#Also thought about a lot of stuff earlier

[fairyhaos]

◈ endearingly // lee dokyeom

dokyeom x f!reader, 1.6k+ words

tags: pet names, fluff, angstier than i thought it would be??, established relationship, idolverse, soonhoon cameo + jeonghan cameo

notes: ib a convo i had with an irl ab pet names!! sorry nb/male carats but this only worked with f!yn :(

summary: in which you hate pet names, but your boyfriend loves them. nevertheless, the two of you manage to make it work.

“Darling?”

“No.”

“Babe.”

“Ew.”

“Honey.”

“I’m not food.”

“Sweetie?”

“I’m literally not food, Seokmin.”

“Aw, come on,” your boyfriend, Seokmin, pouts sadly at you and then promptly faceplants onto your bed in a dramatic display of his distress. “Why can't I call you a pet name? Why don’t you like any of them?”

Sitting cross-legged at the head of your bed, you watch amusedly as Seokmin begins flailing about like a fish throwing a tantrum into your sheets before you. He groans, flips onto his back and stares up at you through his eyelashes, forehead wrinkling as he strains to look at you from his upside-down position.

“Is there really nothing that you like?”

You sigh, leaning back against the headboard. “They’re all so cringy, Seokmin. It makes me feel all… icky.”

Honestly, after six months of dating, it was inevitable that a conversation about this was bound to come up eventually. You're surprised he hasn't called you any pet names until now, but he mostly sticks to saying your name in the most enamoured tone possible, and it's only after the small incident a few hours ago that it's finally happened. The talk on your dislike of such terms of endearment. 

Seokmin sits upright, scrambling around so he can face you. “It’s just because you’re not used to them, I promise,” he says earnestly. "Once you start hearing them a lot, they become really cute!”

You shake your head. “No. Trust me, I really don’t like them at all. They feel really… objectifying. And I know you never mean it like that, but it still makes me feel all bad inside.” Seokmin's face falls, and you wince apologetically. “Sorry. That was probably a really weird thing to say. I'm sorry. It just makes me feel uncomfortable.”

“No, it’s okay,” Seokmin says. “I get it. And if it makes you feel uncomfortable, I won’t use them, don't worry about it.” He smiles brightly, and you pout placatingly, patting him on the head. 

“Sorry. I shouldn't have said that so harshly.”

“No, no, it's fine, trust me,” Seokmin reassures. “And it's not harsh. It totally explains why you reached the way you did earlier, so it's all okay. For realsies. I swear.”

But even as he says so, he’s still pouting profusely, head hung like a dejected puppy, and you wonder why this is getting to him so much. 

Seokmin is big on feelings, big on emotions, but he’s also getting better at handling the negative stuff. And normally, only significant things like acts of injustice or cruel words towards his loved ones will have him upset in this way, so you’re honestly quite confused.

This whole predicament arose earlier that afternoon, when you’d popped your head into the studio that Seokmin had told you he was working in, only to find him immersed in songwriting with Jihoon and Soonyoung.

That hadn’t been a problem, and you’ve walked into studios numerous times to find your boyfriend immersed in something with the other guys, but it’s the first time that what happened next had occurred—

Seokmin’s eyes had lit up when he saw you hovering in the doorway, and he waved you over with a grin.

“Hey!” he’d said, gesturing for you to come in. “Didn’t expect to see you here so early, baby.”

And at the pet name attached to the end of that sentence, you’d cringed immensely and physically recoiled, as if the term had literally grown arms and smacked you across the face.

The change in atmosphere had been instant, both Jihoon and Soonyoung looking confused at your demeanour.

“What is it?”

You couldn’t look Soonyoung in the eye even as he voiced his question, too embarrassed by your extreme reaction. “Sorry. I just. I don’t really like being called—that.”

Too busy looking at the floor, you didn’t notice the way Seokmin’s face fell also, but you could hear it in his tone.

“Oh… I’m sorry, Y/N. I didn’t know.”

The conversation had ended soon after that, with Seokmin promising he’ll be done soon and urging you to just wait at home. There had been no point in hanging around, especially with how stifling the studio had suddenly become. And true to his word, Seokmin came straight over to your house some minutes later, and then the subject had come up once again, and here you were.

It can’t be because of the embarrassment of it happening in front of his bandmates, you decide. If anything, you feel more embarrassed and ashamed for reacting so harshly. 

