#it's a bit ranty anyhow

[bouquet-of-clumsy-words]

@velvetxr0se tagged me to ramble about myself a bit, thank u v much!

When was the last time you cried? - I cried/teared up a little bit at work the otherday ngl lmao but hey, no one saw that.

Do you have kids? - I do not no

Do you use sarcasm a lot? - Absolutely. It is my main form of coping tbh, like, gotta laugh about all the bad stuff right? RIGHT?. I mean obviously there's a limit and y'know a time a place to NOT use sarcasm and sometimes people get a little bit concerned if i'm too sarcastic but yeah.

What sports do you play? - I do not sadly, I used to enjoyyy sports to an extent? but I mean I still do a lot of cycling and I'm kinda thankful because it's moderately keeping me healthy ish.

What’s the first thing you notice about people? -I guess my primitive caveman section of brain will notice boobs. <- lmao this is hilarious. Uhm, I guess without being obvious, their eyes? if they look up/down, are they confident do their eyes get big etc or wander off. Like whole face/body language I guess? I'd like to assume I have an okay understanding/reading people's faces but I'm also v expressive in my face.

What’s your eye color? - Green/grey ish? It's hard to define it as a one colour

Scary movies or happy endings? - Happy Endings? or like tbh I'm a sucker for crappy comedies and whatnot but also like, I watch a fair amount of films so I just like anything that sorta makes you FEEL emotions? Hence why I watched Interstellar and cry everytime.

Any special talents? - I don't think so. I mean I can speak French but it's defo rusty by now since it's been like.. 18 years since I lived there? (wow that's scary typing that out.)

Where were you born? - In Kent, Pembury Hospital on the 29th May

What are your hobbies? - Gaming, sad blogging, socialising uhh, spending time with cats? it's hard to define, idk I go through phases and stuff sometimes and the stuff i usually enjoy just doesn't bring me joy so I just stare at the ceiling.

Do you have pets? - I have 3 Kitties, Ravioli, Fudge and Shrimp

How tall are you? - 5'7''~ I kinda hate how short I am sometimes lmao but we move.

Favorite subject in school? - Uhm, I enjoyed Maths suprisingly and Science and Geography. idk it just sorta sucked we didn't.. learn much about geography as such and just about footpath erosion, like that kinda sapped the fun out of it I think.

Dream job? - Uhm, Ideally nothing. I guess something where I can make an impact and have some kind of satisfaction at the end of the day where it feels like I've actually accomplished something? Working in retail has quite literally killed me with how much shit is wrong with the current state of the world and how much we over produce/waste products. Like working in the warehouse and seeing £400 worth of meat just getting tossed out because someone forgot to put in the the fridge or THREE pallets of water going "Out of Date" because no one bothered to take them out is wild. And the worse part is the audacity of said company then asking people for donations for local charities and being like "do your part" when it's like bruh. (soz ranty) Thanks I'm gonna tag uhh @confetti-hearts @otherspark @hey-hermy @who-is-this-gatsby-anyhow @sleeping-jo @sleepyyphilia @chaoticevilcult @switchywitchie @musicandmasochism

[otherpeoplescreativity]

Ranty ranting

This is the one where I discourse-dump about my personal Fandom Wank:

Reading is not a passive skill.

Anybody who refuses to exist alongside the whole world ought not be on the World Wide Web.

When I was six and up, I used to hunt our library for new-to-me books to read. Anything remotely, vaguely, potentially interesting. I read the Trixie Belden series repeatedly. I read the Bobbsey Twins Series. In mild desperation, I tried out Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms and the first few entries in the Black Beauty series (that one starts out as being "horse book" genre and gets weird). I was a little too seven-years-old to rummage around in the vicinity of A. A. Milne and Beatrix Potter after I exhausted that supply, but I got my hands on even the particularly badly aged instalments of Dr. Dolittle and Pippi Longstocking.

I got all of these from American libraries.

Never once did I have to have my precious hand gently guided into understanding that

grammar changes by region as well as by time period

spelling changes by region as well as by time period

connotation changes by region as well as by time period

a reader who cannot understand a word from context is probably not a big enough kid to be reading unsupervised anyhow

a reader who cannot understand "Pooh Sticks" from context is going to have to backtrack to the sort of children's books that are more illustration than text, because Mr. Milne is not going to devote page share to explaining absolutely every little thing.

In conclusion:

Readers have to read.

