#up high school result 2020

[transmechanicus]

this is. probably a very personal question.

Is it worth it? Transitioning? In spite of it all?

Completely, utterly, and absolutely. I’m one of those ppl who knew i was trans since i was like 8. I found out when i was probably 13/14 what transgender meant, but recoiled from it because i could not imagine a world that would accept me or where i would be happy with the result. At 15 i met my first other trans person, and they became my friend and partner and the first person to ever know i was trans. Being around them, known by them, was such a colossal psychological relief and source of joy unlike anything i had known before. It made separating from them after graduation all the more excruciating to lose that one person i had trusted with that truth.

Sometime over the next two years i came out to my Mom, but nothing really changed, and i had more or less resolved to rot and die under the identity i had been born into. I let my undergrad studies chew me up, neglected all but the most necessary body maintenance, and spent every moment outside work or class buried in video games or books. At some point something snapped out of place, or perhaps back into place. I knew i didn’t want to die like this. I wanted something more for my life and my flesh than being a half dead servitor stocking yogurt. I wanted to transition, and however slowly, however long it took, that’s what i resolved to do.

It took a while. I had no real finances, no privacy, and little independence. I was coming from a white low-self-expression, high-control household. I “messed up” while base coating warhammer models one time and gave myself black nails. My dad berated me about it for days before trying to pin my hands down and sand the paint off (didn’t work, thank you automotive primer). When i was ~22 i got my ears pierced, basically the first permanent part of my transition, and i had never known as much joy as i did driving home knowing the pain was a step of permanent progress. Around this time 2019/2020 i started being out online, more vocal about being transgender as opposed to just having a relatively inexpressive fandom blog with no info beyond my name.

When i was 24, two years ago i came out to my dad, and a week later i left for grad school halfway across the country. I had an apartment all to myself, and my own source of income. I spent my spare change building up a wardrobe of new clothes that i actually liked. I got my first year of grad school done mostly without anything remarkable. Went to some queer events at my school. Found a partner. Got loved to bits for a while. Re-came out to my parents over the summer, and this time it stuck. Started HRT that fall, 2023. Came out to my classmates and coworkers and was rewarded with support and acceptance. Lost the partner. Devastated. Resolve to get even hotter and cooler. Smash out 3 piercings and a tattoo inside a week. Develop personal fashion sense. Attend research conference. Get better at makeup. Go to some concerts. Increase HRT. Tiddy Arc. Buy bra with a supportive bestie. Start weekly therapy. Increase HRT. Cosplay at a major convention. Schedule another tattoo. More HRT. Bra no longer optional. Present day. Tattoo on Wednesday. 90% of progress packed into the last year or so. Undeniably hotter, happier, and more self-expressive than anything in the last 24 years prior.

Transitioning is more than worth it, it brings me so much relief and joy every day no matter how shitty my day is otherwise, and while i have known doubt, i have never for an instant known regret.

There is still time🖤🏳️‍⚧️💕

[loverboyfae]

i notice frequently this rhetoric of white people mocking other white people for their political involvement/racial politics/sjw behavior (outdated term i know but i have been seeing this attitude for a long time) that amounts to creating basically an anti-strawman? in essence it’s like. there are these white people getting up in arms about racial issues that no person of color actually cares about. no real person of color cares about racist jokes, that’s just sensitive white people. no real people of color (pre-2020) are advocating THAT strongly against the police, that’s just sensitive white people. as a result, i don’t have to do anything about these issues because they’re all being entirely made up by white savior types who all of us hate. (side note: I also used to see this rhetoric with a LOT of other issues like how sjw girls are campaigning against homophobia towards gay men that gay men don’t care about, or for trans people that trans people don’t care about, or for disabled people etc., but i feel like it only really still survives in racial politics)

i think about this often, but i’m especially thinking about an experience i had recently that made it so actually visible to me how much of a lie it is. my campus had an encampment and there was a lot of social media presence saying how everyone there was just rich and privileged white people who could afford to play pretend at protesting and have never had to be scared of the cops in their lives. and i saw how, while there was still a majority of white people because that’s the make up of my school, there was a HIGH percentage of students of color, of Black students, of Muslim students; way higher than i have seen in just a headcount of my classes. and they were bringing with them writings from authors of color and learnings from histories of other protests which they had also been arrested at. i knew people there personally who i know are not just well off kids who can afford whatever happens to them. people WERE making sacrifices doing stuff that can enact change that helps palestinians. there were palestinians there!!!