But Seokmin looks so dejected, even as he tries to wipe away his pout and leans over to snuggle into your side, burrowing into the space between your shoulder and your neck.

“Sorry,” you say again, because you're not sure how to fix this. “If you like them, then I guess I can get used to it…?”

Seokmin's shaking his head before you can even finish. 

“No, if it makes you uncomfortable, of course I don't want to use them,” he says. He reaches over to where your hands rest in your lap, beginning to fiddle with your fingers with his own. “I'm not sad about it. It's okay.”

You pout down at the top of his head, even though he can't see you. “Yes you are, Seokmin. What's wrong?”

He doesn't say anything, continuing to play with your fingers. When you close your hands into fists, preventing him from fiddling anymore, he whines in protest, taking his head off your shoulder to look at you petulantly. 

“Please tell me what's wrong, Seokmin,” you say, instead of giving in to the puppy eyes he's making at you. “I can tolerate the pet names if it means a lot to you, really. I promise it'll be okay.”

Seokmin hesitates, and then looks away, shoulders shrinking inwards. 

“It's just. I wanna call you something special. Like, your name is so pretty, and I love it, but I wanna be able to say something cute and unique that's just for me when I wanna call you over or whatever,” Seokmin admits. 

He looks up at you, just briefly, before he looks down at the bedding again, cheeks pink. 

“Some days, I can't even believe you're dating me. I can't believe I'm this lucky. And I just… wanted to call you something that could affirm that. And pet names seemed an easy way to show how lucky I feel to be with you. Shows how much I love you, you know?”

Your eyes widen. The L-O-V-E word hasn't come up between the two of you yet, but—after a relationship of six months, and a friendship that's been going strong for many years before this, perhaps it's not so surprising. 

It's definitely not surprising that Seokmin's said it first, though. He's always been big on feelings. 

(You love him for it.) 

“Oh,” you say softly, heart melting at his shy, sincere admission. “I feel the same way,” you say, and Seokmin looks up at you, eyes wide and hopeful. 

“You like me that much? You're willing to let me call you a pet name?”

“I love you,” you correct, smile widening. “And… well, I think we can work something out.”

───────────── ‘🧴, 

“So then what happened?” Jeonghan asks after you finish recounting your story to him over the phone. His face is slathered in some clay mask and in the blurry connection of the video call, he looks like a green-skinned, peeling zombie. 

You smile, shrugging. “We worked it out,” you say, sitting down at your sofa, phone propped on your knees so you can talk to Jeonghan better. “He's not calling me anything like baby or sweetie, but we're both happy with it.”

“He'll honestly be happy with anything,” Jeonghan says dryly. “He loves everything about you. You could say you want him to call you “boulder” and he'll agree.”

That makes you laugh. “No, he wouldn't. That's silly.”

“Trust me. He'd do it.”

“Lies.”

“Why don't you ask him and find out?”

There's the distinct pattern of beeps as someone inputs the passcode to your door, and then the telltale melody of the passcode being inputted correctly. You look up as the door opens, and Seokmin steps through, making you smile. 

“Speak of the devil,” you say, in Jeonghan's direction. “Seokmin just came home.”

“Hey there, girlfriend,” Seokmin greets you with a smile, coming over to kiss you on the forehead before peering at your screen. “Oh, is that Jeonghan hyung?”

“Hey there, boyfriend,” you greet back, smiling up at him. “It is. I was telling him about our new nickname system.”

“Oh!” Seokmin's face breaks out into a wider grin. “Well. It was your idea, so I'll leave you to it, my girlfriend. I'm all sweaty, though, so I'm off to shower first. Tell him I said hi!”

“Just say hi to me yourself, ” Jeonghan says amusedly. "I can hear you."

You laugh at Jeonghan's response, pecking Seokmin on the cheek before he moves off in the direction of the bathroom. 

“Welcome home, my boyfriend.”

“That's cute,” Jeonghan comments, once Seokmin has left the room. “He calls you girlfriend.”

You smile, and you know how heart-sickeningly in-love you look right now, but it doesn't even matter. 

“He does. The whole thing with pet names was just the idea of specialness between us, and the girlfriend and boyfriend thing do it quite well. Without making it sound like he's talking to a teddy bear. It's cute, right?”

