#it didn't even occur to me that they could be visual and self-directed

[aestherians]

I just had the oddest experience. I was brushing my teeth, looking in the mirror, when suddenly, for a split second, my face seemed different. Not like a hallucination (or p-shift, good gods), more like... I stopped noticing the traits that didn't look like my fictotype. Like a visual sensory shift. A perception shift. I only perceived our visual similarities and somehow blocked out our differences. Like I said, it was over in less than a second. But it was there, clear as day.

[fromthedragonsdesk]

On Visual Novels and Catharsis

I never had a high opinion of Visual Novels. In my mind, they always seemed to boil down to the most basic wish fulfillment tripe that we'd collectively assign to the isekai genre these days, I'd wager. To me it was a waste of time or energy trying to interact with them (as an aside, I'm well aware that the Phoenix Wright series is arguably a visual novel, but I missed that boat by not having DS-era device). Even today, with a glance over most of games tagged 'visual novel' on Steam, you'll see what could be generously described as fetish pornography. So, seeing all this, I reinforced my belief that visual novels were for people who wanted some plot with their porn, and never thought much of it.

To my surprise, Steam insisted on recommending visual novels to me. I usually just tossed them aside from the recommendation queue, until I got two recommended almost back-to-back: Mice Tea and Changeling Tale.

Mice Tea had generally positive reviews, and many of them cited that the game's writing and characterization were generally humorous and appealing. So, given that it was on sale during the Steam Winter Sale, I figured it was worth a shot. Then, after basically binging on the game for 20 hours, I walked away thinking that I might have misjudged the genre on some levels.

I wouldn't say I was entirely surprised by Mice Tea - the reviews did it justice in terms of you, as the reader, wanting to root for the main cast to succeed. Most of the conflict didn't necessarily arise from an outside force, but rather internalized conflicts and the struggle to essentially be honest with yourself and those around you, risking vulnerability, essentially. At its core, I still felt like it was wish fulfillment to a significant degree, but the implausibilities were generally smoothed over enough to allow for suspension of disbelief to ride along with the story. And yeah, there... was a fair amount of catering to various fetishes and such worked in, but all in a fairly world-consistent sort-of perspective? At its core, the story was light, cheerful with moments of self-reflection and introspection, and wrapped up in a generally nice bow all in the end.

But what Mice Tea ended up doing for me, personally, was allowing me to lower my defenses during a particularly stressful point in my life, staying present in my mind when I then read over the reviews and such for Changeling Tale. I brushed off the emotion reviews, thinking that they were likely being dramatic.

I could not have been more wrong.

While set in a backdrop of old Scottish fantasy, I continually found myself impressed at how grounded Changeling Tale managed to make itself felt. I believe this is because the main character / player character of Changeling Tale (hereafter referred to as "Malcolm") is primarily reacting to the supernatural events occurring around him, rather than necessarily driving them by his own volition. Malcolm is thrust into a world that he already feels disconnected from due to his service in the military, and it cracks further open as fae magic begins seeping into the world around him.

That said, no one in the backwater town in which Malcolm has returned to handles the public appearance of fae magic particularly well, much less the three parallel storylines available to the reader between Jessie, Marion, and Grace. If anything, the most unreasonable reactions come from the player themselves, in how flippant or otherwise easygoing they handle changes happening to the people around them. That said, many decisions have a snowballing / weighted effect that can change plot directions far later on than one might expect, leading to fallings-out with friends and family, or worse.

But then something strange happened to me, as a reader, while working my way through these split storylines. Core messages seemed to stick out to me, interwoven among the stories. But they cut me straight to the core as a person; after finishing all 3 major storylines I was left shaking and bleary-eyed, wishing events could have turned out differently, desperately trying to reject the messages that had been suggested despite knowing deep-down that they were right.

"Be the best you that you can be."

"Encourage people to chase their dreams, but make sure you're pursuing your dream too."

"Sometimes peoples' dreams are irreconcilable with one another. That doesn't mean the love is gone, it just means that it isn't fair to either person."

"The size of the dream does not diminish its value; the holder of the dream determines its value."

(I intentionally omitted the storyline associations I would make)

When I held all of these thoughts together, an emotional dam burst in my heart. For years I never considered myself as having dreams or goals. For years I felt kind of confused and wondering if what I was doing mattered, or had worth. But somehow, a visual novel about fae shenanigans that dances alongside a transformation kink broadsides me with the realization that I AM where I want to be, doing what I am doing. I have a family who l love and loves me back. I am not pursuing a dream; rather, I am cultivating and maintaining a dream I have already attained. I am doing what is important to me and my family, and even if I'm not changing the world around me and leaving a name in the history books, I know that I am here and directly affecting the lives of those around me, and I'm not sure what more I could want for at this very moment.

And for the first time in quite a while, I feel content and satisfied.

[centrally-unplanned]

To share another thought on the Folding Ideas video I Don't Know James Rolfe from my last post, while I enjoyed it a ton I do think its core "meta" element fails to reach the heights it could. It is never made that explicit so I am making a subjective read here, but essentially while most of the content of the video is textually about James Rolfe, there are dozens of moments where Dan performs actions that mimic or parallel James, culminating in his own parodic angry video game review as the finale. The idea is something of a "there but for the grace of god I go" point, that perhaps all youtubers, and Dan specifically, are too close for comfort to Rolfe's reality of limited creative options and a hostile fanbase clinging to the past .

But I can't really say for sure! Because he is very adverse to making this concrete enough for the audience.

At times the visual parallels are incredibly direct. There is one moment, where Dan is explaining the real skill and craft of being an internet clown on demand, where he mimics Rolfe's style of rant to explain it while projected AVGN videos that were looping in the background flash over his own body:

And it really works, the meaning shines through; it is a moment you can see back through time where the idea for this shot was, spiritually, the impetus for the film, that this idea must have come to him and he built the essay around making it happen.

Other visual parallels are less explicit; when the parody sequence starts, Dan - who has built a 1/12th scale recreation of the Rolfe's "video game basement" aka studio set in order to "understand" him like normal people do - represents himself in that room via a tiny hand puppet

Which is cute if, like probably most people, know him as the guy who makes videos about NFTs or Qanon. But close to a decade ago, when he was first making ~20 minute media analysis takes, he represented himself on screen with a wooden puppet like this:

It is even like the same color, I am confident this is intentional, it is saying "yeah this could have been an alt version of me; I was not so far from this".

