#ligaratus

[aerinzephyr]

might play pyre again

i miss my team

[malusrecord]

~"Hedwyn, what can I do?" She'd heard of this, she knew it was a fate that befell all exiles to the Downside, but to see it happening to him was unacceptable. "I'm here for you Hedwyn, I'm here!" She's gingerly cradling his head in her hands, afraid she'll hurt him more. (because I love that hc you posted earlier about his horns aaaaa)

All he can feel is heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. An unbearable heat that DRIVES HEDWYN TO HIS KNEES as it surges through him, with the maddening core of it boiling at the very center of his head as Hedwyn's already exhausted body spasms underneath the pain. He can feel his mouth dropping open in a silent scream---and stars, oh stars, he wants to scream but they would be jagged, pitiable howls that require more AIR THAN HIS LUNGS COULD EVER HOPE TO HOLD---and so all he can manage is gasps that get weaker by the breath.

"I...I..I..'m...ha......!" Hedwyn's words snag sharply in his throat as the heat radiating through him suddenly surges as it THRUSTS ITS WAY OUTWARDS and actually intensifies as it goes rather than relenting. Now he does scream; one hard wail as he can feel something---horns, the curse born by all who were cast to the Downside---sprouting out of his head with a rush of blood that mixes into his hair before freely running down his face. He's clawing at his head and face now; frantic and feverish, heedless of the blood, heedless of the new and sudden pain as his grasping, scrabbling fingers are PRICKED BY THE TIPS OF THE STILL INFANTILE HORNS that would only get longer and larger as the years ticked by. If he could just rip them out and have done with it then, then, then----!

A voice then---equally frantic but not his own---spears through Hedwyn's screaming, red soaked senses. Someone was calling to him, someone was trying to grab hold of him....someone....!

"...Gh...!" The exile sways and his hands drop suddenly; blood soaked fingers now being caught by someone else's' but he couldn't bear to open his eyes, couldn't bear anything more, and yet his body SHUDDERS WITH A KIND OF GRATEFULNESS as he dimly, dimly, dimly, oh so dimly, feels far softer hands than his own cradling his sweat and blood-soaked face. Someone was....someone... "R...Rh...." He can't say it---Friend, Ligaratus, Miche...!---but he tries, oh how he tries. "Mi.....ch...e..." Now the hands catch and hold him tightly as Hedwyn drops fully, pressing his shivering, dead weight against his fellow exile's kneeling form as her words---partially audible and pulling him towards an end to the suffering he was currently experiencing---grasp at him in their own way. I'm here for you. I'm here for you. I'm here for you. I'M HERE FOR YOU, NOW AND ALWAYS.

[canmom]

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's like trying to move away from "male/female" in biology and is just trying to describe the dimorphism by reproductive role without assuming that role needs to be gendered

yeah, it may seem kinda futile because like, we have literally all the literature to face up to lol, and like you’ll get people saying ‘“male” and “female” in biology are technical terms referring to the behaviour of gametes, they’re nothing to do with Gender’ but seeing just how many assumptions and perceptions get smuggled in through those words I’d like to avoid them, to the extent I can.

there’s an interesting paper that I unfortunately no longer have the link to, that looked at the different language used to describe the process of conception in human biology textbookss - the way active, masculine verbs are used for the sperm, passive ones for the egg etc. and how this obscured actual important parts of the egg’s role in the process for hundreds of years.

or alternatively like, I know a nature documentary isn’t a scientific paper, but the way you hear the presenter - David Attenborough, say - project gender onto animals is so striking! over and over we see the plucky male competing to win the affections of the discerning female, the mother defending her children, like the different animals come and go but there’s only a handful of ‘stories’ they tell with it.

(and like, on that note, of course it’s not news that in nature docs, the ‘action’ is edited together from probably multiple days of shooting, the animals may not even be the same individuals from shot to shot, the audio is almost certainly dubbed in... all defensible as practical necessity but it’s fascinating how they try to tell a story of ‘scientific truth’ by deliberately obscuring the more direct ‘truth’ of what’s happening in the videos... they try their best to make it easy to buy into the illusion that you’re just witnessing nature unmediated, that the humans who created the film are ‘faithfully reporting the science’ rather than actively creating an interpretation that could be disputed)

or take for example how people report that ‘male’ seahorses are the ones that gestate internally. this is a technical distinction on the basis of gametes, but in popular reporting, you’ll see how quickly we impute gender to the seahorses without any discussion of what is actually meant by the terms. everyone knows what a ‘male’ is, right? haha, ~a man getting pregnant~, how strange nature is...

i feel like someone will come and have a go at me for ‘ignoring’ that most species are, whatever my feelings on the matter, more-or-less dimorphic in terms of behaviour and morphology, that I’m missing the forest for the trees or w/e, but I feel like gender-as-practised-by-humans (and more specifically, humans in our present time and specific place), especially when we are actually an extremely non-dimorphic species, is sufficiently separate from any ‘natural’ dimorphisms that i would prefer to sever the two completely - in language and imagination!

of course evolutionary biologists are gonna continue arguing about stuff like “Bateman’s principle” using ‘male’ and ‘female’ language, regardless of what I think of the matter. I don’t have any real hope of change in how science is practised, certainly not emanating from me, but it brings me some personal satisfaction to excise that language...

