alistairian

[alistairian]

spam emails are horrifying on an entirely different level once you actually begin to grapple with the material reality of ‘cyberspace’. how many servers were involved in dumping this message into my trash folder, where are they located, how much water goes into cooling them every day? where did the metals come from to build these facilities, who maintains them, how much labour and suffering and exploitation is required to bombard me with 50 messages a day i don’t even look at for products i will never buy? not just useless or a nuisance, but actively harming the earth & its people, and for what. zero social value, zero human communication, just capital trying to metastasise

[alistairian]

My new commission work! I love this cozy atmosphere of the kitchen where Lucanis and Lily de Riva decided to spend some time with each other. And check out these adorable pots :D

If you are interested in a commission please send me an email to point.maitimo@gmail.com

[alistairian]

Day 14! A handsome lad as requested by @pianissimoe ❤️❤️❤️

[alistairian]

they call it "protecting the children".

[alistairian]

something i've noticed. people seem to think the most nature-y nature is forests. so forests are always prioritized for conservation, and planting trees is synonymous with ecological activism. my state was largely prairies and wetlands before colonization. those ecosystems are important too. trees aren't the end-all be-all of environmentalism. plant native grasses. protect your wetlands.

[alistairian]

stares at you with my autistic eyes

[alistairian]

[alistairian]

I was browsing some old unfinished works from several years ago and found a sketch of Trinisaura with some basic coloring. I decided to finish it and here it is.

[alistairian]

“From the joking that went on among the actors painting the theater lobby that afternoon, I learned that ‘coming out’ meant having your first homosexual experience. And what you came into, of course, was homosexual society. [...] The origins of the term were debutante cotillions, those sprawling, formal society balls where, squired by equally young and uncomfortable cousins, brothers, or schoolmates, young ladies of sixteen or so ‘came out’ into society. [...] During that afternoon’s painting, I first learned what ‘a camp’ was—the color scheme the directors had chosen for the theater (peach, gold, and azure), for one. I also learned that ‘to camp’ (and the gerund ‘camping’) denoted dressing up in drag and, by extension, acting in a particularly effeminate manner, either in private or in public—flouting the notions of the straight world by flaunting the customs of the queer one. The noun form was the base form: ‘Oh, my dear, she is such a camp!’ (‘she,’ in such cases, almost always referring to a male.) Etymologically, of course, ‘camp’ was an apocopation of ‘camp follower.’ Camp followers were the women, frequently prostitutes, who followed the armies across Europe from military camp to military camp. Since the military have always had a special place in homosexual mythology, and presumably because the advent of a large group of young, generally womenless men was as good an excuse as any for cross-dressing among the local male populace so inclined, the then-new meaning of the term—’to go out and camp it up’; ‘to have a mad camp’ (and ‘a mad camp’ was the phrase most commonly in use)—gained currency in England during World War I and had been brought back to the United States by American soldiers. Calling something ‘a camp’ followed the same linguistic template as calling a funny experience ‘a riot.’ Indeed the two were often synonymous.

[…]

Differences are what create individuals. Identities are what create groups and categories. Identities are thus conditions of comparative simplicity that complex individuals might move toward but (fortunately) never achieve—until society, tired of the complexity of so much individual difference, finally, one way or the other, imposes an identity on us.

Identities are thus, by their nature, reductive. (You do not need an identity to become yourself; you need an identity to become like someone else.) Without identities, yes, language would be impossible (because categories would not be possible, and language requires categories). Still, in terms of persons, identity remains a highly problematic sort of reduction and cultural imposition.

Through the late sixties a sensation-hungry media began rummaging through various marginal social areas for new and exciting vocabulary. In almost every case, once a new term was found an almost complete change in meaning occurred as the term was applied to more or less bourgeois experiences and concerns. ‘Rap’ had already been appropriated from the world of down-and-out amphetamine druggies [...] ‘camp’ had already been borrowed from gay slang, largely in the wake of a popular 1964 Partisan Review essay by Susan Sontag (“Notes on ‘Camp’”), after which it all but lost its meaning of ‘cross-dressing’ and became a general synonym for ‘just too much.’ Spurred on by June ‘69’s Stonewall Riots and the rapid formation right afterward of the Gay Liberation Front, the term ‘coming out’ over the next eighteen months changed its meaning radically.

Gay Liberation proponents began to speak about ‘coming out’ of ‘the closet’—the first time either the words or the concepts had been linked. [...]

The logic of coming out—in this new sense—was impeccable. Sixteen and seventeen years before, the House Un-American Activities Committee, along with its hounding of Communists, had been equally vigilant in its crusade against homosexuals. HUAC’s logic was that homosexuals were security risks because we were susceptible to blackmail. Said the Gay Liberationists, if we’re ‘out,’ nobody can blackmail us and nobody can accuse us of being blackmailable. So let them all know who we are, how many of us there are, and that we’re proud to be what we are.

[…]

As a result of Stonewall and the redefinition of coming out, I had to consider that while I approved vigorously of coming out as a necessary strategy to avoid blackmail and to promote liberation, there seemed to be an oppressive aspect of surveillance and containment intertwined with it, especially when compared to the term’s older meaning. Before, one came out into the gay community. Now, coming out had become something entirely aimed at straights. Its initial meaning had been a matter of bodily performance. (It involved coming.) Now it had become a purely verbal one. Despite its political goals, was this change really as beneficial as it was touted to be? Since it had been a case of displacing a term rather than adding a term, hadn’t we lost something in that displacement?

We heard the phrase more and more; it became almost a single word. The straight media began to take it over. [...] I found myself wanting to stop people every time they began to say the phrase—to slow them, startle them with a slash struck down between the words, make them consider what each word meant separately, remind them of all the possible meanings—historical, new, and revolutionary—that the two could be packed with, either apart or joined.”

—Samuel R. Delany, “Coming / Out” in Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories. 1996

[alistairian]

my watery friend... are you too brushed with the pattern of the dappled light...?

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[alistairian]

I grit my teeth and read the entire executive order regarding trans people, and I just want to take the opportunity to remind folks not to forget intersex people. One of the rescinded documents is “Supporting Intersex Students: A Resource for Students, Families, and Educators," and there is a huge emphasis on legally enshrining "only two sexes."

Yes, this affects trans people, but with the way intersex voices often get ignored in trans spaces, I just want to remind folks not to shut us out. Don't forget us. Don't keep talking over us. Don't act like we aren't on the front lines. Don't act like this is just about you. Please.

[alistairian]

Kink isn’t shameful because of the weird sex stuff. That part’s rad. It’s shameful because it is technically improv. 

[alistairian]

there's a new social cue coming out. no we're not telling you about it

[alistairian]

Lately I've had a lot of hard and urgent work with short deadlines. Due to deadlines and mental exhaustion, I decided not to take my exams for the first time in 4 years. But at least I was able to draw Rook for myself (still WIP)

[alistairian]

[alistairian]

"A world without trans people has never existed and never will"

Poster spotted in Olympia, WA