tw vent/neglect

thinking about the time when i thought i was poor asf as a kid bc

my parents refused to get me a bed for three years and I slept in a mattress

I would not get a phone and instead get a small iPod for 8 years even when i had a job and sometimes get lost on the bus and in the middle of a highway for hours and would have to trust a beaten down convenience store to call my parents because I couldn’t contact them especially when it’s like at night

could not get any new shoes whatsoever to a point where my shoes hurt my feet bc they don’t fit me anymore

would not be able to decorate my room in any way that I’d want and would only be filled with what they would like and the bare minimum

after I got diagnosed with my ed and toxic acidity and not being able to handle spice and other foods I thought we couldn’t afford getting foods and pills that would help me bc they said it’s too expensive

not allowing me to go to the hospital after relapsing alot because it would affect the housing income and in general alot of that (even tho there’s free healthcare here)

And when i got older I found out my dads his own ceo of a pretty big company and he owns so so much other property and he’s like pretty fucking rich and they didn’t want to tell me to keep me “humble”

and only after i got a part time job then I could afford foods that I could eat and occasionally treat myself a meal from outside bc they refused to at home

And then realizing it’s probably neglect and now seeing that people are analyzing steve harringtons room and how just from that you could realize the neglect and how his parents don’t care about him or his interests and at first I’m like oh that’s so me !!!! and then i see of how it’s a sign of neglect im like i oh

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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

they should go on a fishing trip pt.1

We've all seen baby man Danny doing crazy stuff like take over the world and become president, mayor, defeat cults, or become a pet.

So imagine the typical baby man Danny being adopted by the Batfam

But one of the bat kids having the bright idea of giving him dog buttons

Made a real quick animation

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EDIT: There's no audio. Your device isn't trying to mess with you. You're supposed to decide what he's spamming.

Sorry if you went a little mad wondering what's wrong

There's just no audio to begin with

“How copy?”

some (extremely) quick doodles to celebrate the glorious return of glorious masquerade! I haven't had a chance to do much personal drawing lately, but I didn't want to let it go by without doing something!

OH MY GOD WAIT I NEED TO TELL THE PEOPLE. ok so. you know how magicam is the twst version of instagram. i dreamt about the twst version of tinder.

it's called cinder (like cinderella) and its tagline is "find your prince before the clock strikes twelve". its gimmick is that when you make a match with a person you have 24 hours to talk with them. if you like them, get their contact information before time runs out. because otherwise you're never fucking seeing them on the app again IT BLOCKS THE OTHER'S PROFILE. this is where capitalism comes in though. through a paid subscription, once per day, you can "leave a glass slipper" on a match's profile. it functions as a bookmark and keeps your conversation open for another 24 hrs. after the time is up you can keep the glass slipper there to extend more time or remove it to leave it on someone else's

To every trans person realizing their gender makes them straight:

You are good. Not despite your sexuality but because of it. Please don’t let yourself be ashamed about it.

There are queer people who say male heterosexuality is disgusting. There are queer people who say female heterosexuality is stupidity. There are queer people who will laugh about how silly and nasty it would be to be straight only to halfheartedly say “oh I guess trans straight people are the exception!” There are transphobes who pretend they’d care more about you if you just admit to your internalized homophobia/lesbophobia and stop being trans.

They’re all so fucking wrong. You are good for who you love. You are not ‘one of the good ones’, you are just simply good. Anyone who says otherwise is a fucking idiot.

You have a place in the queer community. You belong there as much as anyone else

underappreciated Nico detail that I like - he seems to be an angry crier! very frequently he's angry when he cries and he cries when he's extremely angry. very AuDHD of him. emotional regulation sucks my guy and he's just going through it.

Eh, almost forgot ;~;; Commission for sweet @celestialrose3 ;;~;;; Thank you so much *bows*

Gem said she needed Grian's skull, and this exchange followed:

<joehillssays> There may be a spare grian skull at -534, 112, 1990 <GeminiTay> did joe just give me coords to murder grian <joehillssays> murder has a degree of intent I can't speak to here

what are you thinking?

the ol' punch and judy?

crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.

i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.

in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.

i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.

i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.

plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.

the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.

we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.

i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.

a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.

today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.

loved beyond thinking.

Shout out to the non-partnering people out there who want to spend their lives with a friend and live with them without it being a QPR or partnership of any kind.

I will not tolerate any Aaron Minyard slander