[lesbiskammerat]

transmasc terves are like, a really Interesting phenomenon?? they claim they're fundamentally Females and thus even when they're totally fucking indistinguishable from cishet men, they're somehow Softer and Kinder and Better and whatever bc of their CASAB and a lot of them tend to be like, more on the "woke terf" side of things of "transition treats dysphoria but CASABs are immutable classes" and they're the vectors for the terf shit infesting tumblr in a lot of cases

also idk your experiences with LGBT+ spaces, but I will say that like, IME terves absolutely target transmasc eggs for indoctrination and so they as a group have lately made concessions that mostly involve grossly conflating butch and transmasc experiences; it does mean that like, there's no blanket rule for who's Safe or not; disclosure for context that I'm transmisogyny-exempt and some of this I've seen first-hand and some has been told to me by comrades

and like ofc I'm leery of sounding like I'm excusing transmascs who buy into terf shit, since indoctrination or not, they do a lot of harm and they're able to bring their toxic read of gender into spaces that are supposed to be safe for trans women and trans people in general, so it's like, my sympathy is limited

i do think it seems like they target transmasc people yeah, esp those that aren’t yet sure if they’re a lesbian or a straight man or something else, and cordon them off from other trans people, but that’s a specific group of “gender critical” feminists that do that. plenty of radfems and other assorted reactionary feminists really hate butches and transmascs in roughly the same way typical christian conservatives do. i think it’s interesting though that for whatever reason there hasn’t been a split into very distinct tendencies with their own names, terminology and theoreticians, so they all sort of blend together. like a lot of the ones i’ve encountered will refer to themselves with a wide variety of terms from gender critical to radfem to female separatist or what have you and it’s anyone’s guess as to what, if anything, they actually know about radical feminism, and it doesn’t help that they all seem to associate with each other pretty tightly regardless of big differences in opinion

[unknought]

I’m sure this is just the caffeine overdose but Sappho Fragment 102 is evoking spiders for me but not through the expected word but through “slender Aphrodite”. My brain is convinced Aphrodite is a spider

spider Arachne has overcome me with longing for a girl

[name-given]

ligaratus replied to your post:

so my dad and co tried to Out Woke The Trans Woman...

oh like this is a Thing cishet men do to make themselves look like actual parents and not effectively absentee landlords to their own families

my uncle seemed to be catching on and said something about like, ���are you talking about labor” and i was like um sure also the physical labor of childbirth? 

i guess to further flesh out my thoughts a heterosexual relationship can be as egalitarian and nontraditional as you want to make it with the man as a homemaker doesn’t change the fact that the family is basically supposed to reproduce labor (and gender), which can never be without a labor imbalance, but even on less abstract terms,

the sense of entitlement this family seemed to have over women’s bodies especially during pregnancy and childbirth was just one of those moments that will haunt me forever now

my aunt, who I’ve felt more comfortable than anyone else so far talking about trans issues and my relationship was the one who offered, as the subject of the conversation “the family is expecting” over variations that my dad and uncles had, which Amber and I came to interpret as “families expect women to bear children for them”

[femmchantress]

ligaratus replied to your post: You have big Milf!pin-up girl energy

you Absolutely do

:3c <33333

[queenofzan]

ligaratus replied to your post: tmi everyday, sex stuff[[MOR] having another one...

Very much yes, but the orgasms will change and also be way more exhausting. But you’ll be on a puberty hairtrigger again, too!

yeah, i’ve heard that! it’s one reason i waited so long to actually start hormones; whether or not i’m having trouble with orgasms i’m still, so horny all the time it’s exhausting

like when i accidentally go off my paxil it is revealed that in fact, it is suppressing my libido, and it’s just incessant. like, i have shit to do other than get my stupid body off but noooooooo

[wagahai-da]

ligaratus replied to your post: i don’t know how to keep this up for 6 more...

can you do transcription? rev.com are a reputable company that uses freelance transcriptors and pays all right. i can’t transcribe bc of my brain problems tho

i’ve been thinking about trying but my typing speed isn’t very fast and i make lots of errors all the time and just go back and correct them while i’m typing

and i’m worried my audio processing wouldn’t be very good

[whypolar]

ligaratus a réagi à votre billet “Factors probably related to my having an easier time understanding mom...”

i remember reading a book by a scientist who survived a massive stroke and recovered significantly and what she recommends is basically, keep talking to your mum as much as possible

That’s definitely the impression I get from stroke recovery and aphasia resources I’ve looked at, yeah! Neurological workout....