idk. it’s just very common and very suspect rhetoric and it boggles me that people still use it. tldr: if someone is taking you that an issue affecting marginalized people is only being advocated about by those who are not, question why they only hear it from the people not being harmed before you dismiss the issue. people may not feel safe around them, or they may be willfully manipulating the facts

[art]

Creator Spotlight: @chaaistheanswer

Hi everyone! I am Clara, but you can also call me chaa! I am a digital artist based in Auckland, New Zealand, with a bachelor’s degree in Creative Media Production. After graduating from uni, I moved out to pursue my art career and I’ve been a freelance digital artist ever since. I love concept art, especially character design! Creating characters influenced by my love for fantasy is what I live for. Thank you for stopping by, and I hope you enjoyed my art! And thank you, Tumblr, for this opportunity!

Check out our interview with Clara below!

Did you originally have a background in art? If not, how did you start?

I specialized in art in high school and have a bachelor’s degree in Creative Media Production from Massey University with an animation pathway. For our thesis film, which I worked on with several of my classmates, I took on the role of producer, art director, and concept artist. Our short film was featured in the Wellington Film Festival Terror-Fi in 2020. After graduating, I went on to become a freelance artist, but my goal is to work for the gaming industry as a character concept artist. Ever since I first picked up a pencil, I knew I wanted to become an artist!

Have you ever had an art block? If so, how did you overcome it?

Art block is quite common among artists, and unfortunately, I too have fallen prey to the affliction. I have several ways of overcoming art block: watching movies, playing games, reading, or going out for a drive with my sister. These are just a few things I love to do to help keep my creative juices flowing!

What is one habit you find yourself doing a lot as an artist?

I tend to obsessively research about completely unrelated topics while I draw. I find learning new things helps improve my concept designs, especially in creating backgrounds for my characters.

Over the years as an artist, what were your biggest inspirations behind your creativity?

Video games and anime were my biggest inspirations! Anything with a captivating story that’ll send me to the edge of my seat, and loveable characters. I’m particularly drawn to high and dark fantasy.

How has technology changed the way you approach your work?

Technology has made a huge impact on us artists over the last few years. I used to draw a lot on paper, but since getting a tablet, I find myself searching for the undo and redo buttons and even trying to zoom constantly while I draw on paper. I used to only draw for myself as well, but after posting my art online, I now have an audience to whom I can share my art. Because of this, I am able to earn a living doing what I love by creating illustrations for clients.

What is a recent creative project that you are proud of?

I am very proud of this recent commission I’ve done for a client! Fortunately, the piece turned out exactly how I wanted it to look, and my client was very happy with the result. I am also in the process of working on a Webtoon, which is going as smoothly as I hoped it would be before its re-release!

What advice would you give to younger you about making art that's personal or truthful to your own experiences?

The best advice I would give my younger self is to never hold back! Try not to think about the negatives of creating and sharing art that you believe in. Embrace vulnerability, and don’t be afraid to dig deep into your own emotions and experiences. Always explore, and don’t limit yourself to your own bubble. And most important of all, stay true to yourself! Stay true to your values and beliefs, and never compromise your own authenticity for the sake of pleasing others. Your art is a reflection of you as a person.

Who on Tumblr inspires you and why?

@yuumei-art has been an inspiration to me since my early Deviantart days. I admire how she uses her skills to focus on environmentalism and cyber activism. @nipuni is another inspiration of mine. I found her when I was in the process of recovering from Dragon Age Solavellan hell. I admire how she manages to capture faces well while also sticking to her style. Her paintings are so beautiful and very pleasing to my eyes!

Thanks for stopping by, Clara! If you haven't seen her Meet the Artist piece, be sure to check it out here. For more of Clara's work, follow her Tumblr, @chaaistheanswer!

[richiehugs]

Just a countryboy

Richard was an ordinary country boy. The oldest of four siblings, he had learnt early how to take responsibility in his life. He grew tall very fast as a teenager, being the tallest in the family at a height of 6'3" / 190 cm. As a result of his rapid growth in height, he had his abs out, though he was really thin in the arms and legs. He was severely underweight to his height, with about 150 lbs / 68 kg.