All these symbols function to make the emotional impact; but an emotional impact in service of...what? So in the essay he discusses the film Wavelength, a 1967 avant garde film that is almost entirely composed of filming the side of a room with minimal camera movement while actions occur around it. It is a movie that never gives you a meaning, and therefore you must project meaning into it, bring yourself to the table. That makes sense for Wavelength, and the aggressive cinematography of I Don't Know James Rolfe - which is stellar to be clear - is making the film out to be sort of its own personal Wavelength for YouTube.

But then we go back to that text, which is over an hour of Dan directly talking to the camera about a real person. It is incredibly concrete and detailed, with explicit points being made over and over. And through what those explicit points reveal... I don't think Dan Olsen is like James Rolfe! Does he have an hostile fanbase trapped in nostalgia? Do people acuse him of being cucked by his bitch wife? He has evolved as a filmmaker, intensely so, he does things completely differently than Rolfe does and completely differently from how he himself used to. He doesn't have a shitty biography that self-outs his own creative narcissism, he isn't obsessed with remaking his own childhood films - I am pretty sure as a kid he had never heard of NFTs, they didn't really exist! The final line of the film is "maybe you aren't a filmmaker either" - but idk, Dan, I kinda think you are! If documentarians can be filmmakers you have to qualify.

Now I'm not a fool, I understand that the film could be suggesting these are differences of degrees and not kind; that Dan is equally "trapped in the room" making vlogs for the net, just with more outward trappings of success. But, in the ruthless specificity and detail of his treatment of Rolfe...this film cannot be Wavelength. I am not capable of forging my own meaning from the pieces, he connected way too many of them. This is the trap of avant-garde; you are tempted to help the audience, but once you try to answer some of the questions, it forces the hand of the rest, they all have to fit into that schema. And the film is just too coy with Dan's own parallel life for me to figure the schema out. I make my guesses and I lack confidence in them, they feel "contradicted" by the text.

More detail would have been the easier path; less detail and more symbolic expression would have been the harder path. But right now the balance is just a bit too out of whack for it to come fully together.

[dollgutssss]

hypnotic film opus

୨ৎ Choso is a hypnotic experience that stimulates all the vital organs. 𝄢۫.ࣨ. ݁

gummo apnea series. + rockstar! au choso (actually, he and his trashy band)

warnings — mentions of cinematographic violence, somewhat violent thoughts, religion (just a bit), first-person narration, honestly, this sucks, implied/referenced drug use. are more ramblings than anything else anddd fem OC

HAD SEEN "CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST" for the first time after seeing the T-shirt of a character from the Spanish movie "Tesis" and my stomach was not in the best state. The feeling was familiar to me: the typical anxious nausea when waking up in the morning or the taste after some unpleasant event that makes me aware of my internal organism. The important thing is that it was late spring, the power had gone out in the Audiovisual Faculty and the generator was not working due to overheating. Walking to the main auditorium was a torture because, every time I saw a person, I imagined them impaled like on the cover of that disgusting movie. So, everything around had a strange vibe like when one wakes up at six o'clock on Sundays after a supposed half-hour nap that stretched to seven. My stomach moved, one of its walls did and I thought about going back home, but I could not miss the presentation of the photozine or video art in which I signed as a collaborator in art direction and costume, and also, where I posed in some shots.

Many times, as I walked along, I wondered what the point was —specifically, the second film I saw—. What was the need? Why was it so disgusting? What was the point of making such a film? It occurred to me in between musings, at the entrance to the auditorium, that it was supposed to feel disgusting. It was meant to be something difficult to watch as if you got a merit out of it. I was meant to end the film feeling dizzy and nauseated. As dazed as if someone had shaken me hard by the shoulders and yelled as loud as they could directly into my ear as if in a fever dream. That kind of footage had no comfort, no soothing or melancholy effect even in misery. It just drained me by making big gashes.

In the main auditorium of the faculty there was electric light and everything worked well, since it had a system detached from that of the building. The place had been rented for a few hours to a group of students for the presentation. Inside, everything is dark except for the abstract play of cold lights and the big screen with the cover of the photozine. Behind me, there were still people entering or leaving. I took off my headphones as I walked a little further in because I wasn't even paying attention to The Police song that had been playing for about 4 minutes anyway. When I took my cell phone out of my pocket, its light was annoying to my eyes. Also annoying was the low battery I had left in the device and my poor ability to recognize people was still bothering my bones —I was waiting to greet the team I collaborated with and go sit down—.

"Bekka, I thought you wouldn't make it. Here, these three are from the first batch of photozines."

"Woah, thanks" I say as I flip through the first few pages without stopping to look at each photograph. Not because I had no interest, but because the colored light wouldn't let me visualize, so, long story short, I stuffed the three photozines into the cloth bag. Maki looked busy leading the others, her hair looks straighter than usual and it looks like she painted her hair roots again. "I'll go sit over there. Good luck."

The hours were not good. It wasn't crowded like a local fair, but even that was pretty good for a small college project. Maki glances at me a couple of times before I leave to find a seat. I should be next to her during the presentation on the screen. But I had asked that they not put my name in the credits. Not even a pseudonym.

Is it some form of self-sabotage?

I didn't know.

I've been living like this my whole life. I remembered the movie again. I climbed the steps, to go to the upper seats, my foot feeling my way up, afraid to jump a step because of the darkness. It's in no one's best interest to sit upstairs if I wanted to pay close attention to the video art, but I remembered there was an electrical outlet on the seat to the left and I needed to charge my cell phone battery.

Someone was sitting there. I sat down next to him, without any embarrassment. The truth is that I hadn't seen him until I was already very close, so I had no choice. I turned to see him, unable to stand the slightest curiosity to know the identity of the person and then I realized that I actually already knew him: Choso Kamo, bassist of an underground rock band of which I momentarily forgot the name. Well, at that moment I didn't know him. Know is a deep word and, actually, I hadn't exchanged a single word with him before. I had gone to some of his band's shows, when they played in open garages, basements —my most beloved basement parties, where everything looked like it was going to fall apart if we jumped around too much and where I dreamed of finding a catacomb when I opened the washing machine, but in reality I was just really drunk— and those kinds of places. They were various college bands, quite a few and of all kinds. Choso's was one of many, though a bit more «popular» - in the most underground sense possible, if that's possible - because of their vocalist: a rich kid, like so many around here, but surprisingly good-looking. Good-looking like a husky. Choso, on the other hand, was pretty as an owl that looks sideways at three in the morning or as a puppy you kick by chance and with whom you have to apologize every time you remember that event because you think he doesn't understand you.