[librarycards]

I love how I’m being advertised Harry Potter shit after jkr re-outed herself as absolute pondscum

[frankendykes-monster]

@ligaratus asked me for Superman recommendations, which presents the rare opportunity that someone other than my girlfriend has provoked me to pull out my extensive knowledge of great Silver Age (1956 - 1969) Superman stories. Now, Superman has been in publication nonstop since 1938, but if we're being realistic, if you want the best of the best with the character, you're just going to be reading that decade of comics from beginning to end, but here are my highlights:

Action Comics #162 (November 1951) - "It!": Superman fends off a seemingly incomprehensible fourth-dimensional entity. This one gives a solid basis for what Silver Age Superman is like, in that he lives in a world where hes already taken extensive measures in making it a better place, and so you really arent going to see him fending off the various forces of evil, but rather do increasingly weird and complex problem solving. Of course that sort of status quo gets us to now, where the only half-decent Superman villains are Lex Luthor, Brainiac, Bizarro...Mr. Mxyzptlk...Metallo...?...yeah.

Superman #76 (May 1952) - "The Mightiest Team in The World": This one is a pretty easy recommendation, as it's the very first team-up between Superman and Batman. Even though we had been getting Superman and Batman stories since World's Finest Comics started publishing in 1941, we had never gotten a story starring both of them until a decade later. This one is mainly interesting for historical reasons, but I'm not going to mention any more stories involving DC characters outside of the Superman mythos starting now.

Superman #101 (November 1955) - "The Rainbow Doom": Superman has a rainbow stuck around his body that causes whatever physical objects in his close proximity to turn to glass. This one is pretty solid because it's an early example of how engage in incredibly preposterous hoaxes to get the edge in an ongoing battle, which is to say that this is a story that involves Superman tricking everyone into thinking he's turned Lois Lane into glass i.e. killed her as one of the steps that allows him to win.

Adventure Comics #247 (April 1958) - "The Legion of Super-Heroes": This isnt a Superman story, rather a SuperBOY story. Which is to say that Superman started his heroic adventures as a child in Smallville. Anyhow, I motherfucking LOVE the Legion of Super-Heroes. This story is their first appearance, and essentially they're a club of children from the 30th century that love and adore Superboy, and go back in time to put him through arbitrary trials to see if he's cool enough to hang out with them, which they intentionally sabotage, because these are the shenanigans that elementary schoolers frequently engage in. I'm not going to bring up any other Legion appearances here because honestly I'd say read every Silver Age Legion story.

Action Comics #242 (July 1958) - "The Super-Duel in Space": This is the first appearance of Brainiac, and he's a great science fiction/horror concept of a super-intellegent computer that must learn everything and shrinks down organisms so as to extensively study them, that also just happens to fight Superman on a regular basis. This is also the first appearance of the Bottled City of Kandor, the last piece of Kryptonian civilization, and it presents one of the great dilemmas of the Silver Age, in that Superman cant figure out how to restore it in size.

Action Comics #252 (May 1959) - "The Supergirl of Krypton!": This is the first appearance of Supergirl, and she's going to occupy a similar niche as the Legion of Super-Heroes on account of the fact that I have an intense love for the character and am not going to mention any more stories involving the character because then I'd have to mention all of them.

Superman #129 (May 1959) - "The Girl in Superman's Past!": Clark reminisces about a girl he was in love with in college, Lori Lemaris, which makes the third ongoing love interest of his following Lois Lane and Lana Lang. The difference being that Lori is a mermaid from Atlantis.

Action Comics #254 (July 1959) - "The Battle With Bizarro!": This is the first appearance of Bizarro, there's not much more to it.

Superman #141 (November 1960) - "Superman's Return to Krypton!": Superman travels through the time barrier and ends up being stuck on Krypton and struggling to find a way back before it explodes; basically one of the great tragic stories of this era.

Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #48 (November 1960) - "The Mystery of The Tiny Supermen!": Jimmy Olsen's solo series is ANOTHER case of me having to restrain myself from mentioning every issue, but this is a special case for introducing an important part of the mythos, the Superman Emergency Squad, which is where a group from Kandor all dress up like Superman and do his regular duties while he's incapacitated.

Superman #143 (February 1961) - “Bizarro Meets Frankenstein!”: Now THIS is a great Bizarro story.  Bizarro sees in a television broadcast that Frankenstein’s Monster is referred to as “The World’s Scariest Monster” and seeing as that title should belong to him, he decides to do something about it.  Which manifests in Superman having to protect the actor that plays the Monster from Bizarro.