As time passed by, he dropped out of high school early, and started to work at a local facility. The job included lifting heavy objects, so he got his appetite worked up as well. With his growing appetite and regular drinking with the colleagues, he gradually started to gain weight, but for a countryboy, he didn't have anyone to judge him.

At some point, he met a beautiful girl at a party, visiting from abroad. They got immediately in love and decided to move in together. Thus their life together began. They were just a young couple, enjoying life. Though Richard started to seem rounding out… a bit more.

It turned out the girl didn't mind her boyfriend not being thin as a stick. As a matter of fact, she was a rather good chef, and got later a job at a local snack bar/restaurant. Richard was in heaven. He had a beautiful, hard-working, great cook at the house. So he decided to takes things to the next level, and got married and started a family.

But Richard was soon to realize that a family comes with greater responsibility. They got really surprised when instead of one kid they got triplets right away. He must work really hard to feed his family and himself, but after all, he got a raise and their family was thriving. And so did he. For with the dad-roll, he got a thick dadbod.

Remember? He was already in a careless-thickening-phase before he became a father, but then his weight really started to pile on. Twenty pounds in a couple of months wasn't a joke. So he met up with an old trainer friend to stop his weight gain - but after a couple of sessions he gave up his goals for summer. He wanted to spend more time with his family, and having to work hard, with triplets at home - there was no time for gym.

So he rather kept eatin' than gymmin'. In the end, he never lost his moobs and gut, ballooning up to be fatter than ever. And considering that his kids are barely three years old - who knows what the next fifteen years will bring?

This is the ten year story of Richard, a young countryboy to a fat dad . You can tell how the different phases of life has affected him: 2013 to 2020 to 2023, 150 lbs to 200 lbs to 240 lbs, single to pre-covid dating to post-covid dadbod, 5% to 15% to 25% bodyfat.

(Disclaimer: the numbers are rough estimates.) Do not reuse any of the pictures.

[simply-ivanka]

How the Biden-Harris Economy Left Most Americans Behind

A government spending boom fueled inflation that has crushed real average incomes.

By The Editorial Board -- Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris plans to roll out her economic priorities in a speech on Friday, though leaks to the press say not to expect much different than the last four years. That’s bad news because the Biden-Harris economic record has left most Americans worse off than they were four years ago. The evidence is indisputable.

President Biden claims that he inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, but this isn’t close to true. The economy in January 2021 was fast recovering from the pandemic as vaccines rolled out and state lockdowns eased. GDP grew 34.8% in the third quarter of 2020, 4.2% in the fourth, and 5.2% in the first quarter of 2021. By the end of that first quarter, real GDP had returned to its pre-pandemic high. All Mr. Biden had to do was let the recovery unfold.

Instead, Democrats in March 2021 used Covid relief as a pretext to pass $1.9 trillion in new spending. This was more than double Barack Obama’s 2009 spending bonanza. State and local governments were the biggest beneficiaries, receiving $350 billion in direct aid, $122 billion for K-12 schools and $30 billion for mass transit. Insolvent union pension funds received a $86 billion rescue.

The rest was mostly transfer payments to individuals, including a five-month extension of enhanced unemployment benefits, a $3,600 fully refundable child tax credit, $1,400 stimulus payments per person, sweetened Affordable Care Act subsidies, an increased earned income tax credit including for folks who didn’t work, housing subsidies and so much more.

The handouts discouraged the unemployed from returning to work and fueled consumer spending, which was already primed to surge owing to pent-up savings from the Covid lockdowns and spending under Donald Trump. By mid-2021, Americans had $2.3 trillion in “excess savings” relative to pre-pandemic levels—equivalent to roughly 12.5% of disposable income.

So much money chasing too few goods fueled inflation, which was supercharged by the Federal Reserve’s accommodative policy. Historically low mortgage rates drove up housing prices. The White House blamed “corporate greed” for inflation that peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, even as the spending party in Washington continued.

In November 2021, Congress passed a $1 trillion bill full of green pork and more money for states. Then came the $280 billion Chips Act and Mr. Biden’s Green New Deal—aka the Inflation Reduction Act—which Goldman Sachs estimates will cost $1.2 trillion over a decade. Such heaps of government spending have distorted private investment.

While investment in new factories has grown, spending on research and development and new equipment has slowed. Overall private fixed investment has grown at roughly half the rate under Mr. Biden as it did under Mr. Trump. Manufacturing output remains lower than before the pandemic.

