princess.

Favorite movie or TV series character: Xena herself, no question

Hobbies: leatherworking, writing, sketching, rock climbing

Obsessions: Have I mentioned Xena yet? Because whenever I'm not thinking about my OCs, I'm thinking about Xena.

Favorite genre/type of background music for whump daydreams: Usually I listen to specific songs/playlists for my OCs, since my whump daydreams tend to be about specific characters. Genre is kind of all over the place, but tends to be the type of music I would describe as "vibes" (which I'm aware does not narrow it down at all, especially given I probably have a different definition of vibing music than most).

Favorite whump trope: Ough I'm supposed to just pick one?! OK not necessarily my favorite, but one I like a lot, is whumpees whose trauma turns them into whumpers. Cycles of abuse and whatnot.

Favorite whump pairing: Edit: whoops forgot to answer this one. Uhhh can I put my own OCs? Because if so, Elvan and Asenath; more broadly though any pairing where one person gets hurt and the other person goes feral in response, be it out of defense or revenge.

First time you experienced whumperflies: That scene in Disney's Aladdin where Alaadin is in a prison cell with his wrists shackled to the wall above his head. I haven't seen that movie since I was a very little kid but that's the one scene that stuck in my mind haha

Favorite whump scene from a piece of media: A couple scenes jump to mind from Xena. The first is actually from the show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, of which Xena: Warrior Princess is a spin-off. The episode is called "The Gauntlet" and is one of the episodes that introduces Xena as a character. As the title implies, the climax of the episode is when Xena's general overthrows her and takes her army, and her own soldiers make her run the gauntlet. Joseph LoDuca has my entire heart and soul for the soundtrack in that scene, and the direction is fuckin impeccable. The other scene is from season 6 of Xena's own show, an episode titled "Who's Gurkhan?" in which (for various plot reasons I won't get into here) Xena and Gabrielle both separately sell themselves into slavery to a sultan; Gabrielle tries to assassinate the sultan but Xena sees her about to go for him and knocks her out cold, stealing the knife, so that they would think it was her instead of Gabrielle; she also plays it off as if she was attacking Gabrielle out of jealousy, rather than there being any threat to the sultan. Anyway the relevant bit is that Xena gets taken to the dungeons and tortured at length, mostly just getting the absolute shit beat out of her, including while being hung upside down by shackles on her ankles. 10/10 incredible whump tbh, while there she also hallucinates Gabrielle bellydancing in front of her because that show is gay as all fuck.

A book you would recommend, whump or not: I would highly recommend the historical fiction Lady Slayers series by Lana Popović! There are two books (so far); Blood Countess, about Erzsébet Báthory, and Poison Priestess, about Catherine Monvoisin. They're overtly queer and very very well written (and decently whumpy tbh).

Add your own question: Favorite whump scene from a book?

I'm leaving this as an open tag as usual; if you want to do it, consider yourself tagged!

DPF Familiar Faces: Michelle Langstone

NZ actors tend to end up in a lot of the same shows over the years it seems. I have a lot of fun spotting familiar faces, so I thought this would be a fun and silly little project, seeing which actors have repeatedly been in things that Deano was also in (not necessarily alongside). Just a bit of trivia. Enjoy!

Shortland Street (1996/2000,2011)

Dean played Nurse Harry Martin in 1996. Michelle played Susan Morris in 2000 and Doctor Bethany Hall in 2011 (pictured above as Bethany Hall as that's what I could find!)

Xena: Warrior Princess (1996, 2000/2000)

Dean played two roles: Homer/Orion - S1E13 “Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards” Wiglaf - S6E9 “Return of the Valkyrie”

Michelle played Lana in S6E4 "Who's Gurkhan?"

McLeod's Daughters (2004-2005/2006)

Dean played Luke Morgan in 25 episodes between S4E19-S5E12. Michelle played Fiona Webb Ryan in 28 episodes between S6E1-S6E32.

Go Girls (2009/2013)

Dean played Marco in 2 episodes, S1E2 and S1E11. Michelle played Sarah Bennett in 10 episodes between S5E1-S5E11.

Legend of the Seeker (2009)

Dean played Carver Dunn in S1E17 "Deception". Michelle played Livia in S1E20 "Sanctuary".

The Almighty Johnsons (2011-2013)

Dean played Anders Johnson/Bragi in all 36 episodes. Michelle played Michele Brock/Sjofn in 31 episodes.

This was the first role I saw Michelle in, but in an interview I read it said she was worried about being type-cast as similar characters. When discussing another role, Michelle also said: “I feel less conflicted playing [this new character] than I did playing Michelle in The Almighty Johnsons, because there were things about her I just couldn't understand. Sometimes it really hurt my heart playing her.”

Westside (2016-2017/2019-2020)

Dean played Evan Lace in 9 episodes between S2E2-S3E3. Michelle played Bianca Figgs in 12 episodes between S5E1-S6E4.

The Bad Seed (2019)

Dean played Ford Lampton in all 5 episodes. Michelle played Diane in the first episode.

