#and some nonsense

[earhartsease]

do you have this thing where the first version of something you encountered is always the best one somehow?

we have this really smooth hi-fi recording of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and it's lovely, but it still can't compare with the really shitty CD of it we bought for £1 in an Aldi supermarket in the 90s - somehow that's the touchstone, even with the bits where the baritone is too loud and he gets distorted because the engineers were like fuck it that'll do

listening to the posher recording rn and it's like film-of-the-book - it's okay, but it lacks the sheer grittiness of the fucked up paperback we carried with us for years

as a complete adhd aside, we're not sure if we've ever typed the word posher before, but now we can't help thinking of glamping being the fancy kind of camping so posher is like gourmet kosher?

[nooling]

LOOK I JUST REALLY ENJOY THEIR FRIENDSHIP OK?? You can't tell me they wouldn't hang after their respective personal quests (spawn ending ofc)/emotional breakdowns over their own mortality

EDIT: I forgot to watermark these so now more than ever PLEASE don't repost

[misterradio]

🍪🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜

my coogie

[zorangezest]

soundwave and bee, just some designs I made for fun!

[sixth-light]

so one of the things I was vaguely aware of before reproducing was that people hold a lot of anxiety around the gender of babies and 'wrongly' gendering babies (i.e. failing to guess correctly based on their clothes and appearance what their genital configuration is) and having now had a baby: wow, yes, they really do.

I take an extremely laissez-faire approach to baby clothes because like, they are constantly being thrown up on and grown out of and so on, what matters is that they are clean and easy to put on and I am not spending $$$$$ on them. as long as the colour/design is not directly offensive, it's fine. what this means is that people are quite frequently 'misgendering' the baby and then falling over themselves to apologise about it.

and, like, I haven't even had a chance to dress him in anything pink yet; this is based on rules I didn't expect like 'anything with flowers or sparkly bits on it is for girls only'. equally, I do not care when this happens because it's an irrelevancy, but THEY care to make sure I am not offended. so I have started telling them "look, he's only [x] months old; his gender is baby."

and you know what? you'd be surprised how many otherwise average heterosexual people process this and go "huh, yeah, I guess it is." there is a tiny amount of hope for the future after all.

[camilleflyingrotten]

[rendevok]

Moon dance 🌕✨

[auriidae]

itty bitty comic that took me WAYYY longer than i expected :'] i was trying to test the viability of this medium for sequential art and the answer is Yes it kind of works but Only if you have both a ton of patience and time on your hands. i think this turned out kinda swag for a first attempt!

anyways this was going to be the beginning of a short story but now i've moved and. no longer live in the forest anymore kjfdksj so might have to rethink it slightly

[parisoonic]

A sketch! one day i'll finish my 'summer antics' photoset - it just wont be in the summer lol

[the-northern-continent]

Fen’Harel may seem stressed, but this is important enrichment for him. For optimal health, trickster deities must be pursued by 2-5 larger, angrier deities at all times. This allows them to express their natural instincts to Run, Deny Involvement, and Proclaim Themselves “Just A Little Guy”.

[kaijusaur]

[cowardlykrow]

“Not my circus, not my monkeys”… Except those are his monkeys and they are the circus

[vaguely-concerned]

purple hawke who, at malcolm's death, lost not only a father, a mentor, the single most stable and safe point in their world up until this moment. but also the only person in their life who would consistently, gleefully 'yes, and — ' them. the loss, in one fell swoop, of both a beloved parent and your sole willing — no, not only willing, enthusiastic — improv partner. truly, the most unkindest cut of all that the maker could have seen fit to deal. (there's always so much less laughter in the house, after malcolm's gone.)

and then after all the horrors of the blight and trying to make a new life in the shithole turned shithome of kirkwall....... they meet varric. and something that's been slumbering deep within their soul dries a tear of relief and joy and whispers 'oh we are so back'. and they are so right

[agentravensong]

characters who see themselves as more of a Force or an abstract concept acting in the world than as a person. characters who prioritize their role as a cog in some greater mechanism over their own personhood. characters who get their hands dirty, who run themselves ragged, who take on an unbearable weight, who hurt or neglect or give up or straight-up betray the people and things they once held close, because they believe in doing so they are fulfilling their Purpose, the thing they exist in this world to do (and no one else will do it, *can* do it, so it has to be them). characters who've determined that they are constructs bound to preprogrammed code, to a script already written for them by someone/something else, and have been operating under that mindset for so long that they don't know how to live on their own terms. characters who uphold the fate that is smothering them. can anyone hear me

[mythtakens]

"You're a good dad. You're a great dad." "If I am, it's because he deserves it."

[sixth-light]

I have had these thoughts bubbling away in my head for like...eighteen months or so now (it will become very obvious why shortly) but the discussion in this post has pushed me to write them down: I think societally we HUGELY underestimate how motherhood for primary caregivers, particularly first-time motherhood, can be a source of vulnerability to radicalisation.

There is obviously huge cultural variance here, but for a lot of cis women becoming primary caregiver to an infant in a capitalist Western society represents a time of immense vulnerability because in general you are:

Incredibly sleep-deprived (which has well-documented knock-on effects for your judgement, mental health, etc)

If you gave birth, recovering from a significant challenge to your physical health (even in the best-case scenario)

Isolated from your previous networks and communities of people in full-time work

Completely separated from the context of your prior career goals and achievements

Under huge amounts of stress to learn how to care for an infant (don't get me started on breastfeeding)

And on top of this, you are also be experiencing a huge amount of messaging about how all this is natural, wonderful, something you're meant to do, something you should love doing, and something that you must do for the welfare of their child. It's a huge amount of pressure and life change even when everything goes right and there's very little cultural space to express negative feelings about it.

Any group of people who offer community, support, and affirmation to cis women in this situation are going to have a really good shot at radicalising them into some very weird and dangerous headspaces and in fact we see this happen all the time - think antivaxxers and TERFs. It flies under the radar because of the hazy positive glow that associates with motherhood and babies and also because we don't take the radicalisation of women seriously I guess because they rarely shoot anybody, but...yeah. It is such a vulnerable time!