Jeonghan hums. “I dunno. Teddy bears are pretty cute.” But then he smiles, all real and genuine and cracking the edges of his clay mask as he does. “I was right, though. He just loves everything about you.”

“Yes, he does,” you say, overflowing with fondness. “Good thing I love everything about him too.”

fics tags: @jeonginssa @weird-bookworm @minhui896 @slytherinshua @haowrld @belladaises @moonlitskiiies @mirxzii @zozojella @kawennote09 @a-wandering-stay @abibliolife @wonranghaeee @icyminghao @sweet-like-caramel @your-yxnnie @odxrilove @kyeomyun @crackedpumpkin @kellesvt @eightlightstar @onlyyjeonghan @aaniag @starshuas @raevyng @isabellah29 @hrts4hanniehae @mcu-incorrect @dokyeomkyeom @suraandsugar @tulsa24 @melodicrabbit @dokyeomkyeom @hopeless-foolery

[nostalgebraist]

Even setting aside the need to do quality-degrading tricks to get around the quadratic bottleneck[^1]...

...there is also the fact that long-context LLM stuff exposes a key difference between the way transformers "read" text and the way humans do.

--------

With a human, it simply takes a lot longer to read a 400-page book than to read a street sign. And all of that time can be used to think about what one is reading, ask oneself questions about it, flip back to earlier pages to check something, etc. etc.

On average, a text that is long will requires a greater quantity of thought to understand than one that is short. This is not just a mere matter of the text having "more things" in it to understand one by one, just like it has more words in it that you read one by one; length creates the potential for the expression of more complicated ideas, and denser webs of interconnections between elements of the text (ideas, characters, themes, etc).

But if you're a human, this "greater quantity of thought" can just happen concurrently with the greater quantity of time spent reading the text. You read a few pages, you pause to think for a moment, you read some more, you pause to think... and the more pages there are, the more pauses-for-thought you get, just by default.

(Obviously that portrayal is sort of a cartoon of how reading works, but the basic principle – you get more thinking-time automatically when you're investing more reading-time – holds up.)

--------

However, if you're a long-context transformer LLM, thinking-time and reading-time are not coupled together like this.

To be more precise, there are 3 different things that one could analogize to "thinking-time" for a transformer, but the claim I just made is true for all of them (with a caveat in one case). I'm talking about:

Layers: The sequential layer-by-layer processing that happens within a single forward pass of the model

Attention: The parallel key-value lookups over the context window that happen inside the attention step of each model layer

CoT: The act of sequentially sampling tokens from the model in a way that resembles the model producing a verbal monologue that sounds like thinking (AKA "Chain of Thought" or CoT for short)

#1, sequential layer-by-layer processing, is the kind of "thinking" (if we want to call it that) which the model does internally, to figure out what to predict for the next token.

Crucially, the "length" of this thinking-about-the-next-token process is a fixed constant, always equal to the model's number of layers. It doesn't vary with the length of the input. If the model has (say) 80 layers, then it's always going to do exactly 80 "steps" of this type of "thinking," no matter whether those steps are processing a single word or a million words.

#2, attention, is the one that needs a caveat. Because it is true that transformers do more computation in their attention layers when given longer inputs.

But all of this extra computation has to be the kind of computation that's parallelizable, meaning it can't be leveraged for stuff like "check earlier pages for mentions of this character name, and then if I find it, do X, whereas if I don't, then think about Y," or whatever.

Everything that has that structure, where you have to finish having some thought before having the next (because the latter depends on the result of the former), has to happen across multiple layers (#1), you can't use the extra computation in long-context attention to do it.

This is the price you pay for parallelism, which is the whole reason that LLMs can be as fast as they are. That is, when an LLM looks like it's "reading a book" in 30 seconds, its ability to do this depends completely on the fact that what it's doing is very different in this particular way from what you and I would think of as "reading a book."

You and I would read for a long time, and also have a long time's worth of thoughts that form a logically connected sequence, while we're reading. But the LLM just sort of ingests the whole text at once in this weird, impoverished, parallelized way in its attention layers, while also doing its usual layer-by-layer sequential processing, which only gets to go on for as long as the model's layer count permits.

(See my post here for more details on this stuff)

#3, CoT, is the probably the most recognizably similar of the three to human thought, of the sort that one might do while reading a book.

