sensiblegh0st

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is theres posts on this site

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with the whole assassination situation it seems like more right-winged folks are waking up a bit on the fact that their figureheads are more concerned with maintaining their wealth than they are with helping “the common hardworking American.” I just hope that they also wake up to the fact that they’ve been influenced into targeting marginalized communities as a scapegoat. im not saying anyone marginalized has to forgive the vile shit right-wingers have done, said, or supported, but I at least hope they stop doing MORE vile shit and realize they have a lot more in common with their poor black trans neighbor than they ever had with their rich white cis figurehead.

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hey, it’s almost christmas!

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I’ve been waiting since March to post this...

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WIZARD WRAPPED

You casted 1,039,627 spells this year

You pondered your orb for 985 hours

You targeted 109 spells at someone other than yourself - that’s in the top 6% of wizards!

You gained 5 familiars

Your favorite focus for spellcasting this year was a staff

Your cup size is H

Your most cast spell was Spontaneous Snack Generation and you used it 576 times this year.

Your most summoned object was Ketamine Ape at 69 summons

You trapped someone within an amulet for 10,000 years

You were unwittingly haunted by the evil skull twice

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okay i wanna play. what's the first song on your wrapped that has a color in the title?

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200 Word RPGs 2024

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2024 event, running from November 1st, 2024 through November 30th, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

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Reminder and fun fact:

Today is the 4 year anniversary of the first ever taz episode

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i have rule i semi-adhere to for media criticism which is to ideologically meet shit where it's at (or where it's presented to me). i like to call it the "i didn't make you market it that way" rule--like, if lancer's union was just presented as a sci-fi setting, that would be fine. i don't expect all sci-fi settings to be communist utopias! but when the creators of lancer use the word utopia like 20 times & bandy around words like 'mutual aid' and 'post-scarcity' and 'anticapitalist' when describing it, then to me that becomes absolutely fair game. similarly if someone says 'stardew valley is fun i like farming :)' then i'm not gonna reply with a long post about how it's ideologically petty-bourgeois--but if they say 'stardew valley is anticapitalist', then they've opened up that can of worms and it's fair for me to point out that the worms exist.

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I love that you can just grab kittens. old cat have achy joints and a sense of dignity that you have to play into, so you gotta be deliberate and respectful in hoisting them, but if a kitten is whirlwinding past you, you can just reach out and snatch them. and they'll be like 'mamma mia, I never did nothing :p' and writhe around and lick your fingers. highly abductable animal

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fully sober in the club googling frankenstein 1818 full text

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i love truck stops in winter bc i love a little good old fashioned reconnaissance. i’m at a wyoming truck stop eating taco bell with a bunch of random truckers discussing road conditions like we’re in a high fantasy tavern & inn and we’re warning each other about monsters and highway men. everyone talking about where we’re coming from and going to and how bad it’ll be getting there.

THE tallest man i’ve ever seen in real life just stopped me in the hallway by the coin operated laundry apropos of nothing and asked “which direction are you going?” i said east and he said “good” and walked away.

i caught up with him and asked why and he said “west’s no good right now. i just came from there.”

apparently a truck jackknifed and has traffic backed up ten miles but he sounded for all the world like he just found his village raised to the ground by an evil mage’s army

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There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

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arcane is driving me mad like what do you MEAN silco knew violet and jinx when they were little, he was FRIENDS with their MOM. it recontextualizes the entire first season. like of course powder jumped to cling onto silco after being abandoned. he used to be family. he was the only family she had left, GOD. AUUUGHHHH.

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Your parents can love you and still be shitty abusive parents. They can mean well and still fuck up. They might fuck up without even knowing it's abuse.

Sometimes I think about how, when I was 5, my dad would make grilled cheese sandwiches and cut them into dinosaur shapes for me. Other times when I was hungry, he would refuse to feed me at all, because he decided that 5 was old enough for me to cook for myself when he didn't feel like doing it.

I think about how he taught me to swim, and fish, and (yes) throw a ball. In the summer, at night, he would wrap me in a huge comforter and carry me around outside to show me the constellations. But I hated being left alone with him because he was often bad tempered, mean to me for no reason, and I couldn't count on him for basic things like food.

Sometimes I think about how my mom raised hell in my high school principal's office in front of multiple faculty members because they weren't complying with my IEP (disability required accommodations). She always saw red if someone else laid a finger on me, even figuratively. When we were at home she screamed at me for things I had no control over and said I was using my illness to get my way.

I think about how she bought me art supplies and paid for lessons for all of my hobbies. She attended every single concert, performance, and game. I don't think I went a day without being told she loved me while growing up, and she constantly told me how proud she was. But I could never trust her mood and she could go from loving mother to terrorizing me before I knew what was happening.

My parents love me but I still flinch if someone in my vicinity washes a dish a little too aggressively. My parents never intentionally traumatized me, but my nervous system never knew the difference. Neither of my parents saw anything they did as abuse; they believed they were good parents. It wasn't until my mom was in her mid 60s that she grasped that her own childhood had been abusive, too.

They're not bad, irredeemable people. They're complex people with a lot of their own trauma who lacked many skills necessary for good parenting. I could hate them for it, but I don't. I'm not obligated to forgive them, and I don't think I have, and I don't know whether I ever really will. My parents damaged me a lot in ways that have affected my whole life, and I still have good memories with them.