The latter were assumptions I had. I was surprised to see him at the photozine presentation.

"Can you charge my cell phone in the outlet next to me," I asked him. He was charging his cell phone too, it was obvious from the seat he had chosen. Choso looks at me out of the corner of his eye, or so I thought, the darkness and the purple and blue tones didn't allow me to notice it for so long.

He doesn't say anything, he just sees my hand outstretched slightly at his side, which holds the cell phone and my charger. His pale fingers take my things and then his dark eyes analyze me, he is vague, tired. Two eyes like little black olives or the eight ball in pool. I never played pool. I don't eat olives often either, only green ones.

"I think your hand is stained." Choso points from his seat to the back of my hand. I was a little surprised that he noticed it. He didn't say a word before and then seemed to analyze something about me.

"It's a scorch mark. It's in the shape of Czechoslovakia."

"Czechoslo... What?"

His confused face coincides with the start of the music and the microphone test.

"Czechoslovakia."

It was a little weird. I didn't imagine him impaled in the middle of a jungle, but my stomach was still churning and I felt a need to sink four fingers under my ribs to move the order of my organs a bit. Kind of a silly feeling. It reminded me of all the times I felt a lack of wisdom, as if I had been born with nothing special. I turned to look at him again because I sensed he was sending me neurological signals and only the hairs on my left arm —the side where he was— twitched.

The projector turned on to play the video art and slides. Our faces changed color in the light.

"I've seen you before," he commented, nonchalant. His tied-back hair gave a coolness.

"I haven't."

"But I've seen you seeing me."

"Do you remember all the people you see when you walk down the street?"

"But it was in Fushiguro's basement."

"I was just teasing you. I'm Bekka."

"I know. I'm Choso."

"I know your name."

"It seemed appropriate to say it."

He had a je ne sais quoi. Or I did. He pursed his lips softly, as if he was holding back from saying something half-heartedly because he didn't want to smile anyway. His nose and lips reminded me of Japanese shoegaze and his eyes of protopunk fibers: though they seemed affable and bored, there was a hint of hostility, as if he wasn't used to talking to people he didn't know. Unclassifiable. A bit confrontational. In everything there is movement. It disturbs me, I can suddenly feel every last nerve and it's kind of annoying in a bad and good way.

"Oh... You appear there," he points. His shirt was light and suddenly I was more aware of myself and my bony wrists.

The big screen photograph was not a perfectly staged scene. Maki's tastes and mine were beautiful messes, so the goal was that; decadence and anonymity, ignorance as the seed of happiness, patience as an anti-value. Seeing myself, in a photograph projected to scale, is like trying to learn to live again and I didn't like that. But the elements were carefully placed: my figure in the corner of the room, unbathed, short tank top that showed my nipples, white underwear that looked dirty and half yellowed. Actually, I was sitting in a lot of dirty clothes. I had the chubby bulldog of one of my classmates next to me, my hair was dirty and in my lap was a wilted aster flower with missing petals.

The title of the photograph: «Philocalia»

Choso looked. I know he looked for quite a while as there was more silence than usual.

"Geto's neighbor also has a bulldog" Choso spoke suddenly, but his eyes were still fixed on the screen.

"Does he really?"

"Yes. It's called Cannibal Holocaust."

"You're kidding me."

"I don't know how to joke," he replied with some embarrassment, shrugging his shoulders. "I'm serious."

"I saw the movie before I came to college today and it was the worst mistake of my life."

"Cannibal Holocaust is a movie?"

"Ah, you weren't kidding."

I laughed.

Her ears turned red almost instantly. Conversations felt fast every time they started as if, milliseconds after he closed his mouth, I already had an answer on the tip of my tongue and vice versa. I looked at him for a few seconds, long enough for him to have seen me blink uncomfortably about three times and still not feel strange, quite apart from the fact that his body automatically stopped breathing. So, he had to think about it five more times.

Even everything about the video art felt like a cheap excuse of time, a divine being or invisible threads for him to finally talk to me. Or for me to talk to him. I spoke to him first. So it was Choso's wish, time's favorite, Buddha, God, invisible threads, red ribbons, destiny.

Our encounters escalated from that day, I'm afraid to say. I don't know to what extent or how intimate we became. It felt like Motion Picture Soundtrack, maybe from minute 2:15, in the solitude of the room. Or maybe something from the beginning, when he sang the cheap sex and sad films part, because it summed up my daily life when I used to rot in the guest room and never in my own. I went to a few shows of his band, invited by him and maybe we talked more about Riot grrrl, and he looked more punk rock and I looked more Bikini Kill style, or a Bikini Kill cover that sounded much worse with narcotics on top while I pissed with the cubicle door open, sleepy eyes and his figure on his back, pouring the last of them into the urinal. Every time he opens his mouth I am reminded of something —the least bit violent— in constant rupture, like tearing his dress to cover the bleeding, slowly ripping out the page of an adult magazine - and we are both adult enough now to keep referring to that magazine in a "formal" childlike manner— to make notes and counts of money earned and spent over the legs of a girl who resembled Belle de Jour.

Somehow or other, people change. Choso was no exception. But, I was already used to his screeching guitar and the bad trip feeling I got from his shaky voice over video call. I had already learned and gotten used to being a poor college student, living the dog years: going from a domestic one raised with sticks and strings around my neck to a street one scavenging and kicked out of every place, where every day is an unfruitful jam.

"My mother once told me something stupid, like I shouldn't hang out with people who didn't have parents or didn't know them. Because they would wilt me," I once remarked, lying on my stomach on his bed, dissecting flowers and crushing them in old books. He was sitting on the floor, next to the freshly laundered carpet, his chin on the edge of the bed, watching. Watching. "I don't even know my dad, so I think she was just trying to curse me out."

His eyes were lighter because the sun was shining full in his face.

"That's kind of a weird way of putting it. Her mouth dropped open, wanting to say something else. He hadn't slept that day so he teared up because of that, or maybe something else. I close the book and place a heavier one on top. I settled a little to reach for it. "You shouldn't remember stuff like that." he says.