Reading does require a bit of work on the reader's part. We cannot filter reality to perfectly mesh with the base thought patterns of the reader, and then push it into the reader's neural net without the reader's active participation.

[yetanotherlesbianonthiswebsite]

If you are wondering how my writing process for Arc 2 of TRoT is going, I’d be halfway through it by now if it weren’t for one small scene that at max should cap out around 3k words.

There are reasons I am placing it at the particular point in the story, why it has the dynamic it has, why it involves specifically those characters, and what it is saying in-universe direct, in-universe metaphorically and with its metacommentary. It has a more defined outline than the entire chapter it belongs to because I want it to fulfill specific purposes.

I loathed the way TME treated Briala’s sex life as something outrageous to be used against Celene; an indigenous-coded black lesbian finds herself in an incredibly toxic relationship with a white woman who is responsible for the violence her people face and it’s considered as something the white woman should be ashamed of. I can’t really think of a narrative that would rob Briala more of sexual agency and I want to write a modicum of counterbalance to that where Briala can enjoy sexual agency and sex in a loving and caring relationship.

Honestly, the way that both DA:O and DA II treat genderqueer sex workers is horrifying down to my soul; dehumanized, treated as experimental and weird and even treated as nigh violent in some situations, robbed of all ability to define themselves and ultimately the punchline of a joke. Dragon Age absolutely does not care about the humanity of genderqueer people and treats us as a fetish at best that the protagonists are kinkshamed for. Having a sex scene with Imerati as a trans lesbian main character is a fuck you towards the writing of DA in general that I need in my story.

Having this scene exactly in this chapter means that I can talk about dysphoria and sex. Afterwards, the main triad gets seperated and in the meantime before they reunite, Merrill introduces Imerati to the mirror of transformation. Writing this scene right here means three things: I can explore trans femme sex before GRS (with the added bonus of writing a beautiful sex scene that doesn’t or rather can’t end with all parties having an orgasm), I can explore the very personal pain that comes from not having the access to some of the means of medical transition (though for Imerati, it’s the taint messing with blood magic and for me, it’s the Federal Republic messing with my health insurance provider, but same degree of pain) and I can have a sex scene between a trans lesbian and a cis lesbian that shows that yes, some cis lesbians decide in favor of sex with trans women before GRS and it can be quite beautiful, which is the metacommentary of this scene.

The problem is that it is so incredibly personal. I have written Imerati to be an almost perfect mirror of me, I write my pain and trauma and happiness and hopes into her, she acts like me in any situation, she decides and thinks and feels like me. And that means that I have already canonically written into her the trauma surrounding sex that comes from growing up in a sex-negative cult and in the catholic church. It means I have already given her the clumsyness I have, the result of weak bones and failing muscles. It means that I have written her with all the general anxiety I have and the specific anxiety that comes from the intersection of being a lesbian and trans and having limited motoric skills. It means that writing this scene would mean acknowledging my own sexuality, in full, and exposing myself in a deeply anxiety-inducing way to the readers.

I know that a lot of smut is just the authors expressing their own sexual fantasies and preferences. I know that a lot of readers go there because that particular smut is connected to a lot of their own sexuality. I know a lot of comments and fics are just very openly horny. And yet that openness is exactly what makes it so difficult for me; to so openly make clear that despite not being allo, I am not ace either. Among the global anti-queer hatred movements, violence against specifically trans femme sexuality is a central motive; that’s what the metacommentary counterattacks, and yet that makes it so much more difficult for the entire thing to be so personal. Trans women being openly trans and sexual can be an act of resistance and revolution, and that’s exactly why this scene belongs in TRoT. This fic is built around the question “what is revolutionary?” and one of the most prominent answers next to “stating the truth” is sapphic intimacy and sapphic love; so it almost seems thematically imperative to have at least one sex scene like this.

And yet, it is so damned personal. Given how strong and organized transmisogynistic violence is globally, some of the strongest wounds of self-hatred within me stem from internalized transmisogyny. It means that I have an easier time believing that people hate me than love me; it means that by the shit I hear on the daily, it feels like my partners are making a big sacrifice by being together with a trans woman, that they somehow suffer under me being trans. Every transmisic sentence I have ever witnessed is another dagger in my soul, and believe me when I say that it makes sex incredibly difficult when the fact of your sexuality is the battleground upon which organized global movements rally for the destruction of all queerness.