Magnifying market misallocations, the Administration conditioned subsidies on businesses advancing its priorities such as paying union-level wages and providing child care to workers. It also boosted food stamps, expanded eligibility for ObamaCare subsidies and waved away hundreds of billions of dollars in student debt. The result: $5.8 trillion in deficits during Mr. Biden’s first three years—about twice as much as during Donald Trump’s—and the highest inflation in four decades.

Prices have increased by nearly 20% since January 2021, compared to 7.8% during the Trump Presidency. Inflation-adjusted average weekly earnings are down 3.9% since Mr. Biden entered office, compared to an increase of 2.6% during Mr. Trump’s first three years. (Real wages increased much more in 2020, but partly owing to statistical artifacts.)

Higher interest rates are finally bringing inflation under control, which is allowing real wages to rise again. But the Federal Reserve had to raise rates higher than it otherwise would have to offset the monetary and fiscal gusher. The higher rates have pushed up mortgage costs for new home buyers.

Three years of inflation and higher interest rates are stretching American pocketbooks, especially for lower income workers. Seriously delinquent auto loans and credit cards are higher than any time since the immediate aftermath of the 2008-09 recession.

Ms. Harris boasts that the economy has added nearly 16 million jobs during the Biden Presidency—compared to about 6.4 million during Mr. Trump’s first three years. But most of these “new” jobs are backfilling losses from the pandemic lockdowns. The U.S. has fewer jobs than it was on track to add before the pandemic.

What’s more, all the Biden-Harris spending has yielded little economic bang for the taxpayer buck. Washington has borrowed more than $400,000 for every additional job added under Mr. Biden compared to Mr. Trump’s first three years. Most new jobs are concentrated in government, healthcare and social assistance—60% of new jobs in the last year.

Administrative agencies are also creating uncertainty by blitzing businesses with costly regulations—for instance, expanding overtime pay, restricting independent contractors, setting stricter emissions limits on power plants and factories, micro-managing broadband buildout and requiring CO2 emissions calculations in environmental reviews.

The economy is still expanding, but business investment has slowed. And although the affluent are doing relatively well because of buoyant asset prices, surveys show that most Americans feel financially insecure. Thus another political paradox of the Biden-Harris years: Socioeconomic disparities have increased.

Ms. Harris is promising the same economic policies with a shinier countenance. Don’t expect better results.

[jazmine-here]

Jazmine.

My name is Jazmine, a reemerging writer who tinkers with art. I was dubbed "Jazzy-B-Real" in my youth and "Otherwise_Uncolonized" in my young adulthood.

Jazzy-B-Real:

Otherwise_Uncolonized:

My experimental youtube page was "Constellations of Neverland" at one point. I've been offline since 2020. In 2024, I saw people online celebrating my middle school and high school art while wishing me well due to my disappearance. I'm happy to say that I am well after a rough post-Covid era and a lot of growing up. During Covid's reign, I had purged the internet of what I viewed to be carbon footprints, yet people have kept the light alive in some dust clouds.

I am eternally grateful to you all for retaining such light. As the blooming adult I am now, I've learned to view everything with balance—including the broken person I was—and there are lovely works that I dearly miss as a result. Those works are the "darlings" from my young life.

All in all, I'm in the heat of writing original work. You may see previews here. Thank you so much to those who have saved some of my fandom pieces:

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

So Hazz being ‘stunned’ about the backlash to the Pat Tillman award, reminds me of his shock at the ‘frosty’ reception he received at Prince Philip’s funeral. How on earth does he think letting his ‘feelings’ loose via the much hated media will improve the situation is beyond me. I can’t even remember why announcement the winning of the award was done so early, but more than probably RF related. Is it a case of keeping digging to get out of the hole or a massive PR plan that’s going over my head?

Harry wants attention and legitimacy in the US. He thought being a British prince and Diana’s son was enough to make us love and respect him (like it sort of did in the UK) but it didn’t happen.

So now he’s scrambling. Except he’s been scrambling since March 2020 when Edward Young and the BRF called his bluff on half in/half out. Let’s review.

January 2020: He demanded half in/half out and they all laughed at him.

March 2020: Harry signed with the Harry Walker Agency to be a speaker on their lecture/hotel dinner circuit. He gave like two or three speeches to pathetic reception and then gave up.