"Hmm, well, who knows."

Children of the same inflorescence. The first four-legged, four-armed human in the month-long introductory philosophy class. The anatomy of the hug, interrupted mitosis, Siamese twins, two mirrors, the two for one deals on cans of booze at 7-Eleven. I liked watching him. It's different. My skin gets like a chicken's. Phobic. Tense. He formed the basis of my love, but I wasn't willing to accept it.

Sometimes I felt that he looked at me and touched me in a way that I knew he wasn't meant for me. That I didn't deserve him. Something stored in my blood, flesh and bones - and maybe even in my adrenal gland - wasn't rejecting him, but my brain was. A personality and low self-esteem where I constantly felt undeserving of good things and at the same time, I hated waiting for good things. I hated the glazed path to happiness. I felt I was doing the good thing, the right thing. It grows like mold. Inside me. There is no calm, because I feel all the movement of life. My organs, my feelings, the words in my mind. The wind in the dusty curtains, the dead insects on the pooled water, the dirty water flowing from the sink. And, as I was saying, sometimes he looked at me and didn't touch. Sometimes he touched me and didn't look. He probes the skin like a mole in the dirt.

When I looked at him, he almost never looked away. People walked, stumbled, laughed. Everyone moved. I move, my strands, my glands. He oxygen did, does and will cycle. I never knew how to write. I never knew how to pick movies well either. But, even when he had a bored expression, I could guess the feeling of longing creeping into his mind. The vision of him cemented itself in me. "Seeing him" suddenly became "The seeing of him," solid, so it entered hard through my eye, like a pebble in the first breeze off the street after the hangover and that one, the pebble, broke through some ocular membranes to settle inside me: to make it almost as basic a need.

We didn't usually talk about it. But one occasion, when he stayed at my house after a party, he cornered me.

"What exactly are we?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because you kiss me for free." His voice was soft, calm. I could only see his head, because he was still hiding his body behind the bathroom door. Maybe he was still a little drunk, but his voice has always been sleepy by nature, a tired inheritance. I laugh at the expression used. He frowns and presses his forehead to the cold slab. "And I know some things about you that I don't think your friends know."

"Like what?" I asked as I sorted through some of the music albums he had given me the previous weeks. I didn't look at him. He tended to hide more behind the bathroom door the more I scanned with my eyes.

"You like to sleep with your face pressed against the wall."

"I just want to suffocate at night."

"You don't like to go to the bathrooms alone, you prefer the cubicle door to be open and see someone nearby."

"I thought you were high enough to remember that."

"You cried, Bekka."

His eyes were like puddles into which someone or something had to jump for the tears to fall. He has always been someone quite sensitive, though he didn't seem so at first glance; but I had said it before: he's like a puppy kicked by accident. My heart dropped. I'd only ever seen him that way with his younger siblings. So I was rethinking what I was meaning to him so far.

"It's not a big deal, I just panic in small, enclosed places, kind of like claustrophobia, but it only happens to me with cubicles."

I closed the windows and pulled down the blinds. He pretended he had washed his face to dry the tears that no longer came out for that moment. His bass case rested on the door of the small closet. The light bulb was yellow from moth dust. The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer logo flashed on the screen as he stood next to me, the lion's roar reminding me of my childhood making me tear up a little. Why was I sensitive?

"Why were you interested in me?" I asked as I took off my stockings. It's been a while since I took off my slippers. His mouth half-opens and buries his nose in my shoulder. I could feel him wet my T-shirt with his body, as he had bathed in the rusty Spanish shower in the room.

His eyes look at my mouth.

"You were the one who kissed me first."

"I kiss with my friends at parties."

"But..."

"It's a lie." I didn't used to be a fan of showering kisses all over my face. I didn't have the patience for it much before. He frowned upward, an expression of complaint and I had no choice but to quickly kiss his cheek and then down near his chin and finally his lips. "It's a lie."

I was never used to love tokens. I've meditated on it many times. I pondered it more when I began to have whatever it was between Choso and me during that time. His anxious face, his wet mouth and chapped lips... He was quick to lose his head when it came to physical affection. He had been hostile and difficult to deal with beyond simple, quick conversations at first, but he always had a full, fleshy heart, like a fleshy fruit of premature birth. I marveled at him, in constancy. Although, when I first noticed it, I had been mean —quite a bit— thinking of turning him into a lust puppet. But it remained only a thought, something intrusive like an injection. The way his fingers used to curl around my shirt, blouse or jacket, every time I kissed him in the privacy of his room or mine, the way he asked permission for everything when it came to me and underwear of questionable taste. I learned many things from him, feeding myself, sipping any small trace of purple stillness: caressing his face with my fingertips, slowly, patiently; taking things slow was not in my inventory if my body was a sack and his hand was the one that opened me up and saw my bloody interior, used to the quick, anonymous, short life. Too short.

"That time, when I saw you, your hair was matted," he said, hugging me, the movie in the background and my fingers buried in his loose, black hair. "And a bruised knee from a blow."

"Yes, I fell coming to the party because Megumi didn't warn me about the extra step at the entrance."

Choso smiled shyly over my shoulder, though his eyes were still the same, but more affable and three months older. He's done that before, or never did. It provoked me to watch all the naughty movies to leave only the good stuff for him, like a meticulous and destructive selection for the formation of a solid and impenetrable bubble. The same thing he does for his siblings that no one ever did for him before. When I turned to kiss his cheek, he spoke at the same time the movie dialogues started.

"Sometimes I don't know if you like to play with me or just enjoy living carefree, no strings attached."

I ran my thumb gently over his dark circles under the eyes, or the increase in them because there was a small dark smudge of makeup that didn't come out in his quick shower. I only managed to expand the smudge a little more anyway and laughed. His skin felt fresh. I hadn't even wanted to take a bath, I was getting bad after the drink.

"Do you want us to be something more? Is that why you say that?" I wouldn't have minded giving it to him. The vision of his hair wetting the bed in drips and me rubbing the towel through his strands was starting to become a reality as I waited for his answer.

"You're just so strange."

"Me?"

"Not in a bad way, but in the sense that I'm attracted to you even though nothing you say is certain or solid. But you're genuine and you don't seem to be hiding anything on purpose, so you just confuse me."

"I could tell you a thing or two, when you ask me." No answer, just a quick kiss.

