#but like u should read about me :)

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[kiivg]

."Are you even listening to me, McCullum?".

[babsaros]

hey. when cis society is oppressing a trans man, what he is experiencing is. In Fact. misogyny. i'm sorry i know none of us like to be reminded of our agab, and it hurts whenever people perceive you as the wrong gender. but a cis person hate-criming, assaulting, verbally abusing, etc, a trans man is not doing "transandrophobia" because they do not perceive him as a man.

they perceive him as a woman failing at her gender, as a woman who has been seduced and lied to and manipulated because women are so easily led astray, just like it says in the bible. they perceive him as a woman who has been mutilated. they perceive him as a dyke that needs to be fixed. if they are hate-criming him because they *do* perceive him as a man, because he passes well enough they aren't thinking he could be trans, then they're doing so out of homophobia, perceiving him as a gay man, a pervert, a sissy, a danger to children. OR, they are being transphobic but specifically because they think he might be transfeminine instead. when cis society oppresses a trans woman, they are able to do it on multiple levels at once. She's a woman failing at her gender, a dyke that needs to be fixed. Or she's an evil and grotesque crossdressing pervert, a rude caricature, a danger to polite society. she will never be doing enough to escape oppression entirely, no matter if she gets every surgery she can and wears makeup every day and passes perfectly, because she lives under a patriarchy, and she's a woman, so she lives in a panopticon, and HAVING to get surgery and wear make-up to be respected IS oppression, especially if the alternative is being hate-crimed.

trans women (and trans men who pass) are not experiencing "transandrophobia" when a 'queer women and nbs" event turns them away at the door for being too masculine. they are. IN FACT!! experiencing the byproducts of misogyny in a patriarchy!!! where the terfs and coward cis women running those events and occupying those spaces have been taught (sometimes through experience, sometimes by men, sometimes by women) throughout life that men = stronger and more dangerous than women ALWAYS. That they need to protect themselves at all times and always be vigilant. That men and women can't be friends without sexual tension (and so as queer women the mere existence of what they perceive as a "man" is a threat). That women need a separate sports league because they can't possibly compete with someone who has even a little bit "extra" (an unquantifiable amount actually because there isn't a standard range) testosterone. That women should cook and men should fix cars. i promise you, i promise i promise i promise. it's misogyny. like!!! you don't say cis gay men experiences "androphobia", bc that's not a thing!! you sound like fucking mens rights activists guys please! you don't say a black man experiences "misandrynoir"!! because living in a patriarchy fundamentally means men do not experience oppression based on their gender. its not happening. shut the fuck up. stop walking us back to 2014 can we please take a step forward and stop bitching about this. there are genuine issues in the world and i'm frankly sick of people who should be smarter than that needing to be gently hand-held through this fucking explanation for the millionth time and still stomping their feet.

[luck-of-the-drawings]

"And soda; runs off into the street..." "...and soda... is totally okay!"

[cryptocism]

cut him some slack he only just started listening to music

special thanks to @domnorian for their post opening my eyes to this dynamic and to @eyefocusing for thad’s outfit inspiration

[transmaverique]

amab and afab, if they were used as shorthand for the actual full phrases that they signify, with emphasis on the "assigned" part, and an understanding that they are enforcements of normative (ie, dyadic and cisgender and binary) sex, would be like. really useful. but people took the terms and started using them as shorthand FOR normative sex instead of the ENFORCEMENT OF normative sex. so when other trans people (almost always dyadic trans people) ask for your agab they are almost always asking for your Original Genital Situation. your starting point, so to say. and the reason FOR asking is also almost always bc they are trying to also enforce a certain kind of normativity within queer spaces (which is stupid bc being queer is inherently non-normative but here we are). like, you cant be a lesbian if you're ftm, bc you ARE m, so if you ARE a lesbian, then that means you're lying about some aspect of your identity. does that make sense?

it is always always always incredibly.... i do not trust dyadic trans people that use cagab terms, even moreso than i do not trust dyadic trans people that just use agab terms. agab is also coopted intersex language, but the "coercive" part of cagab SPECIFICALLY refers to medical "intervention" of intersex characteristics, such as "corrective" surgeries and hrt. i am deeply fucking suspicious of any dyadic trans person that uses those terms exactly the same as described above, even moreso if they do so bc "all gender is coercive".

like. yeah. that's true. but you use these terms to erase and overtake intersex discussions on the medical abuse of intersex infants. and i cant help but wonder why you would feel the need to do that.