One Lane Bridge (2020/2020-2021)

Dean played Andrew 'Grub' Ryder in 6 episodes, S1E1-S1E6. Michelle played Charlotte McCrae in 11 episodes, S1E1-S2E5.

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That’s all I have for these two - did I miss anything?

I'm back from the East Coast and enjoying this bottle from a distillery I've been eyeing since I fist heard about them. I always love checking out stores and distillerys when I travel to grab things I can't get at home. The Smoky Quartz Distillery is a veteran owned and run operation in Seabrook, NH. Their V5 Bourbon is a 100% corn mash whiskey named for 5 veteran family members that made the distillery possible.This is a 16 month old bourbon that is sweet with notes of vanilla, popcorn, and wood. Paired with a Gurkha 12 year old Celler Reserve cigar. Oh, one note about the area around Gloucester/Salem/Peabody, MA. There is nowhere good to have a drink and a cigar. ..... Pouring a toast to my sisters in arms on Women Veteran's Day. Today marks the anniversary of the singing of the Women's Armed Services Integration Act June 12, 1948. Women have served in every war since the American Revolution. There are currently approximately 2 million Women Veterans in the U.S. I'm proud to have served alongside some amazing women in my career, too many to tag here. Ladies, this toast is for you. .... "Female service members are so integrated into the military, so critical and vital to all functions of the military, from combat service support to combat support, to direct combat, that we could not go to war as a nation - we could not defend America - without our women." - Senator Tammy Duckworth (IL) ..... #womensveteransday #cigar #CigarLover #CigarAfficionado #cigarphoto #cigarsnob #cigarlife #cigarsmoke #gurkhacigars #gurkhanation #sailorandsticks #cigarsandwhiskey #TapThatAsh #whiskey #bourbon #smokyquartzdistillery #whiskeylife #WhiskeyLover #whiskeyphoto #WhiskeyNeat #WhiskeyAfficionado #whiskeygram #quote #quotestagram #uscg #usnavy #usmc #usarmy #usairforce #usspaceforce (at Coastal San Pedro) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ceupcrdr6uR/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Samsara on DriveThruComics!

PREVIEW Out now from Markosia on DriveThruComics! Samsara It is a time of holy war! Arya is ruled to the north by the Gurkhan Empire, in the name of their god they conquer and subjugate under terms to convert or face execution. In the south rebellions emerge from the shadows, divided in their visions for a free Arya. Caught in the centre of it all is Lakshman the World Serpent, the living…

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#Repost @gurkhacigars • • • • • • Where are our #SOTL? #GurkhaNation https://www.instagram.com/p/CFH81-qn5qE/?igshid=18u934xk90p1d

Surpreendeu-me pela positiva . Gurkha Treinta 30th Anniversary . Shape: Gordo . Size: 6 x 60 . Strength: Medium - Full . Wrapper Ecuadorian Habano Binder / Filler Nicaragua / Nicaragua . Color: Rosado . Grade Hand Rolled / Long Filler . Blender K. Hansotia . Manufacturer: Aganorsa Leaf . Country of Origin: Nicaragua . #kemosabecigars #gurkha #angolancigarlover #instacigar #cigars #cigarlife #cigarlover #cigaraficionado #cigarlifestyle #cigarart #cigarculture #girlsandcigars #cigarstyle #charutos #cigarstagram #cigarworld #cigarporn #gurkhacigars #gurkhanation #cigarsnob #cigarsociety #botl #zigarren #cigarlady #stogie #cigarian #cigarpic #cigargeek #mobilecigarlounge #cigarking https://www.instagram.com/p/B-nnil3nIDZ/?igshid=1ku6kvx6c39n

Luego de tantas experiencias desfavorables con @gurkhacigars a mí mismo me impresiona que tenga la capacidad de seguir insistiendo con la marca, cuando a muchas otras las he obviado por menos. Pero en esta ocasión se trató de un obsequio de mi pana @antonioecc y para ser honesto, me gustó más de lo que pensé que me iba a gustar. Todavía estoy lejos de recomendarlos y comprar en cajas, pero la verdad es que este Prize Fighter no está mal, sobre todo por su precio. . After so many unfavorable experiences with @gurkhacigars it amazes me that I'm still able to try more of them, having placed other brands on ignore for much less. But on this occasion, the cigar was a gift from my friend @antonioecc and, to be very honest, I liked it much more than I thought I would. I am still far from buying by the box or even recommending most, but this Prize Fighter was actually not bad, especially for its price. . . . . #gurkhanation #gurkhacigars #gurkha #prizefighter #gurkhaprizefighter #cigar #cigaraficionado #cigars #botl #potl #holysmoke #cigaroftheday #cigarlife #cigarfan #tobacconist #cigarphotography #topcigars #cigarlover #cigarians #cigarworld #cigarart #niceash #tabaco #puros #cigarpic #cigarsnob #smoking #cigarro #cigarreview #reseñadetabaco https://www.instagram.com/p/CJjKK05nlov/?igshid=1f7b1lchc4eut