When I run my fingers around his shoulders, he has the same look from that time he helped me clean my room —this room— and I ended up with my hands under his Acid Black Cherry t-shirt, caressing his abdomen as he talked to me about the dirt and how messy I was for not cleaning my room in weeks. On the down low, he meant "in months," but the truth was that I hadn't cleaned it thoroughly since last year, and for that, Maki loved me. Because I was the perfect example for the theme of that photozine.

I took off the jeans I had worn to the party, leaving me in my underwear.

"Phyllocalia"

"Mmh? You remembered all of a sudden."

"I bought a photozine that day."

"You could have asked me and I'd give you one of my free samples."

He settled into the sheets, covered my bare legs and glanced at the dirty film left on the side.

"Why? Filocalia, I mean."

"Ask the Greeks," I joked. "Although you won't see them if you snort any shit or inject yourself in the arm."

"I looked it up on the internet after talking to you. I idealized you."

"Everyone does it, what did it mean?"

"«Love of beauty», but you were wearing dirty clothes, in a pile of dirty clothes. Then the meaning stretched to «Love of beauty, and the source of all beauty is God,» but I don't believe in God."

"I don't either."

"But someone saw Him in you. Even when everything had withered around you. It's one of the best pictures in the zine, even when there's an "anonymous" next to the model's name, that's you. It's as if you wanted to erase every map of your human existence."

His fingers traced imaginary lines - the parallels and meridians I struggled to learn in middle school - on my collarbone. I wanted to learn more from him. Much more. He made me understand my intellectual laziness and my search for visual and carnal stimulation as an attempt to satiate myself, to satiate ourselves. He enlightened me to the idea; that unnoticed aster flower, wilted and with missing petals, could be more than an exhibit on poverty and misery, more than a stuffed decoration in the Russian book. Most things happened too fast, ominous, and the movement made me dizzy, the fast days, the fleeting affairs as if I was running away from something... All of it too, he could explain to me, letter by letter, the slowness of things, of love, like a slow burn but in good hands and covers of Radiohead's OK Computer as a warm-up.

We both knew nothing essential.

We weren't part of the top fifth in college.

Nor did we stand out much.

Movies, music, and higher education didn't understand the small things, the costliness of crawling along when everyone was running and the ease of lying down for a while, bleeding out, talking and kissing each other in the stillness, when the lamp goes out and the movie is half over. Luckily, even though it was February and the pollen caused me to sneeze, there was a breeze after sex.

english is not my first language, so, SORRY IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS LITTLE STUFF. more than that, this is a small exploration, and I will probably make a longer fic taking this idea. (update, actually, I have a fic, but it's in Spanish)

୨ৎ ⊰gummo apnea⊱ is the set of three one-shots of this style, the other two are about suguru geto and toji fushiguro, soon to be over here too <3 !!!!

[happytaffeta]

I'm tired and angry and scared don't mind me. Feeling some kinda way about a lot of things tonight.

TW self-harm ideation mention near the end, familial difficulty adapting that may read as transphobia out of context and I provide not much context in the first few bits.

Like how long it took to even begin to find the words for what it is to be me. And it's not like my parents didn't try to be supportive, we just had no clear direction. My mom, whom I know is trying, and has been trying literally since before I was conceived, and that time she said that she looked up pictures of people who'd had mastectomies and they looked mutilated to her, and how could anyone want that? Then a few months later I showed her a photo of a nice fella here on tumblr because I wanted to show her his shirt, cause I'm making a similar one, and it came up that he's trans, and has had top surgery, and she said he just looks like a guy, and she reiterated that the pictures she had seen before were upsetting but this guy's pictures were not. And me, sitting there, like, 'Yeah because he had time to heal and is wearing a shirt he made specifically to fit him the way he likes and feels good in his skin, he is indeed just a guy.' My dad who is also trying, who sometimes slips and calls me my childhood nickname or 'daughter' instead of 'kid' and then gets flustered and apologetic. It's sort of endearing, but it still feels weird. My maternal grandmother, who passed away before I ever found the words, let alone the courage, who was the most likely to have been the one among my grandparents to be chill with it all, who loved hummingbirds and manatees and bluebirds and yellow roses. My childhood, years and years spent insisting that I was not a lady, playing the role of dad in games of house with other kids, taken immediately with visually androgynous cartoon characters of all sorts as well as identifying with blatantly masculine and blatantly feminine male characters, but rarely identifying with female characters of any kind unless they were specifically about my age and androgynous or masculine presenting. Wearing dresses and feeling pretty but rarely, if ever, in a girl way. The fact that even now I still guess people's genders based on context clues and I get it wrong, and I still can't break the habit even though I've been through that myself all my life.

The fact that I have had to put up with breasts and bras and all the nonsense that comes with them since I was ten or eleven and the first training bra made its way into my life, and even now that I have words for why I hate them, no one will help me get the damn things removed.

The recurring, entirely non-actionable, thoughts about just taking matters into my own hands(I am not in danger of hurting me, don't worry. I can tell the difference between a passing thought that is casually occurring in a moment of frustration and an urge I need active help dealing with, I have decades of practice, I will be okay).

[simplyalexeiofficial]

I've been seeing a fair number of posts and/or questions regarding the mosaic timeline and whether or not it actually happened, and I dare say that my time has come. I've put what is probably an unhealthy amount of time trying to figure out the in-universe mechanics of time travel because I'm doing an elaborate and self indulgent rewrite and I needed to know what rules I was working with. So, I present to you, my mosaic theory.

To start, we have to visualize Jane Chatwin's time loops kind of like a tree. The trunk is the single timeline from before Jane starts the time loop, the branches are the different loops. While the branches (events) of each loop go off into different directs, they all stem from one trunk, ie. We can reasonably assume that before Jane started the time loops where there was only "one" timeline, and every event that occurred in that one timeline happened in every loop because it was before the paths split.

I can already hear some of you getting ready to argue, but just hear me out.

Quentin and Eliot both did and didn't go back in time because whether they realized it or not, they accidentally created another set of time loops. How is this possible? Well, I mean, we're dealing with the time key itself, the tool that Jane used to create the original loops to begin with. The same time key that, presumably, was the catalyst that sent them back in time to begin with, even without the watch to act as a conduit. Timeline 40 is a branch, but branches can split into more branches. So, what happened wasn't that stopping Quentin and Eliot from stepping into the clock erased the mosaic timeline from existence, it was that timeline 40 had split into timeline 40A and 40B. In timeline 40A, Margo gets to them in time to stop them from going to the Mosaic, this is the timeline that we follow through the rest of season 3 all the way to the series finale. In timeline 40B, Margo doesn't make it in time to stop them (there's no evidence to say that Margo never received Q's letter at her wedding, just that she wasn't there to stop them from going, it's entirely possible that she got held up on the way, or couldn't find them in time).