April 2020: Harry became a mental health advocate during the COVID pandemic and crisis, making comments like he didn’t understand how people living in high-rise apartments could cope without having a green space and that everyone needed some kind of green space for their sanity (yeah, no shit, Sherlock. That’s why COVID was also an enormous mental health crisis.) and encouraging everyone to become certified mental health counselors if they’re bored.

Summer 2020: Harry uses Diana’s memory to justify invading an elementary school with a camera crew during peak summer COVID cycle to plant forget-me-nots. Everyone pops off and it’s clear the backlash stunned the Sussexes.

Fall 2020: The Sussexes rebrand to become misinformation activists.

Winter 2020/2021: The Sussexes rebrand to the Emancipation of Meghan Markle. Philip dies. Harry rebrands to Hero Harry by demanding to wear his military uniform, resulting in no one wearing their military uniforms. He also pivots back to William's Best Brother at the funeral by ignoring the actual arrangements to walk alongside William (as opposed to behind him; Peter was supposed to walk next to William).

Summer 2021: Meghan wants world domination and the Sussexes rebrand to become humanitarian ambassadors.

Fall 2021: Harry rebrands to become a hairdresser global vax advocate. He and Meghan become the figurehead for the Vax Live concert.

December 2021: Harry pivots back to Diana and says his work with COVID is as groundbreaking as her work with HIV/AIDS patients.

February 2022: Harry rebrands as a dude who watches American football by going to the Superbowl and looking bored af.

March 2022: Harry and Meghan buy a new NAACP award for themselves for all the work they did fighting unconscious bias and racism in the BRF.

Spring 2022: Harry goes back to being Hero Harry with The Hague Invictus Games. He pivots back to being a royal when he attends the Platinum Jubilee with Meghan.

Summer 2022: The Emancipation of Meghan Markle continues and Harry re-rebrands as a humanitarian activist, giving an unpassionate speech to a mostly-empty conference room at the United Nations. Unfortunately The Queen dies and Harry gets to pivot back again to being a royal. He gets thrown a Hero Harry PR bone when he's allowed to wear his uniform to the Grandchildren's Vigil and gets to stand behind William and Kate in the procession.

Fall 2022: The Emancipation of Prince Harry's Unconscious Bias begins, with critically-reviled Netflix docuseries.

January 2023: Harry pivots back to Diana and picks up her mantle to destroy Charles and the BRF. He takes it a step further by going after William, when everyone knows Diana only wanted to destroy Charles to put William in his rightful place as soon as possible.

Winter/Spring 2023: Harry abandons his "I hate my family, they're evil" rebrand to go back into the royal fold by attending Charles's coronation.

May 2023: Harry pivots back to Diana by claiming a near-death chase by paparazzi on the busy streets of downtown Manhattan. Damn, if only there was a white fiat instead of witnesses.

Summer 2023: Harry pivots back to his Hero Harry at the Dusseldorf Invictus Games. He also becomes Polo Harry and becomes #husbandgoals when he joins Meghan at a Beyonce concert and looks bored out of his mind.

Fall 2023: Harry pivots back to mental health when he joins Meghan for a panel with Carson Daly on the dangers of social media.

Winter 2023: Harry rebrands as Hero Harry and purchases the Living Legend in Aviation Award for himself, while accusing John Travolta of dining out on his mother. Harry pivots to Hollywood and goes to Jamaica for a movie premiere.

Spring 2024: Harry goes back to Hero Harry and Invictus Games. Harry also pivots back to being a British royal prince with a very misguided tour of Nigeria.

Summer 2024: Hero Harry continues and he purchases the Pat Tillman ESPY.

Look at all the times Harry changed tactics. He can't stick with something long enough to make an impact because he - like his wife - is so impatient for validation. He just wants to be loved! Why won't they love him?! "That's okay," crones Meghan in her soothing Southern California vocal fry as she rocks her toddler husband to calm him out of his anxiety spiral (because she's the only one allowed to collapse in a heap on the floor). "Hush little baby don't you cry. Mama's going to buy you valor and honor."

And that cheers Harry up because Americans like gold (after all, we're the land of 'everyone gets a participation trophy,' Olympic gold medals, and world domination). If we see how many gold trophies and awards he has, then we'll respect him the same way the British public respected and adored him for his titles.