[mitchmotch]

i was commissioned by @achinga to draw vash and milly! they're so silly :)

[starwikia]

suicide cw

look i have been in this area before mentally. it sucks and i wouldn’t wish this on anyone. but, and this is going to sound callous, but i don’t feel any sympathy for james somerton. even if i hope he’s like. not dead. But thats all the amount of goodwill im willing to give him. The more i think about this really, the more angry i am. 

ngl this entire situation is another example of how white people weaponize their mental illness to avoid consequences. Im seeing it in real time.

this man has a continuous habit of using self-harm as a get-out-of-jail-for-free card. in both of his apologies, he has worded his supposed attempts in ways that were clearly meant to guilt people who displayed his plagiarism and overall horrendous history of racism and misogyny. i say supposed because, while i’m not saying those are lies and this would he such a fucked up thing to lie about that i don’t want to think he has, unfortunately, it’s been proven again and again that his word can’t be trusted, as he’s known to lie to try get out of consequences. Hes a proven liar. him lying about this is actually the best case scenario, because no one should go through this entire situation, wouldnt wish this on anyone, but you can only do this so often before people stop sympathizing with you. is this callous? Yeah, but like. I’m actually fucking angry he cant straight up take no as an answer. that this is how he reacts realizing he cant be one of the Cool Kidz™️ on youtube anymore. he acts like he DESERVES a career, like its not a privilege hes lost due to his own actions.

He lied about apologizing and forgiving people, he lied about giving the money to hbomberguy to give to ppl he ripped off (yknow, instead of doing it himself), he lied about the jessie gender situation and rewrote the narrative to make it so he isnt the bad guy, and hes the victim all along actually!

you can’t tell me that supposed last message of his isn’t meant to be a 13 reasons why esq attempt to deflect the blame “look i’m going to kill myself and it’s all YOUR PEOPLES FAULT for not letting me achieve my DREAM of being filmmaker IN PEACE!!! I just wanted Nick’s (the guy who I have thrown under the bus again and again) portfolio up!! Im just being a good friend dont you all FEEL BAD” he refuses to take ANY ACCOUNTABILITY of any of his actions and he IS STILL trying to shove the blame over to other people again.

it’s also pretty ironic people are like “uhhh well hbomber’s fans harassed him!!!” like hbomber outright told people NOT to HARASS JAMES!!! ALSO acting as if james doesn’t have a very real documented history of STRAIGHT UP sending his fans to harass and threaten smaller creators, more notably women, trans, and bipoc creators. especially after he’s stolen typically very personal anecdotes so he could profit from them. so why can he do it but the second people are like “hey this guys an actual piece of shit.” and he can’t handle it suddenly people are trying to white knight his shit? like no he doesn’t get that. he doesn’t get that at all just because he couldn’t handle the consequences of his actions. 

what? were supposed to stay quiet about a man profiting off of other minorities because he wanted to be the spokesman for all gay people? people tried to solve this on a smaller, more private scales for YEARS and he kept doing it. it was clear that the giant public video was the ONLY way to get people to notice. HE WOULDVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH STEALING 87 FUCKING THOUSANDS WORTH OF DOLLARS. HE CANT HANDLE THE FACT HE CANT GET AWAY WITH IT. 