Now, timeline 40B continues on after Q & E depart. Just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist because it's like timeline 31 or timeline 15, they're not important to the story that we're following but we know they still happened. My assumption for Timeline 40B is that the questers continue to gather the keys even though Quentin and Eliot never return. (remember, just because Margo wasn't there to stop them, doesn't mean she never got Quentin's letter or found the Key with Jane). Whether they finish the quest or disperse to mourn their lost friends is irrelevant, because we're still following 40B Quentin and 40B Eliot. For them, the branch of 40B is kind of like an ingrown hair (that's the best example I could come up with, sorry). It's split from the branch and curled down, growing back into the trunk because the Mosaic happens before Jane starts her original time loops, ie. when it was all a singular timeline. We know that Jane has the key that she got from Quentin in every time loop and this is why. IN CONCLUSION, Not only did the Mosaic happen. It happened so hard that it happened in EVERY time loop, because it occurred before the timelines split into more than one branch.

This also explains why Quentin and Eliot remember the Mosaic. Jane remembers the other time loops because she made them. Quentin and Eliot remember the Mosaic loop, because they made it (albeit, unknowingly)

Now, I know there are people who are gearing up to say "but what about when Julia and Quentin go back in time in season 1?" Well, same principle. Quentin and Julia went back to before the start of Jane's time loops, when it was all a single timeline. The Witch and the Fool mentioned in the books that Quentin15, Quentin27, Quentin38, etc. read are all Quentin40 and Julia40. wHiCh BriNgS uS tO tHe MoSt DeLiCiOuS ReVeLaTiOn. That Jane's time loops are the reason the Beast exists in the first place. If Jane hadn't created the time loops, Q40 and J40 wouldn't have gone back in time and given Martin the idea/information that he used to become the beast (because, remember, Martin just wanted to stay in Fillory, Q+J were the ones who told him how did it, even if they thought they were talking about Plover because they didn’t realize Martin would be the eventual beast), which in turn wouldn't have led to Jane creating the time loops to stop her brother. It's a giant time travelling cluster fuck and I love it so much.

Anyway, I also have an entirely self indulgent theory that Todd is actually a descended of Quentin's because Todd kind of sounds like Ted, as is Teddy, as in Theodore, and one could not-unreasonably assume that Theodore and Eliot (which, even if it has two T's is still Todd's first name) could be passed down as family names. It would also act as a not-unreasonable explanation of why Todd is so enthralled by Eliot, because damn that's his actual ancestor (even if not by blood).

I spend an obnoxious amount of time thinking about this.

[watching-pictures-move]

Put On Your Raincoats #28 | American Babylon (Watkins, 1985)

Roger Watkins spent most of his career making pornos, something which he apparently hated, and in American Babylon he turns that hatred directly at the audience. The movie is about two bozos. Losers. Schlubs. One of them, played by Bobby Astyr, spends his days doing little but watching pornography, oblivious to his surroundings and annoyed by interruptions. When his wife steps in front of the projector, he grouses at her to get out of the way. "Evaporate, Joan!" The other, played by Michael Gaunt, is weak-willed, easily goaded into doing or saying anything, whatever is the path of least resistance. Neither Astyr nor Gaunt are what you'd call conventionally attractive, and combined, they are some of the least flattering portraits of masculinity to grace the screen. I read somewhere that the popularity of unattractive men in straight porn is to help the target audience relate more easily to the proceedings. Watkins brings into focus the implied contempt in that trope.

As someone who spent a non-zero amount of time over the last year delving into vintage pornography, this movie hit a little close to home. When Astyr starts critiquing the camera angles in the movie he's watching, I felt personally attacked. Astyr's choice of entertainment here is in the form of plotless reels with titles like Teenage Pigmeat in Heat, a film by Bernard America, and Butt Girls in Bondage, directed by Hank Packard (which sounds like a dig at Henri Pachard's pretentious porn name), and starring Lonnie Lee as the Butt Girl. Astyr appears to be getting off on their dehumanizing quality ("Hey Robert, I just realized something. They don't show anybody's faces in this movie." "Of course not, it's so much better that way, it could be anybody.") The reels are shot in cold, sterile black-and-white, their mise-en-scene (power tools, gym equipment) suggesting a parody of masculinity. (I admit I was a little concerned when the male performer was firing a blowtorch in the direction of the female performer while they engaged in sexual congress.) Watkins had been steadily removing any sense of warmth or eroticism from his sex scenes, but also seems aware of the limitations of this approach (especially when you cast a performer like Taija Rae, sporting a lady mullet, hubba hubba). His critique seems targeted at the genre as a whole, which despite the level of artistry it can contain (and I'm very much on the side of pornographic films being artistically worthwhile), is ultimately in the service of prurient interests, but in retrospect, feels prescient of the kind of gonzo pornography that would become the norm in the decades that followed. There's no need for plot, character, warmth, humanity, just body parts mashing against each other. That Astyr is seen usually in a raincoat and motorcycle helmet drives the point home.

Gaunt's character is depicted just as brutally but with a bit more humour. This is a guy whose most strenuous decision in his marriage (and source of tension with his wife) is whether or not he'll drink his milk. (His wife, seen topless and in panties and heels, in a skewering of genre demands, leaves him an angry note: "P.S. Drink your milk".) Astyr's wife, played by Tish Ambrose, in need of the kind of intimacy she doesn't get from her husband, sees Gaunt as an easy mark and sets up a rendezvous at a country western bar. Their exchange and her attempt at seduction are telling.

"You strike me as the kind of guy who's good at taking orders."

"Yeah, I guess so, my wife thinks so anyway."

"You want something to drink?"

"Yeah, I guess so, my wife thinks so anyway."

"I'm not wearing any underwear."

"I beg your pardon."

"The only thing separating skirt and my quivering pussy is a layer of air. What do you think of that?"

"Me? I don't know what to think."