However, it's slow, and also it's sort of a separate thing that these models don't do by default the way they do #1 and #2. And in particular, when it does happens, it usually happens after reading the whole text, at which point it's "too late" in the sense that the model's computations on intermediate parts of the text can't benefit from anything it "figured out" in the CoT; they've already happened by the time the CoT starts.

(A fairly obvious [?] idea – or at least one that has occurred to me before – is to do long-context LLM reading by splitting the text into smaller chunks like chapters, and having it write some CoT "notes to self" in between reading each chunk and the next. In this setup the LLM would be doing something a lot closer to humanlike reading. I can't remember if I've actually tried this, but it's certainly something you could do without any special tooling.

However, it'd be slow because CoT is slow, and hence no LLM provider is going to do it by default for long-text processing. Instead, by default you get the thing that's fast, but also subtly bad in a hard-to-explain way. Caveat emptor!)

--------

When I've tried to come up with an analogy in human terms for what these long-context LLMs are doing, I've ended up with this:

Imagine you are given a superpower that lets you glance at any book, and immediately "know" (and be able to recall from memory) every single word of it. Not only will you remember the words, you will also "know what they mean"... but only with the most knee-jerk, surface-level, unreflective sort of understanding of which you are capable.

Like skimming taken to an extreme, albeit without any actual skipping: you really will have the whole thing in your head, after the glance. But you'll have it in a nearly undigested form.

It'll be like you've somehow read the whole thing cover to cover, while somehow not expending any mental effort whatsoever to follow what it is you're reading.

Or more precisely: consider the immediate, unreflective response you might have to a single sentence or paragraph, after you've understood it on a verbal level but haven't spared any time to ponder it. Then, imagine that you could somehow have an equally superficial reaction to a whole book at once. That's what we're talking about here.

So, like, you could glance at a novel, and know all of the things that happened in it... insofar as those things were presented 100% transparently, without requiring any effort on the reader's part to "connect the dots" (even in a fairly trivial way).

But wherever there are "dots" that require "connecting," you won't have connected them; obvious questions like "wait, who is that guy? have I seen his name before?" will go unasked, and your intuitive sense of the later parts of the book will become more and more distorted as these unthinking surface-level takes on the early stuff get reused to (badly) interpret the slightly-less-early stuff, and so on.

Now, after the glance, you do in fact remember all the words. And you may, if you wish and at your leisure, begin to actually think about what you read. You can ask yourself "really, though, who was that guy? that one character? what was his deal?", and begin to piece together a real answer by tying together the words (and superficial gut-level interpretations) that you now remember. You might have to do a lot of this, though, to "get" a long or difficult book; there may just be a lot of things that need thinking-time, and for you, that thinking-time can only begin when the actual reading ends.

(What I describe in the last paragraph is analogous to an LLM doing CoT generation after taking in a book as input, where the CoT is just trying to help the LLM understand what it read rather than doing some additional task on top of that.

As I indicated, such a CoT might have to go on for a very long time – much longer than the sorts of CoTs people are used to eliciting from LLMs – in order to reach a deep understanding of the book.

And if you don't include this step at all, and just start asking the LLM about the book right away, what you're getting is what the glance superpower guy would say right after a glance. Unreflective takes about a text that he's ingested, but not digested.)

--------

[^1] on that topic I am pretty bullish about this recent effort, though time will tell how good it really is... (I tried uploading some novels into its free web interface yesterday but it timed out, so I couldn't do a vibe check myself)

i'm testing the capabilities of a Large Language Model That Shall Not Be Named and. dear god it's really bad at summarizing this novel

[keeps-ache]

i am once again full of youthful enthusiasm !!!

[starry-bi-sky]

i made a rough timeline for the clone^2 au, just for my own convenience sake when dating things. some things might be out of order from the episode date, and thats also for my convenience.

September 3rd: Danny, age 14, has the accident in the lab that turns him liminal

September 10th: Danny is discharged from the hospital and given two weeks leave from school

September 24th: his sick leave ends, and Danny returns to school

October 14th: Danny sneaks into his parents' basement and releases the ghosts they have trapped in cages. Official birth of the vigilante, Phantom

November 27th: Danny fights Pariah Dark, and wins

December 24th: the Ghost Writer torments Danny

February 12th: Danny's 15th birthday

March 3rd: its been six months since Danny's accident

March 7th: Danny fights his evil future self

May 8th: Danny meets Ellie [age 15] and they become twins

December 14th: Danny finds out from his parents that he's a clone

February 12th: Danny's 16th birthday

Early-Mid April: Danny meets Damian [age 6] :)

Mid-Late April: Damian runs off for the first time, damages Danny's hands the first time

May: Damian runs off two more times in the span of three weeks, he damages Danny's hands both times.