am i supposed to feel bad for the guy who basically threatened a trans woman with the police? i don’t care what anyone says, it’s so fucking obvious that he threatened jessie by implying he was getting the police involved in their conflict. what am i supposed to act like that didn’t happen? are we supposed to pretend like he didn’t glorify nazi’s and outright said that gay people made up a good chunk of the nazis? That he didnt say america joined ww2 bc they were jealous of the NAZIS. WHAT WOULD POSSESS YOU TO FUCKING SAY THAT. but then? He gives women (not even women most of the time, he misgenders nonbinary ppl constantly) shit for writing mlm. are we supposed to act like he doesn’t straight-up sees himself superior and better than people of color and steals their works to put himself on a pedestal? Are we supposed to act like he didnt spit on our elders by saying “only the boring gays survived aids” like man! Fuck you! He BLANTANTLY MAKES UP HISTORY TO PUT HIMSELF ON A PEDESTAL!! HE ACTIVELY TRIED TO REWRITE LGBT HISTORY TO SUIT HIS FUCKED UP NARRATIVES!

yes this sucks ! no one deserves this but no one should be making him a martyr. Thats what he fucking WANTS! He wants to be immortalized as a victim!! (again, supposedly, it was reported hes alive but its not confirmed).

The shit he got isnt near the amount of fucking callous behavior hes done again and again. Again, to drill this point, EVEN IF HE DIDNT CALL THE POLICE HE THREATENED A TRANS WOMAN INTO THINKING HE DID!!! The fact he tried to use a head injury to justify years of the outright ghoulish shit fucking astounds me. Why the fuck did anyone in his life thought it was a good idea to let him TRY to come back. in the end, he had options. he didn’t need to try to make a comeback. HE DIDNT NEED TO FUCKING LIE OR IGNORE THE SHIT HE WAS CALLED OUT ON the reality is, he wanted to come back thinking he could shove it under the rug, was told that no dude, you’re not allowed to be a youtuber anymore. you’re done. you need to move on and went full nuclear. it’s not on anyone’s hands but his own. HES BEEN DOING THIS TO HIMSELF!! But nah man we cant call his shit out bc hell may or may not kill himself. Fuck the other minorities who have the same issues but worse and sometimes BECAUSE of him. This is going to SUCKKKK so bad when other ppl, specifically white gays, are going to weaponize this shit to get away with their stuff.

[fisheito]

i told myself that yakuei only had one position then i proved myself (sorta) wrong

my fave face here:

[sluttypatrickstar]

reading smut is not a substitute for a personality

[inkskinned]

it is totally okay to be hurt and tired and fed up with the american schooling system but i need you to understand that we need to be better about loudly and routinely defending public education.

yes, many teachers suck, many schools utterly suck. i also got bullied and was absolutely not given the right support for my needs. i am not defending public education because it was kind to me. i am defending it because it needs to exist.

right-wing republicans do not want an educated population. they want kids to be homeschooled or in private school. there is a huge religious undertone to this.

the most common argument is that despite high costs, the "result" is not "good" enough. they point to failing schools as proof that public education is just never going to work out. there will be arguments made here that you actually agree with: that teachers can be bullies, that we taught online for 2 years and still charged the same amount of tuition, that we have no recourse for students to actually have agency or a voice, and that schools are now unsafe for kids due to risk of illness and gun violence.

these are all placing the blame in a fraudulent way, one intended to get your parents to homeschool you. the less kids in a school, the less federally-awarded funding for that school, the less any school succeeds. they will not mention the fact it is their legislation that takes away important funding opportunities, that teachers are living at or below the poverty line, that buildings are not kept up to code, that administration is overpaid and forces specific curriculums, that corporations like (my personal enemy) Pearson Education control certain classroom goals because teachers can't afford other options. they pretend to be ignorant of the gun violence and say "oh just get a gun" - but these are the same people who will be sending their child to a private school with a bulletproof backpack. they don't care if your kid dies, though. they "don't believe" in covid, but they did get their kid vaccinated, because of course they did.