But that's their mistake. They've missed the fundamental realization that Americans don't care about titles and awards. We value action, deeds, follow-through, promises made and promises kept. That's the backlash (and the cause and effect, to quote an earlier post I made) that Harry keeps getting. He doesn't understand that we're a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-and-don't-complain-how-hard-it-is-just-do-it nation of rebels and troublemakers. We're not going to sit idly by and watch a rich foreigner - from the monarchy that we booted in the first place - wax poetic on our national problems and pat himself on the back for buying awards that make him feel like he's fixed all our problems.

Not when there's real people doing the actual work whose credit he keeps stealing to buy those awards in the first place.

Anyway. I don't remember what my point was...

Oh, right. This is just Harry trying to find value and relevance here in the US. Everything else - Diana, COVID, misinformation, mental health, Hollywood, Meghan, racism and unconscious bias, British prince - sinks faster than he can claim he never got swimming lessons even though William was personally trained on how not to drown by David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson themselves (or whatever his pathetic excuse is. Hero Harry and the veterans is the only thing Harry has left that people pay attention to, and the media is only paying attention to that because Meghan buys them to cover her during all of the Invictus events.

So very long rant short, Harry keeps defaulting back to Invictus Games because it's the only thing that *works* for him. It's the only thing he has left that ties him to the life he used to know (globally adored and nationally beloved British royal soldier). He's going to hold onto it harder, faster, and more angrily than a toddler holding on to something they're not supposed to have.

[walkawaytall]

I really wish there was more interest in how to handle ADHD other than just addressing the symptoms that affect the people around us.

Like, the best pharmaceutical treatment we have right now is stimulants, and I agree that being on stimulants 24 hours a day, 365 days a year is probably not good for your body. Hell, I’m on a less-than-ideal dose of my medication from a concentration perspective because the ideal dose had my resting heart rate sitting at a cool 115BPM. I know taking med holidays is important. I know all of this.

But because ADHD isn’t just an attention problem (or may not actually be an attention problem at all at its core), it sucks that the only time period medical professionals seem to be concerned about treating are the “important” times: the length of a school or workday. Forget the fact that ADHD affects executive function, forget the fact that people with ADHD often experience chronic and unending anxiety and/or depression as a result of the ADHD, forget that there are important times that have nothing to do with an 8-hour school or work day, forget the rejection sensitivity dysphoria, the sensory issues that make things like clothing, food, and group situations a nightmare to try to navigate, the household stuff that has to be taken care of outside of the 8-hour school or work day. It feels like none of that matters because it doesn’t affect a group of fifteen or more people.

On top of ADHD, I have been plagued with anxiety-related issues for the majority of my life. I likely have a form of OCD and I have a history with a restrictive eating disorder; both of those conditions are very closely associated with high levels of anxiety. I’ve been on anxiety medications before. I was first given an as-needed medication that took the edge off but also made everything feel a little fuzzy, like there was a pane of glass between me and the rest of the world; I was put on an SSRI that somehow made my OCD-related intrusive thoughts about 50x worse than usual and had me wondering at one point if I should be hospitalized; and I’m currently on buspirone, which is doing what it’s supposed to do without the side effects of the others thankfully. But nothing, and I mean nothing, has reduced my anxiety as much as my ADHD medication.

Two hours after my first stimulant dosage, I just suddenly didn’t feel on-edge any more. I estimate that being on ADHD medication has reduced my anxiety by about 70% (buspirone’s for the other 30%). I started taking it in the summer of 2020 and I remember, in 2021, when I saw my boss in person for the first time since lockdown, he remarked on how much more confident I seemed, how I was more likely to speak up in meetings, etc. And I was like…yeah, man, it’s a wonder what not feeling anxious every second of every day will do for someone.

ADHD affects so much more of my life than just attention and anxiety, too. I have sensory issues with mine, which is pretty common, and they make eating — an already sometimes-complicated task due to the ED history — difficult at times because, while I can eat foods that I don’t particularly like, if something is what I call “the bad texture”, I will gag no matter how hard I work to overcome it (believe me, I’ve tried). And my brain sometimes decides that foods that were previously fine are now “the bad texture” and they may or may not shift back to being okay eventually; I don’t know.

