constant-instigator - Tumblr blog

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⚠️flash warning⚠️

dolores just wants to sleep

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HEADS UP- TERF PLAGARISM

THIS is a lovely, kind, fun, well researched book by a trans author/artist, with therapist consultation, designed to help trans or nonbinary folks enjoy exploration of their gender. It was published October 2020.

And THIS is a promotional tweet for a hideous, lazy copy that pretty obviously used the color-picker and general concept of the first, in order to sneak gender-essentialist TERF propaganda into teen and preteen book spaces. It was published today- October 16th, 2021.

Note the “transgendertrend” username, and the preying on ableism to especially target caregivers of autistic kids with their undermining.

This isn’t a suable offense, but it still offensive. And sad to say, but exposing the obvious cribbing may prove to some people that these folks are not acting in good faith, have no original ideas in their head, and are, in general, lazy and disingenuous as all hell.

So, please join me in exhausted outrage, help spread the word, and maybe let these yahoos know what you think of their integrity.

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the best gag in dracula by far is how the entire time jonathan harker is imprisoned in dracula’s castle, dracula is pretending to have a full household of servants when in reality it’s just him running around doing everything, and it would be CRIMINAL to write a drac-centric adaptation and not milk this gag for all it’s worth. dracula dropping off harker in the carriage, pulling into the stables, then sprinting through the castle to answer the front door. dracula lurking outside harker’s bedroom for him to leave so he can sneak in and make his bed and fold his pajamas. dracula in the kitchen struggling to make food when he hasn’t eaten anything except blood in centuries. dracula giving up, turning into a bat in frustration, flapping over to the nearest farmhouse, stealing a pie off the windowsill, and proudly presenting it to harker for dinner.

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My newsletter about my yay-for-HRT T(ea) party is now available! Click through for queer joy, thoughts on why we SHOULD celebrate transition milestones, and as a randomish bonus, previews of my elaborate animated book trailer, because yes I am still working on that. 

And yes, These are actual pictures from my actual party, not nabbed from elsewhere, I promise. So much baking.

Newsletter is here: https://buttondown.email/LeeBrontide/archive/what-do-we-celebrate/

My small but growing archive is here: https://buttondown.email/LeeBrontide/archive/

Subscription, should you feel so inclined, is here: https://buttondown.email/LeeBrontide

(And yes, I know it’s weird to do a tumblr post linking to a newsletter. But I have been burned by TOO MANY social media platforms in my 38 years on this planet and it has made me paranoid and crotchety.)

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my dad–also a writer–came to visit, and i mentioned that the best thing to come out of the layoff is that i’m writing again. he asked what i was writing about, and i said what i always do: “oh, just fanfic,” which is code for “let’s not look at this too deeply because i’m basically just making action figures kiss in text form” and “this awkward follow-up question is exactly why i don’t call myself a writer in public.”

he said, “you have to stop doing that.”

“i know, i know,” because it’s even more embarrassing to be embarrassed about writing fanfic, considering how many posts i’ve reblogged in its defense.

but i misunderstood his original question: “fanfic is just the genre. i asked what you’re writing about.” 

i did the conversational equivalent of a spinning wheel cursor for at least a minute. i started peeling back the setting and the characters, the fic challenge and the specific episode the story jumps off from, and it was one of those slow-dawning light bulb moments. “i’m writing about loneliness, and who we are in the absence of purpose.”

as, i imagine, are a lot of people right now, who probably also don’t realize they’re writing an existential diary in the guise of getting television characters to fuck. 

“that’s what you’re writing. the rest is just how you get there, and how you get it out into the world. was richard iii really about richard the third? would shakespeare have gotten as many people to see it if it wasn’t a story they knew?”

so, my friends: what are you writing about?

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Ok but just saying that with a hospital you also have the bonus of a corporate overlord who doesn’t give a shit about anything but profits and can be reliably counted on to downplay any disaster in an attempt to avoid publicity.

I’ve been researching hospital power structures for a WIP and…whooo.

But seriously tho stop making hospital patients into horror movie boogiemen. Not cool.

stop using hospitals as horror settings

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Why is this even a question? How is your child meant to learn to apologize when you don’t do it yourself as a parent?

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I thought I posted a few of these before, but it it looks like I didn’t?

For those just joining now, I’m making an excessively ambitious animated trailer for my first book (Secondhand Origin Stories, which is actually already out, but whatever, I’m aiming to finish this by the time the sequel releases.). These are some of the backgrounds I’ve been putting together to that end, in various stages of completion. Please excuse missing relevant details- some of those details are destined to be covered by the figures I’m not yet posting.

I’m really pleased with how these are coming out, overall. They have a few tweaks yet but hey I can’t show you everything before I release the trailer, right?

I really wanted to give the whole thing a cinematic flair, without loosing the moody, introspective vibe of the book. I’m finding this kind of visual worldbuilding and character building really rewarding. I can go over the top with that in a way that wasn’t feasible when I was doing comics. I feel like once the more visible scifi/superhero elements are added (mainly via the figures) it’ll really showcase my story as a grounded, character driven kind of scifi, which is pretty much my whole deal.

I hope you like them!

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Aliens have captured you, and placed you in one of their nature preserves. However, they have sorely miscalculated on two issues: The amount of calories needed to keep a persistence predator sated, and the lethality/brutality of a hangry human.

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The August newsletter is OUT but don’t despair, the archives are always available. This month I talked about a book series that was foundational to me as a person, it’s upcoming adaptation for TV, and the complicated feelings I got in re-reading it. It also contains actual photographic evidence of me at age 15, looking like the baby queer I was. 

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You know what? Bring back the Mary Sues. Bring them back. All of them. Give me endless self-indulgent, angsty-backstory, improbably attractive and correct protagonists. Let them have weird colored eyes and the cheekbones of gods. Let their tragedy be treated with the reverence of the most enshrined sagas, and their romances burn like the planets core. I am re-reading a terrible book I loved as a teenager in the 90s and I am LIVING.

Give EVERY kid a book where they get to attach to a blatant reader standin and give them that feeling of transcendence to hold in their heart forever.

VIVA LA MARY SUE!

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even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.

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Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.

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Tara Houska (zhaabowekwe), social media, 8 July 2021. Text reads:

This is the Mississippi River headwaters right now. Minnesota in a severe drought. Enbridge is taking 5 BILLION gallons of water from our rivers & lakes to drill Line 3 pipeline thru. […]

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Salt of the Earth (1954), dir. Herbert J. Biberman