#in which i use my blog as a blog

[thesleepiestselkie]

I'm kicking myself for changing majors in college. I dropped what I knew I was good at and enjoyed (communications) for a passion project I couldn't follow through with (a bookstore?? en esta economía?? bruh).

I don't do shit with my ancient Greek, even though I have a book of poetry waiting for me to translate it sitting on my shelf right next to the Middle Liddell. Maybe I should do it just to upkeep the skill, but I'm not actually sure if it'd be fulfilling to do in any way at this point.

I feel like i could be a good writer, but when I had a chance to actually learn the skills, I put in the absolute minimum effort it took to maintain the pretense that I was a good student. This unfortunately is a skill I had already refined immediately following freshman year of high school.

My homeschooled 14-year-old ass decided to just not do any of my required schoolwork for a year. When anyone asked I either lied or found a way to pull off something showy at the last second to make it seem like I was actually paying attention. Then at the end of the year, my mom (shockingly, somehow) asked me for all of my work to review and grade.

Sometimes when you're homeschooled and your mom's a tradwife, your dad's a Navy chaplain, and you spend a solid half of your waking hours in church for a religion that actively wishes you harm, you develop some... bad coping mechanisms. It truly did not help that I learned when I was maybe six or so that "being independent" meant that nobody was looking at me, so the more independence I could convince my parents to give me, the less I would fear retribution for existing.

I'm like half-diagnosed ADHD (my psych agrees and is helping me use off-label meds to try to treat some of it, but I can't afford an actual diagnosis) and self-diagnosed autistic, and I feel a hell of a fucking lot safer when I feel like nobody's watching me and potentially either watching me for Mannerisms or judging me for how bad I am at skills everyone's supposed to have learned somehow .(Maybe they teach them in school but I wouldn't fucking know! LOL!) This sucks in and of itself because I'm very drawn to hobbies like YouTube and Twitch but those inherently involve Being Perceived.

I just get so.... Chidi Anagonye about everything. I have to say the most accurate and simultaneously the most empathetic version of what I mean every time (hi, abandoned communications degree). It absolutely keeps me from pursuing both my hobbies and my actual skills that I want to be working with, and I have no idea how to power through it. It feels like an impassable wall sometimes that stops me from connecting with people or getting a job that would be actually fulfilling instead of just occasionally satisfying.

Gah. Like. Fuck. Clearly it's a disability, but I'm already on anxiety meds, and in general I'm not working myself into a tizzy nearly as often as I used to, but I'm just at a dead stop with no momentum creatively because I need feedback to get better, but if anyone ever notices that I'm bad at anything I want to be swallowed by the earth instantly. So I don't know what the fuck my deal is but I would really like it to sort itself out. I know I'm like a ball of trauma or whatever but it should not be so hard to get the fuck over myself and make something.

[divorcedwife]

a burden you can't put down

[rainyhowls]

thinking abt how my therianthropy is such a casual part of me now. when i first realized i was nonhuman i thought that if i wasnt constantly thinking abt my theriotype and how unhappy i am abt physically being a human i was a faker and a fraud who just wanted to be special. but now i can confidently say "yeah im a wolf" without feeling like I need to prove myself to anyone.

[vynnyal]

I've been having a delightful time stumbling over my emojis being used in random servers, so here's more

[nedlittle]

apropos of nothing, here are some gay historical fiction novels that engage with historical queerness in thoughtful, complex, and interesting ways (organized chronologically)

hild by nicola griffith ↪ early 7th century england

a tip for the hangman by alison epstein ↪ 1585-1593 england

confessions of the fox by jordy rosenberg ↪ 1702-1724* england

the confessions of frannie langton by sara collins ↪ 1812-1826 jamaica to england

patience and sarah by isabel miller ↪ 1816 america

devotion by hannah kent ↪ 1830s prussia to australia

the sweetness of water by nathan harris ↪ 1865 america

whiskey when we're dry by john larison ↪ 1885 america

the city of palaces by michael nava ↪ 1897-1913 mexico

tipping the velvet by sarah waters ↪ 1890s england

at swim, two boys by jamie o'neill ↪ 1915-1916 ireland

the gods of tango by caro de robertis ↪ 1913-1920s argentina

uncommon charm by emily bergslien and kat weaver ↪ 1920s america

the book of salt by monique truong ↪ 1930s vietnam to paris

the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay by michael chabon ↪ 1939-1954 america and beyond

the flight portfolio by julie orringer ↪ 1940 france

the savage kind by john copenhaver ↪ 1940s america

a thin bright line by lucy jane bledsoe ↪ 1950s america

*this one has a framing device and footnotes from the present day but the bulk of the story is set in the early 1700s