it is a closed loop. conservative parents hear the fearmongering and remove children from the system. frequently these parents are also deeply religious. the kids are raised without access to other media & learn to parrot their parents. you have now created a new generation of conservatives. additionally, one of the parents/caregivers must stay home and homeschool the children, usually for free. i will give you 1 guess which parent tends to stay home to homeschool the children. these parents are encouraged to have many, many children. those children are most likely not getting access to safe sex ed.

we might laugh at fox news suggesting teachers are forcing children to use kitty litter but: first of all, there is kitty litter in the classroom. it's part of an emergency kit in case children are locked in due to a shooter. so that's fucking dystopian, and the fact they've completely reimagined the scenario to somehow make the teachers look bad when it's instead a fucking huge symbol of our failure as a country to protect our children.... it feels a little intentional.

secondly: don't just dismiss the situation. because, yeah, obviously, no teacher is encouraging kids to be a catboy. but the actual undertone that fox news is trying to sew is an outright distrust of teachers and of public education. they rely on the dehumanization of trans people as a common touchstone to hide the fact they're pushing two agendas at once. (which is ironic. because the thing they accuse teachers of. is pushing. an agenda.)

whenever someone tells you they want you to read less, you should be suspicious of that. when someone tries to separate you and your education, you should be suspicious of that. i don't even like incel rhetoric nor would i want my kids exposed to it - but i would not take away my child's (age-appropriate) access to the internet. i would just provide more educational materials, not less. the difference here is that i believe we can resolve ignorance with knowledge; whereas conservatives believe that ignorance is bliss.

they misappropriate funding and demonize teachers. they pull the same trick each time - the same thing we are seeing with anti-trans rhetoric. they do not want you to have access to safe sex ed, so they act horrified, claim sex ed teaches you how to thrust deep, claim that we have no idea what "age-appropriate" means. since the mid-nineties, the united states has spent at least 2 billion dollars on abstinence-only education, even though to quote the above link: "a preponderance of studies has found no effect of abstinence education at reducing adolescent pregnancy". conservatives want you to think less of any person struggling with addiction so they can continue their racist "war on drugs", so they spend up to $750 million dollars a year on the DARE program which has absolutely no effect. acting like teachers "must" be "grooming" children is just the same thing - so they can demand that funding either goes to their causes or the funding doesn't "exist" ("i'm not paying for our kids to learn that thing!")

and they want you to feel uncaring about this. they are aware that you will hate some parts of your school experience. pretty much everyone does. they want to lean into the parts that you hate so that you don't put up a fight about it when they take it away for not being "good enough."

i know i maybe sound like a conspiracy theorist. but truly. truly. it is beneficial for conservatives to reduce your faith in the american public schooling system.

one of the explicitly stated campaign promises of the conservative party: to axe the Department of Education in 2024.

i know we are all tired and burnt out and there is so much else wrong with their entire platform. but maybe just - pay attention to this one.

[oceanwithouthermoon]

people who dislike saiki kusuo i need to pick and prod at ur brain. whats going on in there?

[every-sanji]

[pearlsdiamondsandvodka]

brennan lee mulligan: old king cole was-

me: omg a mechanisms reference

brennan lee mulligan: -a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he so he called for his pipe and-

me: king you’re getting the lyrics wrong this is so embarrassing for you

[againstme]

idk man i’m just thinking about against me! and transness, especially cause we’re coming up on ten fucking years of transgender dysphoria blues, on the 21st.

lyrics have been swimming in my head lately.

“what god doesnt give to you, you’ve got to go and get for yourself.”

“if i could’ve chosen, i would’ve been born a woman. my mother once told me she would’ve named me laura. i’d grow up to be strong and beautiful like her.”

“you wouldn’t think something like gender identity would complicate something like asking for some company.”

“she spent the last few years of her life running from the boy she used to be.”

