#furman. I like Ezra furman

[auckie]

Her music isnt bad. But largely unremarkable in a way that makes me believe chappel roan was manufactured in a pharmaceutical lab specifically for straight women who wanted to have a ‘but I listen to X!’ card for when they get a liiiittle too homophobic.

[keymintt]

something like an angel

[taino-ti]

look. all these posts about queer women artists to listen to instead of projecting onto taylor swift are Nice and All, but it is really telling that trans women hardly ever make these lists.

[dinoco51]

not even gender envy but just like holyyyy shit i wish i had access to the social sphere in the same way boys do. i want to be a young man. i want to be a son… a nephew… TORTUROUS. i enjoy being a girl its fun its just agonizing because i want to know what its like on the other side sooooo bad. and also because i wish i was a man. but im sure if i was a man i would wish i was a girl. so there is no win in this scenario except that i would be born into a world which does not care about these things and invent them. but such is not the case!

[zagreus-eats-your-bread]

people need to stop making songs called Halley's Comet

[petricorah]

📅 a song that reminds you of a specific time - i just want your jeans sung by hannah murray, it reminds me of zuko. in a way. yearning about sokka. what’s one of yours?

my room faces north but the sun's in the south

something something zuko's sunshine and fire being in the southern water tribe---

also your song reminded me of "Marietta" by Upstate that I feel could be a divorced Zukka song. I mean, there's long distance, anger, and letter writing? the lyrics are so on point.

I got your postcard. It was nice of you to send. I love the way you signed it-- Dear. Old. Friend.

Mine is Driving Down to LA by Ezra Furman. Sometimes i think it'd make a great zukka comic or fic, but it's just a good song in general that holds memories for me.

i don't mind if I lose my legs or die i've built a home inside his eyes and i ain't leavin'

[matchboxcards]

I’m a trans Oklahoman. Not used to going online and seeing people talk about my state. I wish it was not because of this tragedy. I want to love my home state, but it is hard to feel loved in return

I wish this was a surprising situation, but, if I’m honest, my surprise is more from how many people care about people like me who live in places like here. That’s a good kind of surprise, the kind of bittersweet hopefulness that rises from the ashes of hate and devastation

I think about Nex every day. Trans kids deserve a better Oklahoma. Oklahomans deserve a better Oklahoma. That’s what I hope for; that’s what I live for

[bloodsugarsex]

pro tip: if you want to get some of the worst song recommendations of your entire life, ask men on dating apps which song they've had on repeat lately

[haunthouse]

made a genius (read: completely obvious) realization (that if i have a specific song i put on in the mornings to give myself the energy to get out of bed, i can simply set it as my alarm to put less steps between me waking up and me getting out of bed, and therefore hopefully reduce the whole 'executive dysfunction before my vyvanse kicks in makes it take 3 hours to get moving' thing)

[glimblshanks]

saying Joan Jett would kill a swiftie is so funny because never in my life have I met weirder gay people than swifties

Broski I'm sorry you only hang out with boring queer people, but your experiences are absolutely not universal

[therehavebeenstranger]

Okay! @stankhead just tagged me in their brand new tag game about our top artistic influences. I really really love this and am honestly very grateful to grem for giving me a little opportunity to be reflective about this right now; for context, i am about two weeks out from graduating with an MFA in creative writing (fiction track) from [redacted prominent midwestern university w decently-renowned 40 yr old mfa which has been attacked in recent years by humanities-hating admin, there you go, now everybody who follows the chronicle of higher ed can probably dox my ass] and so it’s nice, at this transition moment, to take a step back and think about the influences that have shaped my writing on a global level. I think it’s super useful and i’m typing this in a word doc so i can hang onto it for later. Okay enough chit chat. I’m gunna try to limit this to no more than like 4 or 5

Carmen Maria Machado—CMM is one of my biggest, most direct, and most obvious influences. She came to my college campus to lead a workshop and give a reading in the months leading up to the publication of her body and other parties. I was a sophomore (or maybe this was late freshman year?????) and encountering her work totally and completely shifted what i write and how i write. Complete reframe on what speculative fiction was and what it could do. HBaOP went on to have a big impact on me (esp. formally weird stories like Especially Heinous) but at the moment i was obsessed with her stories the husband stitch and my body, herself

