#not my usual thing

[magicratfingers]

idk why people are using AI to rip-off artists when you could be using it to see things made of baked beans like???

[mihawking]

INCLUDES ARTWORK BY BEAUTIFUL SOUL @jaymang0

Just as he was about to lock up, the door creaked open. A gust of cold night air followed the figure of a man who stepped in quietly, his presence immediately commanding the room. There was something about him – an energy, a kind of quiet intensity that made Sanji straighten up, as if subconsciously preparing for something to happen.

He carried himself like someone who had seen things, someone who had been places most people avoided.

Sanji was instantly intrigued.

[amewinterswriting]

So, I've been playing the remaster of Baten Kaitos lately and for a JRPG of it's time (2003, originally) I'm actually quite amazed by how the narrative subtext frames disability. Major spoilers after the read more, and I will explain everything so you should understand even if you know nothing about the game.

In the world of Baten Kaitos, islands are kept aloft in the sky and the people live on them because of a disaster that poisoned the earth. Most of these people have wings on their back that they can make appear and disappear at will. They are referred to as 'Wings of the Heart' and their appearance is unique to each person, symbolizing their hopes and dreams and personalities. The people of the Empire do not have wings (? or perhaps choose not to use them, according to the prequel) but compensate with mechanical 'winglets'. It's also worth mentioning that the Empire is a major antagonistic force for about half the game, so even though there are friendly characters who come from the Empire, the association of no natural wings is predominantly 'evil'.

The protagonist only has one natural wing, and a prosthetic wing to compensate. It is shown that he has faced prejudice because of this - people treating him with suspicion and hatred because if his wings are deformed, it follows that his 'heart'/soul must be deformed as well.

In fact, this is a major motivation for him deceiving the rest of the party and the player themselves, aligning himself with the evil god we were trying to prevent from being resurrected the whole game. His 'payment' is a second, natural wing to match his existing one.

The plot then follows a secondary protagonist who eventually manages to confront him with a magical artifact that disrupts the evil god's power for long enough that he can choose a different path. And he does so, physically ripping off the wing he was 'gifted' and returning to the good guys and using his prosthetic (which the second protagonist had kept safe for him in the hope that he would one day rejoin them and he might need it).

While I have a lot of criticism for some elements of that plot (the one-winged protagonist should definitely have had more of a 'redemption' arc after deceiving the whole party and the player in a way that nearly destroys the entire world, but five minutes after he's rejoined the party it is almost as if it never happened), it is interesting that a game of this age does address the fantasy of 'what if I could just be magically fixed' and reject it. It actively frames the use of the prosthetic (something crafted for him with love and care from his family, later protected and cared for by the party in the hope that he'd come back to them) as something positive and better than a magical cure for him.

It's definitely not a perfect story (I would have loved to see some kind of connection between the party members - even at the end of the game, it does feel a lot like a group of strangers just happened to be going the same way and tagged along with each other), and I can't bring myself to decide whether the 'prosthetic' plotline is helped or hindered by the idea the the prosthetic is not a physical inconvenience in any way (never seems to need maintenance and works just as well as a natural wing, even adjusting as the protagonist grows) and only a social one (characters comment on it, some in negative ways and he admits he's faced that kind of prejudice his whole life). On the one hand, it's nice that he only actually faces any problems because of other people - it's a fantasy story, why shouldn't his inventor grandfather be able to make the perfect prosthetic for him? On the other hand, not having any physical ramifications (that the player is aware of) really does make his flip flop to the darkside and back for an hour seem a little cheap. Like, you've been bullied a bit, that sucks, it's still not worth screwing everyone else over, including all the people who have actively fought beside you to prevent the very thing you're doing?

But overall, the handling of his disability and the fact that the game doesn't just hand him a magical 'cure' as his happy ending? That feels pretty good to me.

[keithbutgay]

hi!

um

yeah

notes goal post

because i really need motivation

(i stole some of these but shhhhh)

if this post gets 50 notes i'll drink water right now

100 i'll go to bed at midnight for the rest of the week

200 i'll actually do my laundry

500 i'll take a shower every day for the rest of the week

1,000 i'll brush my teeth every night for a full week

2,000 i'll stop binding for an unhealthy amount of time for a full week

3,000 i'll start actually wearing my ankle braces consistently

4,000 i'll eat breakfast every day for the rest of the week

5,000 i'll stop binding while sleeping

6,000 i'll stop wearing earrings i'm allergic to for a full week

7,000 i'll start doing makeup again

8,000 i'll stop eating chocolate for the rest of the week

9,000 i'll make my autodale masks

10,000 i'll touch grass every day for the rest of the month

11,000 i'll water my plants twice a week for the rest of the month

12,000 i'll put on my lotion when i need to for a full week

13,000 i'll eat at least two meals every day for the rest of the week

14,000 i'll finish my water bottle every day for a full week

15,000 i'll write more for forest files

18,000 i'll clean out my backpack

19,000 i'll take my vitamins every day for the rest of the week

20,000 i'll finish my stained glass project

21,000 i'll go to bed before midnight for the rest of the week

22,000 i'll do my summer reading

23,000 i'll move the knife out of my room

24,000 i'll eat three meals every day for three days

25,000 i'll stop purposefully triggering myself for a full week

50,000 i'll try my best to stay clean for two full weeks

i'll probably add more goals if this somehow get past 5k, but there it is for now :)

spam allowed

tagging allowed

ummm the deadline is halloween

*thumbs up*

go for it

[ardri-na-bpiteog]

Also increasingly aware that a LOT of people "manage" getting through the 40+ hour work week by sleeping less than is healthy and relying on stimulants like coffee and energy drinks to keep them going.