[math-memes]

[lemonswoop]

Old anniversary art for Kingdom hearts because of course I always try to draw something for Sora’s birthday⭐️

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 2 - Bulky Vendor

[altschmerzes]

honestly i just think I will fundamentally never understand the very common (and sometimes posited as universal which i don’t love) sentiment among aromantic people/communities that like. oh one part of aromanticism is Not Understanding Or Caring About Or Getting The Point Of the line between friendship and romance, the distinction of different types of relationship. because for me as an aromantic person that line and distinction is actually Extremely important and clear and it feels… weird and bad to consistently see it posited as this like. Prominent Aro Thing to not understand/care about that.

ACTIONS will never inherently be allotted to one type of relationship or another, and the only feeling that is inherently romantic is romantic attraction/love, but the like. labeling itself of relationships and feelings and actions based on the person or people involved… idk. THAT is very important to me. it is Very Important to me that it’s extremely clear that none of my relationships or actions or feelings are or ever will be romantic and it’s important to me that those labels are seen and respected. it’s important to me in my personal life, and it’s reflectively important to me in the stories i tell and the ones i interact with.

idk. people are obviously welcome to the sentiment and i dont begrudge them having it and maybe im misunderstanding what this means when people say it. but it does make me feel a little anxious and once again the odd guy out in my own community to constantly be seeing this posited as like. An Inherently Aromantic Quality to not understand the difference between types of relationship or the point in differentiating. it will always be critically important to me that romance has and will have no place in my life or relationships. once i learned it was possible not to feel romantic feelings or attraction - and i accepted that it was true for me - everything became very clear to me at that point. ‘how do you Know’ i just know. I Just Know. and that matters to me.

[mythalism]

genuinely curious how the writers and larger dragon age audience would treat thom rainier if instead of being appropriately* repentant and putting himself in prison he blew up a major orlesian government building to instigate a chevalier rebellion or tried to have someone do some necromantic blood magic ritual involving uncertain danger and possible sacrifices to bring the innocent children he ordered killed back to life

[unlimitedbutchworks]

sometimes i get so frustrated about how many transmisogynistic users get reblogged despite their reliable-to-the-point-of-predictability episodes of vitriolic hostility against transfems or absolute lack of care in spreading hearsay about us that i think of making a big blocklist or callout, but its a foolish idea because callouts are only for making a spectacle and Other of someone in order to reinforce norms in the in group. transmisogyny callouts never spread to a large audience for this reason; as a rhetorical tool, they are not for enacting justice.

and even if they could, i stop myself, because they're a stupid way of trying to stop bigotry in the first place. we should be striving to be able to recognize bigoted rhetoric and challenge it ourselves, to stand with the marginalized in our communities, rather than making the victims have to point out The Bad Ones over and over since you can't see. and clearly, you can't see! because i cant hardly scroll this website and see an acquaintance reblog a post without recognizing op as either an open transmisogynistic themself, or a useful idiot for transmisogynists and spreading their callouts. (many of which included private pictures and nudes for "evidence" towards their evil kinks; to make this clear, revenge porn with a coat of progressive paint.)

but time and time again, nobody sees the problem when it happens to trans women. its all a pretense to voice preconceptions of disgust to trans women. they dont really believe that making shitty posts is equivalent to actual sexual abuse, just like they dont actually believe that wearing thigh highs is pedophile-coded, its all just excuses to hate trans women like they want to. for them, its just finding excuses to put in the keywords that turn peoples brains off and play into their bias. oh, sure, i cyberstalked literal years into her private nsfw blog to dig up that nude and match it with a selfie from her main and i put both in the callout im spreading around, but why would that be bad? dont you know she calls her girlfriend mommy in private sometimes? look, i did mental gymnastics to equate this consensual roleplay to real world harm, its totally pedo-incest coded! look, i said shes into raceplay apropos of nothing just to get people pissed at her, but you're not gonna check, right? why would spreading that and her nudes- sorry i mean evidence of her crimes to more strangers and exposing her to transphobes be bad? how can it be sexual harassment when the woman person really really deserves it i promise?