The sensory issues affect me socially. My therapist and I have recently come to the conclusion that I’m probably not actually an introvert, but if I’m around larger groups, that means noise and movement and probably being touched, and too much of that causes my brain to either freak out or shut down. I used to always say, “I love people, but when I’m done, I’m done.” And that was likely because the overstimulation was building and building in the background, and at a certain point, my brain would just be like, “We gotta get outta here.” I was Queen of Irish Goodbyes for a very long time because of this.

And the executive dysfunction affects…well..everything? Not just work, not just school (but also those because if my environment is chaotic, my brain feels chaotic, and it is difficult to maintain a non-chaotic environment if you keep getting stuck on order of operations when picking up a room).

I’m not saying that I want to be on longer-lasting stimulants or that I want to be on the higher dose that I know helps my concentration more, cardiovascular system by damned. What I’m saying is, I wish treatment research had been more holistic rather than just figuring out what would give teachers and managers an easier time despite what the person with ADHD might be dealing with as soon as their meds wear off.

Maybe current research is working on it; I don’t know. I just know that, the older I get, the more frustrated I am with my brain and the more apparent the deficiencies I used to be able to counteract with pre-chronic-illness energy and crushing perfectionism become, and I wish there was an answer to this that actually helped me most of the time rather than forcing me to pick which parts of my day/week is “important” and making sure I’m medicated for those parts.

[redgoldsparks]

August Reading and Reviews by Maia Kobabe

I post my reviews throughout the month on Storygraph and Goodreads, and do roundups here and on patreon. Reviews below the cut.

Heavyweight: A Family Story of Holocaust, Empire and Memory by Solomon J Brager After listening to this excellent interview with the author on the Gender Reveal podcast, I was very excited to pick up Solomon Brager's hefty nonfiction comic about family history, Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and empire. This is an incredibly well researched and thoughtful book. The author grew up with outsized family stories of a Jewish boxing champion great-grandfather from Essen who punched Nazis, and a great-grandmother who carried her children across countries and mountains to escape to the US. But these stories became much more complicated when the author started digging for receipts. One factor is the immense financial privilege of the family which already had bank accounts and significant savings in New York. Another factor is the layers of violence and empire that build up the power of the countries fighting on both sides of WWII. The author's quest to research the family story is a major thread in the story itself and I am absolutely awed by the amount of work that went into uncovering and shaping this story.

My Dearest Patrolman vol 1 by Niyama As a delinquent teen, Shin was mentored and protected by a friendly patrolman, Seiji. Having one supportive adult in his life completely turned Shin's life around and he also decided to become a patrolman. Years later, Shin and Seiji meet again, and Shin decides to confess the feelings he's been nursing for a decade. Lighthearted dating hijinks ensue! Strikes a nice balance between silly, sweet, and spicy.

Go For It, Nakamura! by Syundei An extremely silly and cute high school rom-com. Shy Nakamura has a massive crush on his classmate Hirose. Despite the fact that they see each other every day, Nakamura has never introduced himself. What will it take to get him to finally speak up and try to befriend his crush??

Something Not Nothing by Sarah Leavitt In 2020, Sarah Leavitt's partner of more than 20 years, Domino, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. Leavitt, a cartoonist and writer, tried to make sense of this decision through comics and abstract watercolor paintings. The result is a gorgeous, heart wrenching, deeply human meditation on love and loss. There were pages that lifted my spirits and pages that pierced me to my core. I sobbed through the majority of reading it, but couldn't put it down. Leavitt's mapmaking of the landscape of grief is a gift to us all.

Assassin's Fate by Robin Hobb read by Elliot Hill What can I even say about this, the final novel of a 16 book fantasy series, which I have been reading and re-reading now for twenty years, other than holy shit??? I can't believe I've reached the end of Fitz's journey at last. This book is SO long (nearly 1000 pages) and much of it is brutal to read; characters we love are beaten, abused, tortured, and left in pretty hopeless situations for much of the novel. I think Hobb's insistence on revisiting almost every single character from the Rain Wilds and Live Ship sub-series expanded the first third of the book more than needed; had I been editing it, it would have been shorter. And yet! And yet! I was riveted by this too-long book, devouring it in big gulps, scream-texting about it to several friends who were reading the series along with me. The ending hit SO HARD. Its PERFECT, TERRIBLE, WRETCHED, one of the cruelest endings for several beloved characters and while also giving them a kind of grace and eternity I did not see coming, but should have. This book fulfills the themes of the entire series so well, completing repeated patterns, showing cycles that ripple through three generations, while also leaving a door open for the future that I'm already daydreaming about. Literally how did Robin Hobb come up with all of this. Its flawed but its perfect. I am in awe.