It would be disingenuous to the way I’ve written TRoT so far to now step back from the plan of writing this scene, and it would be equally disingenuous to not acknowledge this real-life pain in this scene. One of the most fascinating contrasts I see in my writing of TRoT and Nerdling’s writing of Run Home is that I write very openly romantic characters that have a lot of problems with sexuality because of their trauma and that the inverse is true of the protagonists of Run Home, they are openly horny and yet find emotional commitment extremely difficult because of their respective trauma. The problem is that my story does not have ten chapters space for a healing arc where the characters slowly address and partially overcome their trauma; the main source of conflict is the historically grown structure of the status quo, not the trauma of the characters per se. I need to fully address and work through Imerati’s (and in turn, my own) pain in one short scene. I need to balance pain and beauty, anxiety and peace, because the thematic reasons for this scene demand such a balance.

I’ve written the coronation chapter in arc 1 in one writing session, I’ve written the Gaspard POV chapter in three, and yet I sit five writing sessions on this one short scene and I don’t know what to do. I’ve written myself into a corner, not narratively, I have solutions to every single narrative conflict until 9:43, but thematically and metanarratively. I’ve seen excellent and beautiful and sweet sapphic porn in my search for examples and guiding lights in the DA fanfic community, in name that is Prequels and Pirates, and yet, I don’t know if the path I will have to take in my writing must be different. I’ve always written TRoT without the explicit need for beta readers (though I always feel like I need sensitivity readers) but this time, I feel like I need beta readers for one small sex scene. It should be simple and yet it is so fucking complicated.

[storfulsten]

In your au does whitty get jealous of other people who try to flirt with bf and does he sometimes act as an overprotective older sibling when anxious about his boyfriend being saved?

this got rambly for no reason sorry about that, so under cut it is

tl;dr - yes he does get jealous. not sure abt the other half of the ask but he tries to not be overbearing or get in the way of bf socializing or whatever I guess but protective boyfriend mode is always on standby if needed lol

well yeah probably. I mean he trusts bf so he's not worried on that end, but other people trying to put the moves on bf he does not like lol. he won't do much about it though bc he knows bf can take care of himself and will decline said advances once he realizes he's being hit on. though bf doesn't always catch on right away tbh lol (honestly both of them are pretty bad at realizing they're being hit on by other people, and in those situations that whitty's being flirted with without realizing, hoboy bf would not like that lol), and those times whitty will still not do anything but he will be glaring daggers from across the room at whoever dares to even try. the only time he'd intervene is if he notices bf getting uncomfortable, like if some dude is really insistent and won't stop even after being turned down. he'll swoop in being all 'hey babe' and maybe lean down and give bf a lil smooch, then stand up at his full height and glare down at whoever is being bothersome, daring them to try to trespass on his territory again (that sounds archaic af sorry can't think of a better way to word it lol). it gives bf a chance to be all like 'this is my boyfriend :)' drawing a clear line in the sand without having to get hostile about it. either it results in scaring them away or into line bc holyshit whitty's intimidating as hell, especially when he's in jealous protective boyfriend mode like that. or maybe into a rap battle or something idk, it is a fnf au after all lol so yea he gets jealous but he won't make a scene about it if it can be avoided bc again he trusts bf and knows there's no need to make a fuss about it. he'll still sulk about it from a distance though lol. and when they get some privacy bf might end up with some nasty hickeys and stuff (though only if bf let's him ofc but he usually does bc heck yea) bc yeah maybe just a wee bit of a possessive trait there, but only in specific scenarios such as being annoyed at other people hitting on his partner and all that ha. normally he's pretty chill and only does that much biting when needed lol

[flowers-alwaysandalways]