For people who are unwilling or unable to do this...work really does just dominate your life. Like we really should not have to rely on unhealthy practices just to have a social life or keep on top of housework or whatever.

I know I post about this a lot but I'm so TIRED all the time and it's just so depressing that this is how we're expected to spend the one life we have.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[amewinterswriting]

I love my blender. It's powerful enough to crush ice so I've been making all kinds of cold drinks over the summer - frappes, iced coffees, strawberry daiquiris, smoothies, etc. I can live without most appliances but the first thing I'd do if my blender broke is buy another one!

We need to embrace the fact that the tumblr userbase is aging. What’s everybody’s favorite kitchen appliance?

[perfectlyripeclementine]

calling my lover "mine" but not in the way that my toothbrush or notebook are mine, mine in the way my neighborhood is mine, and also everybody else's, "mine" like mine to tend to, mine to care for, mine to love. "mine" not like possession but devotion.

[hansoeii]

crowley

[amewinterswriting]

Fresh off the phone call with my doctor and I can report: I have polycystic ovarian syndrome! Woo! This isn't actually bad news, exactly - I knew it was very likely, given a family history and symptoms, and since I definitely don't want children, it's more a confirmation that what I was experiencing isn't normal and I shouldn't be expected to just 'deal with it' and that going onto birth control as a committed lesbian with a cis(ish) partner makes perfect sense.

Below the cut is frank and no nonsense description of menstrual symptoms. While not explicitly NSFW, it might be squicky or uncomfortable reading in public.

So, friends, Romans and fellow countrymen with uterii, here are some symptoms you might want to get checked out:

Are your periods irregular? As they might come earlier or later than expected, they might last for only a few days one month and then two weeks the next? You might skip the bleeding entirely but get other symptoms like mood instability, tenderness of breasts and cramping. You might get periods only a week apart from each other or five weeks apart from each other with no discernible reason.

Do you experience intense feelings of 'unexplainable' sadness or irrationality or irritability and then start your period a day or so later? You might chalk these episodes up to a kind of depression at the time, but over time you might notice a pattern of them only happening or getting noticeably worse pre-bleeding.

Do you bleed heavily during your period? As in, you only ever buy 'overnight' or '8 hour' sanitary products because if you used anything less absorbent you would bleed through them within an hour and stain clothing or bedding? Do you still somehow manage to bleed through an 'overnight' sanitary product despite putting a fresh one on before sleep and you have a graveyard of ruined bedsheets? Yeah, turns out that isn't normal and that's the one that really surprised me. You might also pass large clots of bloody substance (usually uterine lining that hasn't broken down properly but when everything is covered with blood, it's pretty difficult to tell for sure).

Is your pain while bleeding at a level that over the counter medication like paracetamol (tylenol) and ibuprofen at recommended dose and taken together still often doesn't eradicate the pain entirely, if at all. Stronger medication like co-codamol (codeine and paracetamol) may or may not help temporarily. You might experience the effects of any painkillers being short-lived, and you might have taken doses closer together than recommended (every 3 hours instead of 4, for example). You might have taken muscle relaxers like tranexamic acid with some limited success as managing cramping.

Is your pain so strong that it wakes you up as soon as pain medication wears off overnight? Do you have disturbed sleep (waking up at least once a night while bleeding) and struggle to get back to sleep again until the fresh dose of medication kicks in?

Do you naturally grow dark hair in places atypical of AFAB people? Facial hair and/or chest hair in particular. (Luckily I'm not all that concerned about my gender presentation - which is why I say cis(ish) - but I do find it funny that my beard grows the odd grey hair when I've never found any greys on my head hair!)

If any of this sounds familiar, it isn't normal and it's worth getting checked out. Even without POS, it could be something like thyroid not functioning normally, androgen insensitivity or any number of other things.

If you are going to get it checked out, a good doctor should recommend blood tests (and if not, push them for blood tests and describe your symptoms in as much bloody detail as you can). These should screen for all of the above. In my particular case, the blood tests were inconclusive because I was already taking progesterone to manage periods (highly recommend if you are able to take it - a daily pill, entirely stopped my periods after a couple of months and that's a fairly common use of it. It tends not to cause the erratic moods and unpredictable periods of estrogen-based contraception but do your own research) and that masked some of the hormonal markers of POS. (I would have had to have stopped birth control for three months to get more conclusive blood tests, which would have been nice to know before I had bloods drawn, so I could make that choice.)