Superman #147 (August 1961) - “The Legion of Super-Villains!”: I know I said I wouldn’t mention the Legion again but I’ll make an exception for here, where Lex Luthor travels to the future to get the assistance of their counterpart team.

Superman #149 (November 1961) - “The Death of Superman!”: This is the first Imaginary Story I’m bringing up i.e. one that isn’t “canon”.  As much as I’m not a giant fan of this incarnation of Lex Luthor, I can’t deny that this is the character at his very best.  Luthor pretends to have finally reformed so as to get an opportunity to get in close to Superman and kill him, which he actually does, leaving the rest of the world to pick up the pieces.

Superman #156 (October 1962) - “The Last Days of Superman!”: All the wacky shenanigans I’ve already written own aside, this is without any doubt the best single-issue Superman story ever written.  Superman is infected with Virus X from Krypton and given 30 days to live, and spends that time carrying out all the missions he planned to officially make the world a better place.  The moment where he carves his final words into the Moon?

Action Comics #300 (May 1963) - “Under The Red Sun!”: This is another great tragic story.  The Superman Revenge Squad (I’m not getting into them after talking at lenght about Comet) sends Superman into the year 1,000,000 A.D., with him being unable to return to the past on account of how the now red sun has stripped him of his powers.

Gets me every fucking time.

Action Comics #293 (October 1962) - “The Secret Origin of Supergirl’s Super-Horse!”: Yeah I just wanted to take this opportunity to talk about what is undoubtedly the strangest comic book character I have ever seen, Comet the Super-Horse.  He was first introduced as one of the Superpets, a legacy that got started with Krypto the Super-Dog, but here we, uh.  Learn that Comet was actually a centaur named Biron from ancient Greece who was accidently turned into a horse by Circe who tried to make up for it by giving him the powers of “ Jove, Mercury, Athena, and Neptune”, and then he’s sent into the distant future (our present) and outer space by an evil wizard.  Also sometimes a comet comes by the Earth that turns him into a complete human with amnesia that goes on to date Supergirl even though most of the time he’s a horse that she owns.  Yeah.  Any time someone tries to bring up how weird comics are without knowing who Comet is, they ain’t seen shit yet.

Superman #162 (July 1963) - “The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue!”: This is probably the most famous Imaginary Story, with Superman being fed up that he can’t solve all the world’s problems, so he uses a machine to increase his intelligence that ends up splitting him into two separate Supermen that are now capable of doing everything Superman wanted.  Also one marries Lois and one marries Lana.  It’s great.

Action Comics #304 (September 1963) - “The Interplanetary Olympics!”: This one is pretty simple, Superman is chosen as Earth’s representative in the Interplanetary Olympics where it seems everyone is stronger than he is.

Superman #164 (October 1963) - “The Showdown Between Luthor and Superman!”: Another simple one; Superman and Lex Luthor engage in a boxing match on a planet with a red sun.

Superman #167 (February 1964) - “The Team of Luthor and Brainiac!”: Says it in the title.

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #51 (August 1964) - “The Three Wives of Superman!”: Last Imaginary Story, and this one’s a doozy.  Superman marries and becomes widowed to Lois Lane, Lana Lang, and Lori Lemaris in a quick succession.

[sophrosynic]

The Aquitaine thing is probably how France was ruled by England for a good long time in the Middle Ages? So uh not a great comparison since that happened via the Normans taking over England first

Ohhh that makes sense. Yeah, it’s a weak comparison, but it is kind of funny.

[princessnijireiki]

Kafka’s lament, decontextualised, a snap of yellowed page, a tertiary source, quoting his old diary, I have not written in ten days …I too become vermin, under their gaze; an/other Jewish faggot, blind with migraine, HaAdam—a man? like me, ensnared.

…ok, y'all, so as you can see there’s a new copypasta-ish anonymous message getting sent around to people, that I’ve seen a few times already over the past week— which is just the uncredited & unformatted contents of this poem by @sorrygoleslied

which is from a blog that only has one post, the poem itself, and whose inbox is closed, but which appears to be a writing blog or sideblog for @ligaratus

with no (apparent) rhyme or reason behind who it’s getting sent to, and no indication of like… what the goal is… why it was sent in the first place… or who’s actually behind it, obviously; the author makes the most sense bc literally the writing blog is so new & not yet archived in search engines that google doesn’t recognize this poem beyond the string of anon messages, but again, like… fucking why?

anyway, here’s some person’s weird attempt at self promotion…? or performance art? or whatever the hell is going on lol.

[name-given]

Heyy I don’t remember if I’d replied to the very sweet ask you sent me after I followed you and I just wanted to say I super super appreciated it 💙

I don’t remember if you did but thank you! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

[the-transfeminine-mystique]

today’s mood is best represented by @ligaratus sending me that message and my spending like the next hour almost in tears bc thinking about God and how we come to know God is so intense and overwhelming in the best of ways