[umblrspectrum]

ive been struggling big time coming up with anything funny to draw that hasnt been done yet so have my rw au art dump

[mazken]

cicero :} unfiltered version under the cut

[iknowwhereyousnoozeatnight]

tennis

[aurosoul]

processing some things.

pt 1 of idk….. we’ll see where this goes

[starvingnarcissistmusic]

I should really make a non music blog so that people who like my music don’t get bombarded by random unrelated stuff but this is like tangentially related sort of so whatever

God I just love Mal Du Pays. I am always a sucker for “the enemy is you / the enemy is a manifestation of some part of you” trope in any media but MDP has by far gotta be one of the best applications of it I’ve ever seen.

I mean even just the design of it is brilliant. Obviously inverting a characters colors to get the evil / darker version isn’t anything new for this trope, but ISAT is unique in that you have quite literally been STARING AT MDP THE WHOLE GAME, every single time you die and every single time you loop back. Turning the non diegetic game over screen into a diegetic encounter is incredibly clever and immediately gives MDP that sense of crushing pressure that makes it so memorable.

Also literally any game where the game over music is later established as the motif of a character automatically just wins me over by default. It’s such an effective tool in immediately conveying just what MDP is, even before any of the dialogue starts. It’s the end of this journey. It’s the pain of a home you’ve never known. It’s an entire universe collapsing in on you at once. It’s the end. It’s the end. It’s the end.

And I think, it’s a little Fucked Up, that Siffrin’s sadness looks identical to him. Every other sadness we see in the game is very distinctly not human in appearance, incredibly abstract and inhuman pretty much all around the board. But Mal Du Pays? The sadness of our main character? Pretty much the same. Literally a color swap. I think that’s incredibly telling. A being born of Siffrin’s grief and pain and agony, and the form it takes is his own silhouette.

Thematically, it’s very On The Nose that Siffrin’s worst enemy is simply himself, but at the same time, it’s exactly what you expect. I remember getting to MDP for the first time, seeing Siffrin walk through the void and just… knowing what would come next. Of course it would be another him. For Siffrin, his hell is himself. This nightmarish half-life, devoid of a past and with nothing but a quickly collapsing future, his worst impulses and fears and agonies and pains personified, and all it looks like is his shadow. Of course, what else could be here, at his lowest of lows, but a reflection? Of course there would be nothing here but you. It’s always only ever been you. Mal Du Pays is a mirror. A mirror that hates you like you do, that loathes you like you loathe yourself. In the worst, most monstrous way possible, it tells you exactly what you’ve been telling yourself your whole journey. And so you believe it, let it sink its words into your skin and bury you in the misery. Because maybe then, maybe when you finally give in, it won’t hurt anymore.

(A cold comfort is still, however little it may be, a comfort.)

And then you’re saved. The King is defeated, your friends came back for you, you manage to come up for air again. But it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Everything is still coming to an end. You’re still going to be all alone. And so, you sink again.

Notice how Bigfrin doesn’t have a face in this panel? This is Siffrin at their most self destructive, most desperate, lower than lower than low. And in a way, I think that by quite literally looking like the Sadness they nearly created, they’re symbolically drawing a parallel there. Siffrin fully embraces what Mal Du Pays represented, to the point that their new form looks just like it. Even if they didn’t manifest MDP, they are just as horrible. After all, the mirror goes both ways. Mal Du Pays looks just like Siffrin, but that also means that Siffrin looks just like Mal Du Pays. And maybe, in Siffrin’s head, they’re one and the same. Maybe they’ve always been.

Oh god it’s 1 in the morning. I did not mean to make this that long lmao w h o o p s

uhhhhhh in summary tldr mdp is very good isat is also very good play isat

(also if you want more MDP content, I sort of wrote a whole song about it. So listen to that if you’d like. Im goin to bed)