If bloods are inconclusive (and possibly even if they are a strong indicator of a problem), you might be referred to get a transvaginal ultrasound. They will use an ultrasound device to get images externally (with you having a full bladder, like a pregnancy ultrasound you might have seen on television) and potentially internally, with a condom covered probe. They should ask you if you have any concerns about penetration, latex allergies and for your consent, and you may or may not have a chaperone/assistant present to check up on you and how you are feeling throughout. In my experience, it was awkward but painless, and I'd much rather have another transvaginal ultrasound than another pap/smear test.

Treatment options are limited with POS. My doctor did discuss his reluctance to recommend a hysterectomy with me, which is perfectly valid: it is a major operation with all the risks that involves, including anesthesia and proximity to other vital organs. There's also the long recovery period which would sign me off work for a period of time. We did discuss the fertility aspect briefly, but my doctor seemed far more worried about 'risks from complicated surgery' than 'you might want a child someday' and he readily accepted that I had already had the child-free conversation with my wife and we were both enthusiastically on board with never having children and had been for some time.

At the moment, I'm happy to continue taking progesterone, as it has entirely removed all my period-related symptoms with virtually no side effects (I feel like libido might be a little lower than it was and I might have gained a small amount of weight but both of those could also be lifestyle related changes). The only thing it doesn't stop is facial/body hair but that can be managed by usual cosmetic routes if desired. But this does give me the information to make informed choices if I do need to come off of birth control for any reasons (they do carry a small additional risk of breast cancer, and aren't suitable if you have high blood pressure or are prone to migraines and those are only the things I know off the top of my head that might result in me coming off them). But it's also just the confirmation that no, I wasn't being unreasonable about this, I shouldn't have had to 'just deal with it' for so long and I honestly wish I'd gotten the ball rolling on this years ago.

Another potential treatment for trans masc folks: testosterone does usually stop or reduce period symptoms, so that's worth considering and researching if you were planning to go on T anyway.

So yeah, if your uterus is making your life a pain and you don't know why, consider this your sign to go get it looked at, if you can. You don't have to live with it, there are potential options to manage and/or cure it, depending on what exactly you have going on. I won't lie, I had to drive a lot of this myself and specifically request that this gets looked at, and that was very difficult for a few reasons (I'm not comfortable with phonecalls, I've had to make and transport myself to all the appointments, I'm autistic and my mother isn't super fond of doctors or medication, so I've had to do this independently as an adult when this could have been picked up as a teenager and I'll probably always be bitter about that) but it has been so worth doing.

[amewinterswriting]

Secondary school in the early 00's in Wales was a very similar experience. I was so far in the closet that I wasn't even aware it was a closet and I tried to do the normal expected thing of being attracted to the opposite sex even though I didn't feel any attraction (I wouldn't learn about asexuality until much later) and just tried 'faking it' by choosing the least worst person (preferably entirely unobtainable) to pretend to be attracted to. Most of my friend group at that point turned out to be some flavour of queer, but all similarly so far in the closet we couldn't even name it to ourselves in the privacy of our own minds. We also all had some flavour of mental health issues for the duration of secondary school - at least partly linked to the intense denial. I'd been there for the aftermath of at least two different suicide attempts or friends before I turned 18.

Despite this, we were all the weirdo kids who got bullied because apparently kids can just smell the queer on us? And any attempt to get teachers involved wound up with being punished or brushed off for daring to be the problem. They were all absolutely aware that we were going through it and they hated us coming to them for support because it would mean that they would have to do something about it. So they minimised it, ignored it or gave us meaningless advice ("Have you tried being a sheep and fitting in more?" Is still burned in my brain)

And yes, I absolutely knew a trans kid. The only reason I know is because I was and still am a very close friend who supported their transition. They certainly didn't come out as trans in the hellhole that was that school - I shudder to think how badly that would have been. The only reason the original twitter poster thinks there weren't any trans people at their school is because they didn't prove they were a safe person to come out to.

And yes, I got into my fair share of physical altercations. Because that was literally the only thing that got bullies to knock it off.

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

[chloesimaginationthings]

"They call it the MANGLE" - FNAF 2 phone guy

[junodoom]

swordtember day 8: sun

[xxplastic-cubexx]

brain please wake up and draw

bonus :

[egophiliac]

since Eng is getting 7.5 soon(?), I felt motivated to go back to my Meleanor rig and make her a couple of lesson animations! ...except for alchemy, because the cauldron bubbles proved too hard to photoshop around, whoops.

maybe she just got lost on her way to the classroom...?

(credit: backgrounds are from the game, I just put her on top of 'em)

(aside from the backgrounds, this is not an edit, I drew her from scratch! please do not tag or treat as an edit!)

[bacchuschucklefuck]

no more fan-ta-sizing about it! everything's already changed~