“standing naked in front of that hotel bathroom mirror, in her dysphoria’s reflection, she still saw her mother’s son.”

“agitated states of amazement, never quite the woman that she wanted to be.”

“you want them to see you like they see every other girl, they just see a faggot, they hold their breath not to catch the sick.”

“chipped nail polish and a barbed wire dress. is your mother proud of your eyelashes? silicone chest, and collagen lips. how would you even recognize me?”

“no more troubled sleep, there’s a brave new world that’s raging inside of me.”

“all my life, wishing i was one of them. there will always be a difference between me and you.”

“what’s the best end you can hope for? pity fucks and table scraps?”

“all the young graves filled, don’t the best all burn out so bright and so fast?”

“sometimes at night, i pray to wake a different person in a different place.”

“i don’t want to hang around the graveyard, waiting for something dead to come back. i know you think you’ve got one up on me, that you can see something i can’t.”

“i wanna be so real, you can see the difference.”

“dig up your bones, early graves are not homes.”

“come on, shape shift with me! what’ve you got to lose? fuck it!”

“confessing childhood secrets of dressing up in women’s clothes, compulsions you never knew the reasons to.”

“i’m sick of feeling like i’m losing my mind. sick of doing the same things most nights after night. sick of self loathing and self absorption, self destructive narcissism.”

some of these are directly referencing transness, some just alluding to it. some are just ones that i relate to as i’ve grown up struggling with my gender and sexuality and accepting my own transness and dealing with self harm and self destruction and relying too much on drugs.

finding myself buying baggies of coke and just stuffing them in my wallet while i walked downtown, feeling this immense guilt at the bottom of my stomach for essentially just wasting 25 dollars on a drug that wasn’t doing much for me besides making me feel like i was feeling something different than what my life was. getting scared shitless while in the line at the convenience store after picking up, seeing cops come into the store, and the small tied up bag filled with what was more baby powder than coke in my back pocket felt like the the heaviest and most obvious thing in the world.

and then i’d find myself on calls with my friends, with my camera turned off or pointing at the ceiling, suddenly muting my mic holding a cut up piece of a straw in my teeth as i crushed shit up with my library card from a city i wasn’t planning on living in again. just having them talk while i was racking baby lines, tilting my head back and rubbing it on my gums after. i was sniffling all the time. sometimes my nose would bleed when i would wake up. and i wasn’t even really feeling much; i didn’t know at the time that this would be because of having adhd and just basically spending money on overpriced shit that was just like taking an adderall, but it was a drug in front of me, that gave me the idea or the false hope of running away from my life during the short lived high.

“before you know it, here i am again, fucking 6 o’clock in the morning, rolled up dollar bill in my hand.”

“what the fuck are you cutting this with, anyway?”

“how low can you go before you can’t turn around?”

i don’t think that when i was 14 and getting into against me! that i would ever actually get to a point of fully relating to those lyrics. of running away from such a huge part of yourself or your problems, trying to fill the void with drugs that you’d plow through so quickly, faster than you thought you would every time.

the thing is, was that at this point, i had already started my transition. i was already “passing.” but i never got to the root of it. sure, i’m trans, but who am i? and i didn’t know how to answer that question. so i just pushed it away, pushed it under the rug.

“you can pray all night and day, but you’ll still wake up the same person in the same fucking place.”

against me! has been there for me for ten years. throughout so many transformations of myself, so much shape shifting, so much dysphoria, so many late nights wishing i was a different person in a different place.

i found solace in their lyrics. it gave me some small bit of hope, some realization that i didn’t know that i needed; that trans people always have been and always will be here, that being able to be trans and be alive is possible, and that i don’t have to be digging my own grave, spending late nights staring at the mirror and seeing the girl who i used to be.

against me! gave me the courage to be alive.

[why-the-heck-not]

26.08.23, saturday

today was what we like to call "productive procrastination" aka the rest of my life is in shambles but I now have a clean kitchen