Gaunt reveals a talent for physical comedy with his gawking, indecisive face during their tryst, his slapstick-like scramble out of his clothes, his dash with an empty cup as part of his excuse sneak out for another tryst ("I told my wife I was coming over to borrow a cup of sugar"), and his nervous patting of strap-on before he excuses himself out of a threesome. One encounter occurs when watching a porno with Astyr, who seems entirely oblivious to what's going on right beside him but also happy to have them around. ("My best friend and my best wife, finally taking an interest in my one true passion.") Their attempts at bonding seem self-defeating from both directions, as when Astyr tries to initiate a heart-to-heart, it's not clear how truthful Astyr's tale of young love or his recollection of a threesome that sounds suspiciously like one of his movies and the one Gaunt partook in. ("They were sisters, Thomas, sisters! That's what they told me afterwards. They might have been lying of course, It's human nature to lie.") When the visual style switches over to those of his movies, the indictment is complete, but in the final ten minutes, the movie finds something of an emotional core with a montage (Menopausal Males in Bondage) that recontextualizes the proceedings from Ambrose's perspective, while dissolving the boundaries between Astyr, Gaunt, and their porno movies. A beret and checked coat, first sported by Taija Rae, helps provide a visual throughline.

While I won't deny that the kind of masculinity exemplified by the protagonists, while flawed, feels a lot more benign than the kind of toxic masculinity that's been the focus of modern discourse, the laser focus of Watkins' indictment makes the movie work. Where the movie is less cogent but admirably bold is in situating its protagonists and their pathetic suburban existence as some kind of endpoint for American civilization. The opening credits have illustrations of historical images, evangelical radio is heard on and off throughout the movie, and after the aforementioned montage, the film closes with "American the Beautiful". In a brief but forceful sequence, we hear news of Lee Harvey Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby, Walter Mondale's acceptance speech at the 1984 DNC ("Mr. Reagan calls it "tokenism". We call it America.") and the bombing of North Vietnam, while Gaunt's wife (seen again in the nude, to sate the horndogs) fires a shotgun and the screen cuts to black. Watkins produces a passage from "The Harlot's House" by Oscar Wilde to drive home the sense of finality. ("The dead are dancing with the dead, the dust is whirling with the dust.") The protagonists' suburban homes are presented effectively as purgatorial spaces, captured in cold, isolating cinematography by Larry Revene, who had collaborated previously with Watkins on Corruption and Midnight Heat. Like the latter, I watched this in a not very nice video-sourced transfer, although it didn't seem quite as detrimental here (aside from the terrible audio quality, which made Gaunt's whistling sound like nails on a chalkboard). The look of the movie is effectively sterile, with a heavy reliance of moody bluish lighting that comes through even in a less pristine copy. (I understand that this didn't play theatrically, so I'm willing to limit my complaining.) It's also worth noting that while not detrimentally so to the film's overall argument, I did find Astyr's porno movies stylish in their way, and that I was not immune to the charms of Taija Rae, particularly with the beret and lady mullet I alluded to earlier. Folks, I'm not made of stone.

[ocw-archive]

Stuntmen are Welcomed by Wilson in 'Shanghai' - The Olympian, February 9, 2003

After making two films with Jackie Chan, actor Owen Wilson feels no pressure to keep up with his co-star when it comes to doing stunts on camera.

"So far, I've been able to sit on that urge," says Wilson, 34, who reteams with Chan for "Shanghai Knights," the sequel to 2000's "Shanghai Noon."

He flashes a crooked smile, which seems to be his perpetual expression, and adds, "I kidded Jackie about him being known for doing it all. I'd like to be known as the actor who does none of his own stunts. Even bending down to pick something up -- 'Hey, need a stuntman here.' "

Dressed in dark jeans, Nikes and an Aerosmith T-shirt, the shaggily blond Wilson leans forward from an overstuffed couch in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel. As the windy afternoon darkens, he picks up a round section of a tuna-stuffed spring roll, offers a piece to his guest, then pops one in his mouth.

Wilson says he loved the idea of reprising the character of Roy O'Bannon, the brashly insecure gunfighter in "Shanghai Knights" because, he says, "That character is funny to me." But the Roy O'Bannon he plays is a long way from the one that was on the page in the original "Shanghai Noon" script.

A few changes

"I started to ease into it a little bit more when I started working on the character with the writers," he says. "They were open to changing it and that made the character funnier to me. He was written as ... this cool cowboy who was able to shoot his initials in the door. But the character, as he became, couldn't have been further from that.

"Characters with insecurities, characters who have the seven deadly sins, those are always funnier people. A cool guy or a badass is not a funny character. Even when I was in 'Behind Enemy Lines,' I tried to make him a little funny. He was this tough, 'Top Gun' kind of character and that's fine for Tom Cruise -- I loved him in that movie. But I don't see myself playing a real badass."

Wilson has a note of awe in his voice as he describes watching Jackie Chan choreograph a fight scene from "Shanghai Knights" that incorporated umbrellas, until Chan transformed it into a brief, witty homage to "Singin' in the Rain."

"I remember seeing that movie with my mother," he says of the classic musical. "So to see Jackie show up on the set one day, pick up an umbrella and just do that was amazing. I can improvise dialogue, but Jackie does it with the action stuff."

Yet the two of them didn't instantly hit it off:

"When I first met him, we were supposed to have dinner but he was so shy that we cut it short at drinks. So I didn't know what it would be like to work with him."

In fact, Wilson found himself dazzled by how hard the 48-year-old Chan works.

"There's a quality to him in real life, an innocence that Jackie has," Wilson says. "It's an enthusiasm, as well as a lack of self-awareness, in terms of how something will sound when he says it. You can ask him a question about anything and you'll get a completely unguarded answer. That quality of innocence is fun for me to play off."

Although he professes an urge "to act in a great movie," he somehow can't imagine it for himself.

"I love 'The Insider' and I think it would be great to be in a movie like that, but I don't see myself as an actor who could do something like that," Wilson says. "I like Nicolas Cage, but he did 'Leaving Las Vegas,' and I don't know if I could do something like that. I'd like to try some straight, serious thing, but I'd also be a little nervous. I have a fear because I can't do accents and change my voice. My fear is that that's what a real actor is. He's able to transform himself."