I was tagged by @meetmeinadaydream 💓💘 thank you, dear! 😀 Rules: answer thirty questions, then tag twenty SOME NUMBER OF blogs you would like to know better. (I'm just gonna let anyone do this who wants to instead of tagging specific people 😅) 1. nicknames: Sam 2. gender: Female 3. star sign: Libra 4. height: 5'4" 5. current time: 3:28 PM 6. birthday: October 17 7. favorite bands: The Beatles...I really have not been into music for a while and it seems I mostly like solo artists anyhow? 8. favorite solo artists: Lana Del Rey, Katy Perry, and Marina and the Diamonds 9. song stuck in my head: random songs from the Waitress musical keep coming in & out 10. last movie watched: I think it was Florence Foster Jenkins last summer? That I saw in theatres anyway... 11. last show watched: Kimmy Schmidt 12. when did i create my blog: Summer 2013 13. what do i post: I'm not really sure anymore...things that are positive, mostly (with the exception of my occasional ranty post) 14. last thing i googled: "mosquito bite remedies" 15. do you have other blogs: no 16. do you get asks: I wish! 17. why did you choose you url: I needed a change 18. following: I can't look it up right now because I'm on mobile 19. followers: 20. favorite colors: all the colors tbh ❤️ I like a rose-gold theme but my favorite color is probably light bluish green 21. average hours of sleep: 8ish 22. lucky number: I don’t have one 23. instruments: I'm not very musically inclined, but I can play a bit of piano 24. what am i wearing: Shorts and a short-sleeved top, pretty basic 😊 25. how many blankets i sleep with: 2⃣ 26. dream job: professor 27. dream trip: Just Paris tbh 28. favorite food: I like spicy foods more and more the older I get...my favorite food is probably noodles 29. nationality: American 30. favorite song now: She Used To Be Mine by Sara Bareilles 💖

[augbro]

Okay, probably gonna get ranty here, so fair warning. A month ago Cory went to grab me more needles from the pharmacy for my testosterone shots. He went with photographs of the exact product packaging I needed, complete with item numbers. The idea was that he'd pick up whatever they had on hand. The lady at the pharmacy offered to order us a box of both the 22 gage draw needle+syringe and the smaller 25g sharp for subcutaneous injection. These were the ones my endocrinologist wanted me to use, and the ones I was shown how to give myself shots with by the nurse on duty at my endocrinologist's practice. Cory didn't double check the labels when he picked them up, because the idea that they'd order NOT what we had provided specific product numbers for didn't cross either of our minds. Which is why we were baffled when I went to take my shot on Sunday and opened up the boxes only to find these weird as shit safety 25g + syringe combo packages and 18g draw sharps. So, there are a few problems with this. The first is that the 18g draw sharp is twice as thick as the 22g one I usually use, to the point that I'm very concerned that piercing the membrane of my depo-testosterone vial will make a permanent opening in it, which means that if it is ever standing in a position that isn't perfectly upright, it will leak everywhere. That's bad! The second problem actually answered a question I'd previously had--I constantly hear trans men talk about how they wasted like a third of a shot because it came shooting back out after they removed the needle from their skin. I've been doing subcutaneous shots for 12 weeks without wasting a single drop, and the process for keeping it from doing that seems pretty simple. And then I took shot 13! So here's the deal. These dumb safety 25g needles have a weird apparatus on the tip that allows you to immediately snap a guard down over the sharp upon removing it from your skin. I don't question their effectiveness, but I do question why they are needed at all. Never once have I pulled the needle out of my stomach and then immediately stabbed myself with it. You pull it out, you pop the cap on it, you toss it in the sharps bin. You put a little Bandaid over your puncture so you don't get a little pinprick stain of blood on your white heavy metal baseball style shirt in a weird place. The End. And on top of being kind of redundant, it has another stupid design flaw that I'm pretty sure is responsible for like half my shot immediately exiting my body as soon as I pulled the needle out. The sharp's packaging indicates that it is 16mm long, which is the same length as my regular sharp. However, the stupid cover apparatus actually overlaps the needle quite a bit even when pulled all the way back, and seems to actually cover a small portion of the 16mm of supposedly usable needle length. So you can't actually push it in as deep as you can with the good ones, which means it's a shorter trip for the testosterone to exit the way it came in, which is kind of the opposite of what I need to happen. Anyhow, I think the thing that's the most frustrating in all of this is that we ordered a lot of something specific, and they decided that these ones would be better without consulting Cory and ordered them anyways and now I have a year's worth of something that I didn't want, something that I can't really use without fucking up the multiline membrane on my T vial and something that outright sucks. And I had to wait like 2 weeks for it to get here. I also don't know what the policy is for returning a ton of loose needles, but I guess Cory's about to find out when he heads to the pharmacy to ask what happened tonight. The lessons learned here are: 1)always check the item number on the box when you're buying needles in bulk BEFORE you pay for them and 2) if you're using the God awful safety 25g sharps and have noticed that you lose a lot of your shot every week, consider switching to ones without the guard. You will waste less and I sincerely doubt that you will accidentally stab yourself or a loved one with them.