Peak Cracked Dot Com—but especially everything DOB touched when he was there! I was a regular cracked reader from the age of 11 to the exact day that all those layoffs happened, and by regular i mean that every day i had access to the internet i read/watched/listened every piece of new content they published, whether or not i gave a shit about the subject matter. Cracked’s influence on me is less easy to tangibly track than CMM, but i literally boiled my forming brain in that site and i think the style permeates me work. Cracked had this strand of pedantry that necessitated dwelling with strange research and subject matter and letting things sort of spiral and cook and letting the obsession change the voice. (also, subject matter—this article inspired an obsession w Dorothy Arnold which became a story that will be published later this year.) It had a huge impact on my sense of humor and the way i approach dialogue, even when i’m not conscious of that. For dialogue i am especially thinking of video content like after hours and agents of cracked (the way the “swaim proving that that guy fu-u-u-cks goats” monologue hits in this ep *changed me forever). In general, i think my approach to narrative voice was really impacted by the fact that i spend my adolescence reading DOB’s old “my brief time as (blank)” articles and shit like “yer gramma was built like a brick shit-house in her day”

*if you click that link fair warning that the video is from like 2010 and def has some stuff that makes me uncomfortable in hindsight, including at least one use of the r word

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy—man. This is one of the great novels of all time, isn’t it???? i was assigned it in ib english senior year of high school and i’ve tried to read it at least once a year since. Pieces of the language regularly float back to me—“a viable, dieable age” “a sariflapping” “the time was ten to two” “the history woman in the history house.” Roy does things with language that i didn’t know you could do—makes paragraphs which are so thick and lush that they feel humid and green. Sticks words together to make new and better ones. Talks frankly about the story being told by the story. Like, that’s one of the things that’s so brilliant, right? From go, you know that sophie mol and velutha will die. The question is not what will happen in the story but how the story will be told and how it will mean to us. The language bears that out. It has totally suffused in my brain, it’s a lens through which i read everything. Also i think it’s about time for my annual reread of this book, ha.

What the moon brought by Sadie rose weilerstein—see, this is why i love this tag. I would not have pegged this book as an influence before being tasked w this reflexive task, but it looms large in my mind!!! My copy of this book—a collection of stories about sisters Ruth and Debbie as they go through their jewish year in the american suburbs, living their lives and observing jewish holy days—was ancient, falling apart; it had been purchased for my mother and her siblings in the early 60s. i was obsessed with it. it was the first book i read which treated Judaism as a fact of american life, if that made sense? Or the first book where i was conscious of Judaism as a force shaping story, time, etc. i mean it’s literally about what the moon brought; a recognition of the lunar jewish calendar. A different kind of time keeping. It told me that jewish stories were and are interesting, singular, rich, and worth pursuing. including a picture of the cover bc i love the cover :)

The fourth state of matter by jo ann beard—this essay is amazing, not that i am the first to say so. It’s worth reading, though i’ll warn that its content (it’s about a shooting that happened on a college campus) can obviously be tough to deal with. This has a very direct impact in my mind. My first creative writing prof ever used this essay to teach us about psychic distance, and learning about psychic distance was like—not like getting a new tool in my little writer’s toolkit, but like having the key that unlocked the kit in the first place.

There’s more, of course there’s more, but this is a thousand words so i’ll call it here. again, thank u gremlin for coming up with this tag it’s lovely and so useful. i'll tag @pintobordeaux and @januariat but i really genuinely encourage anybody who sees this post to do this kind of accounting. it's really useful and illuminating :)

[anarchoarchie]

no other song exists!!!!!!!!

[beesantennas]

girls when they don't have anyone to rant to about their fic for two hours so they can ask which song title makes a better Fic Title

[peppermintbutch]

watching I Saw the TV Glow and then listening to Transangelic Exodus >>>

[donothing-nothingworks]

[farsaing]

rlly gd time recently