Change of direction

Wilson's transformation already has occurred. As a Texas college student, he could visualize himself on track to follow his father into advertising, perhaps writing a novel on the side. But then he met Wes Anderson, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay for "Bottle Rocket." When they suddenly found it being produced by James L. Brooks, they moved to California with his brothers, Luke (his "Bottle Rocket" co-star) and Andrew, to wait for fame and fortune.

Luke Wilson and Anderson went on to co-write "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," earning an Oscar nomination for the latter. Owen Wilson, meanwhile, began landing parts in films such as "Armageddon," "The Haunting" and "Anaconda," and regularly stealing them with his offbeat timing and slightly spacey, surfer-dude persona. Often he was the best thing about the film.

Changing roles

"There hasn't been a lot of thought or planning about the roles I've taken," he admits. "Usually, something is offered and it sounds like fun or it's somebody interesting to work with. I wanted to work with Gene Hackman; that's why I did 'Behind Enemy Lines.' But in terms of reading a script and saying, 'I love this,' that doesn't happen very often. More often, you take something and say, 'Well, we'll work on the script.'

"Sometimes you do that and you can save the movie and sometimes you can't. In 'Shanghai Noon,' I felt we made it better. In 'I Spy,' we tried to wing it and it didn't work that well."

Meanwhile, Wilson is set to work with "Zoolander" co-star Ben Stiller in a film version of the 1970s' TV cop hit, "Starsky and Hutch." But, as Wilson notes, "We're trying to figure out the tone."

"I Spy," "Starsky and Hutch": Any other old TV shows Wilson wants to resurrect as films?

"Man, I loved 'Miami Vice' because, when I watched it, I was 17 and I thought it was really cool," he says. He pauses, then says, "But I wouldn't want to see myself in that movie. I wouldn't want a spoof. Maybe that's not possible these days. I guess you can't go home again."

[skullamity]

I was going to respond directly, but anything I had to say mostly echoes this so it felt easier to tack on to this response specifically.

1) I married my husband before I ever knew I was trans, and obviously he was attracted to me before but the way he's attracted to me now is both more and also different/better. I don't know how much of that is actually different or better and how much of that is my ability to understand it now that I don't have to disassociate 24/7 to exist in my body rather than in spite of it, or if any awkwardness I used to feel was just my perception being warped by my insecurity.

2) Also seconding the idea that transition should be gradual, especially if the character has only recently become aware that they want to be someone else. Even after I knew I was trans and wanted to pursue HRT, even though I'm a visual artist I could not have told you what I wanted to look like, or even what I thought the natural progression of exposure to more testosterone would change about my appearance because it just seemed really big and unfathomable and being my ability to comprehend it until it was physically happening in a way I could observe. At one year on T it felt like my beard would never fill out and my facial hair would always look just sad enough that I'd probably want to shave daily, and now at 6 years on T, it HAS filled out to the point where I shaved my mustache last month because the constantly flip-flopping weather was drying the skin beneath it out in a way I felt I could only treat properly if I had direct access to it. I immediately knew I had made A Mistake™ because I didn't realize how much a part of my face I would come to think of it as, and for a week my face didn't feel like my face anymore in a way that was extremely jarring. I NEVER thought I'd even want a mustache, and when I tried to picture what my face might look like in the future, imaginary future me never had one.

I think a lot of trans people outright reject the idea of having a clear picture of exactly what they'll look like coming out the other side, specifically as a bit of a shield for any initial disappointment in case the changes that occur end up either being really mild or completely different than that imagined self.

3) I know it wasn't an official question but to tack on to the genitals talk here, there are also a lot of trans people out there who just don't feel dysphoria about everything below their waists at all. It not always a matter of not being able to afford or access surgery, you can just not be interested in, too. The most dysphoria I've ever felt about my junk was when I was actively pregnant or having periods. Because of HRT I no longer have periods, and as long as I remain not-pregnant, below the belt is a no dysphoria zone.

The most important thing to remember about any of this, I think, is that dysphoria has an unlimited number of sources, and that every trans person will check a different number and combinations of boxes on that list. Treatment needs to be very individualized as a result, and the best results generally come from the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought--if one person's dysphoria is treated easily with a name change and new pronouns, then there's no need to foist anything beyond that on them. If a trans person feels dysphoria-free with name and pronouns change, HRT and top surgery, there's no reason for them to seek bottom surgery.

This is all to say that everyone's experiences and the changes they want are going to hinge on the specific things that bother them personally the most, so don't worry about writing in a way that will reflect the majority of trans peoples experiences, because that majority doesn't exist! Everyone's treatment needs to be so damn bespoke that you could feasibly write this any which way and it would be realistic or believable to some flavour of trans person, and totally not reflective of the experiences of several other completely different groups of trans people at the same time. You're golden as long as you keep an open mind about any unexamined biases you might have--these are so hard to spot even if you, yourself, are trans so you'd probably get a lot of mileage out of a sensitivity reader who is the same gender as whatever the character ends up being. I say this specifically because I've seen trans men try to talk about how they assume things are for trans women and be way off base, trans women try to talk about how they assume things are for trans men and be way off base, and both try to talk about how they assume things are for non-binary people and just completely and thoroughly be talking out of their asses, even if it came from a place of good intentions.

Anyhow I am also now super interested in reading. I see you tagged the title of the (series??? I assume???) so imma hunt that down later after I fold my weight in laundry. Cheers!

Trans followers, if you’re up for it, I’d like your input (you can message me privately or even anonymously if you wish).

So obviously I’m very cool and sexy and big brained and that’s why I write werewolf erotica, anyway I realised this morning that I haven’t tried writing a trans werewolf character. Or, more accurately and importantly: each book contains one new romance (plus an ongoing established one in the background that began in the first book). The new one each time is designed to explore a different dynamic - sometimes to challenge the existing relationship standards in this fucking genre (because my god these people think really-quite-horrific abuse is sexy), but sometimes to explore just, you know, another type of love, like a poly or ace relationship or what have you. And I realised that I have not yet done this with a trans werewolf.

This opens up two very big questions though, which I have just spent a really fun half hour talking over with a trans friend of mine, but I don’t want her to have to speak for all trans people on the subject. So I’m asking for input here.

I recognise that some people of course won’t agree on these - what’s invalidating for one is validating for another, and all that. But I do want to make sure that, whichever way I end up going with this, it’s based on the input and opinions of trans folks who approved and not solely what my well-intentioned but naive cis ass thought sounded nice. So! Questions under the cut, because I value your dashboards.

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