Early June: Damian runs off one more time, damages Danny's hands again, resulting in permanent nerve damage.

Mid-Late June: Damian finally gives up on the League coming to get him and joins the Fenton Family.

July: Damian finally coaxes Danny into letting him come along with him on patrol: Wraith is born.

[thetwilightroadtonightfall]

I am the happiest person on earth right now because I just went out with a friend to grab a late lunch and it was just supposed to be a quick casual catch up thing that turned into a 4 hour conversation in the car about things that happened to us almost a decade ago 🥲

[skitskatdacat63]

Niche history ramble(also boy king mention at the end ofc) //

I was reading abt Maximillian I today, the second Habsburg emperor, bcs ive prev read about his father who I think is very interesting. But omg somehow this guy is even more interesting, but in a completely different way(I like his father Frederick III bcs I think his life is very funny ooc, but Maximilian I is genuinely really cool!) Also it's surprising to me that it took me this long to read about him, considering I very vividly remember seeing his portrait in a museum in Vienna. It's weird looking at it being used as the display pic for his wiki page bcs im like ...I've seen that in real life omg....

He's referred to as "The Last Knight"(as well as being nicknamed "Heart of Steel") And god I love now having random knowledge, cause I'm reading this like "ha, how very Don Quixote of him" and then the very next line in the biography was like, historians question whether he genuinely was like a knight or if he was a Don Quixotic figure 😭😭 glad to see I was on mark. Anyways, I wonder if Cervantes knew abt this, like I wonder if him being popularized as the last knight was a widely known thing back then. It's funny how Don Quixote was written at the end of the 16th century, but even back in the beginning of the century, being a knight was still kinda an outdated thing. I like how the two views on Maximillian I are either that he was the Last Knight or the first Rennaisance prince who had Machiavellian ideals. It fits into my weird obsession w those two works(The Prince and Don Quixote)

Anyways that being said. Boy King au Fernando is def like this, except he has literally nothing to back it up djfkkglg. Like at least Maximilian I was actually out there being insane. Fernando just sits in his cozy reading room, fantasizing while reading The Prince, and commissioning suits of armor as decoration(thats what he says. The real purpose is to dress up in them so he can feel cool.) I think this is honestly a reason he goes along with the marriage. He begrudgingly finds Seb's family history to be very cool and interesting, and he isn't opposed to being around it 🤭 Well, begrudgingly isn't the right word. He's very earnestly obsessed with it, but he can never tell Seb that bcs Seb will literally never let it go.

Seb just finds him staring up at paintings of Seb's ancestors, and Fernando, tears in eyes, hand on his heart, proclaims "I'll continue your legacy!!!" Seb is both mocking him like "he's not even your relative" but also has tears in his eyes like omg he's my family 🥺 he's accepted being my family 🥹

[kuromi-hoemie]

i just finished iron blooded orphans and need to lay down for a bit

[noraqrosa]

fetishes are just fears you've redirected

[risingsunresistance]

you can tell i enjoy what i create bc i make art less than once a month now 😎

[thethingything]

okay I took painkillers an hour ago so I'm a little out of it but I just realised after how bad this month hit us with various stuff and how bad our depression's been, we have managed to start getting back on track with stuff:

changed our bedding (which was a big task we hadn't had the energy for in a while)

started getting the motivation to draw again

caught up on a bunch of journaling over the last few days

cleared off part of our desk

joined a party on Habitica which seems to be helping with getting the motivation to do stuff again

started getting back into language learning a bit more (we've kept up with it but only like, the bare minimum)

and probably other stuff I'm forgetting...

but anyway like, our mental health is still kinda fucked, but we're at least doing things, and that little burst of starting to do more after struggling to keep up with anything is usually a good sign for us

[astrxealis]

my ocs..... i love you

[eteledhasanaxe]

so help me I will go into the screen myself

someone hug him

[mangoes-and-mothman]

accidentally said "oh thats so cunt" in front of my 12yo cousin who has a tendency to repeat things i say. im hoping this won't have any future consequences

[testostaround]

I think, if I had someone be mean to me for mutual enjoyment, say things that hit insecurities and that I fear are true or how they really feel, but with the understanding that they don't mean it, and just let them do that instead of fighting back or making them stop or choosing to stop trusting them. I would probably cry. And I'm not sure if it would be good or bad for me. I don't tolerate it usually and I think making myself keep quiet and take it would make the things they say hurt a lot, but I feel like it might also make me realize that I don't have to defend myself for stuff to not affect my self worth? Usually if someone says something that hurts my feelings I feel like it's accepted as truth until I say something

[keeps-ache]

was up til 4 writing last night woohooooo :3

[columboposting]

Honestly not even the last fifteen years — try since the 1990s. A lot of the language we use to talk about social issues today comes from academia, and it is language that has been in use in academia for far longer than it’s been in vernacular. “Social constructs” and the ways in which texts produce/subvert/question them have been, broadly speaking, the primary concern of literary scholarship since the ‘80s. The third wave of feminism started in the late ‘80s; Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” in 1989, and very soon after it gets picked up by a lot of literary critics. Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is pretty much the starting point of postcolonial theory, came out in 1978. By the year 2000 Queer Theory and Gender Studies are flourishing. Fuck, I was so busy talking about those guys I almost forgot to mention that Marxist lit theory has been alive and well since the fucking ‘70s!!!! If you go back and read a piece of literary theory from 1998 you will probably be surprised by how much it sounds like it could have been written yesterday. But that’s because many of the ways we now describe gender and race and sexuality were invented by academics — queer and female academics, academics of color, other marginalized academics — thirty-forty years ago. 

Obviously, criticism from the early/mid-20th century is, to generalize a little, going to suck for all the reasons you think it will; back then, most critics had this idea that a text had one objective correct meaning, and the critics deciding on that meaning were overwhelmingly wealthy straight white men (that said, we even owe some things to those nerds — mainly close reading, looking at a paragraph or a sentence of a work and examining its form and content and using it to draw conclusions about the work at large, AKA what’s happening in 90% of tumblr media analysis). But since the 70s literary criticism has been primarily post-structuralist, and since the 90s that post-structuralism has primarily turned its attention to examining how a text understands structures of class, race, gender, sexuality, culture and society at large in very nuanced, intelligent ways. There are a lot of fantastic scholars doing a lot of fantastic work!!! Post-Colonialism, Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, and New Historicism are all doing quite well at the moment — within the past fifteen years or so you can start throwing Ecocriticism into the hat, if you want to see people talking about how literature treats the natural world. By dismissing “scholars,” you’re ignoring the fact that there are a lot of really cool literary critics you could be learning from RIGHT NOW!!

And this is a little beside the point but I do really want to note that also: you’re neglecting the fact that YOU are doing scholarship, even if you’re not “scholars”!! Like, I hate the people who invented close reading, but holy shit close reading is the foundation of like every piece of tumblr media analysis ever!! Furthermore: Frankly, if you’re talking about the latent meaning hidden within the text you are probably also doing a little bit of psychoanalysis because that’s where we get that idea about reading literature (sorry, fellow Freud haters). If you’re talking about the emotional reaction the text provokes, if you’re interested in how the serialized nature of dracula daily changes the experience vs reading it as it was published — congratulations, that’s Phenomenology, the study of how people experience a text!!!!!! Plus there are (as previously mentioned) all the ways that we get our vocab on gender and race and class and social constructs from theory. Your blorbo analysis post is a form of literary criticism that is deeply, deeply indebted to both modern post-structuralist theory and earlier 20th century ideas of close reading and psychoanalysis, even if you don’t know it. In that respect, and in the fact that modern criticism is going to be working under many of the exact same methodological and ideological influences as you, I promise literary scholarship is worth your time. 

since I'm paying more attention to drac daily stuff this year I'm seeing a lot of posts saying "scholars always get the book wrong" and guys, ya gotta read better scholarship. poke around on jstor and google scholar for publications from the last ~15 years. see if you can find queer / feminist / postcolonial centered journals with online public archives. find a writer you agree with and see who else they cite. I prommy that academics are not your enemy and a lot of them are in their line of work precisely because they're just as not normal about their blorbos as you are. hashtag don't turn this into another "historians will say they're just friends."