BL Metamorphosis vol 1 by Kaori Tsurutani translated by Jocelyne Allen An older woman picks up a BL manga by chance at a bookstore and discovers a new fandom late in life. She ends up befriending a shy high school girl who works at the bookstore and also loves BL, but has no one to talk to about it. This is such a freaking cute premise and I love the loose sketchy art style!

BL Metamorphosis vol 2 by Kaori Tsurutani translated by Jocelyne Allen Unlikely friends Urara, a shy high schooler, and Ichinoi, a widowed calligraphy teacher, bonded over their love of a BL manga series. Now they're heading to a doujinshi event to try and meet their favorite author. This brought me right back to my early days of visiting cons and meeting authors for the first time!

BL Metamorphosis vol 3 by Kaori Tsurutani translated by Jocelyne Allen Urara has been reading and loving BL manga years, but it takes a push from her older friend Ichinoi before Urara considers the idea of possibly drawing her own. Can she find the time to write and draw a story around her cram school schedule? This series PERFECTLY captures the BL reader to BL writer pipeline, I'm so charmed.

BL Metamorphosis vol 4 by Kaori Tsurutani translated by Jocelyne Allen Urara applies for a table at a comics festival, so now she has a deadline for her first original comic. Can she get it done in time? Ichinoi is there to cheer lead and support in every way she can (finding a printer, sewing a table cloth, agreeing to work the table, packing their lunches) but only Urara can get the comic done. This book contained one of my very favorite exchanges of the whole series, when Ichinoi asked "Is it fun to draw manga?" and Urara responded honestly, "No. It's hard to look at my own art for so long. But it feels like I'm doing what I should be doing."

BL Metamorphosis vol 5 by Kaori Tsurutani translated by Jocelyne Allen Urara and Ichinoi struggle through a long, slow day of trying to sell an original comic at their first ever comic event. Unbeknownst to them, their favorite author is there as an attendee. This book felt like one of the most relatable portrayals of the early days of a comics career I've ever seen. I'm obsessed with this series and definitely want to watch the live action movie adaptation!

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez This complex fantasy novel weaves together a multi-strand narrative of violence, love, and the end of empire in an original world of old gods and talking animals. In the main thread, two warriors carry the corpse of an almost-dead goddess across the country in a five day dash from the mountains to the sea. The goddess was once the Moon, torn out of the sky by her own desire for immortality. Her children became the despotic Moon Throne, a cruel dynasty which has repressed and punished the people and elements. The Moon Thrones' heirs, three brothers with extraordinary powers, chase the warriors and hunger for the last dregs of the fallen Moon's power. In another thread, an unnamed protagonist watches this drama unfold as a play being performed in a dreamy underwater sleep realm, while recalling the stories their lola told of the old country before the war. This novel is often compared with NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season in terms of scope, literary prose, and ambition and I can see why. This novel employs some very creative and unusual writing choices that make it more rewarding to read in print than to experience in audio. I had a content warning for gore and cannibalism going in, so I was prepared for the violence of the middle section. I really enjoyed this novel and I can tell I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks read by James Fouhey, Lisa Flanagan, Graham Halstead, Katherine Littrell, Michael Obiora This book follows multiple different story lines, some of which captured me much more than others. In Kentucky in 1850, an enslaved black boy watches a new thoroughbred racing colt's birth and begins a lifelong relationship with the horse, who will go on to be one of the most well-known champions in the history of American horse racing. In New York City in the 1950s, a gallery owner known for her modern tastes falls for an equestrian portrait of the great Kentucky race horse, Lexington. And in 2019, in Washington DC, a Nigerian-American art history student and a Smithsonian scientist dig into the mystery of an unlabelled horse skeleton in the museum's collection- and its possible connection with several paintings by a Civil War era equestrian artist. I admired the amount of research that went into this novel, and the way the paintings of Lexington tied the different timelines together. However, I really struggled with how the interior emotional lives of several of the Black male characters in this book were portrayed by this author. When Jarret, the enslaved Black groom, is separated from Lexington and forced into plantation labor temporarily, Brooks writes of him gaining a depth of spirit and understanding for the human condition from this experience. This felt deeply weird to read from a white author! I'm not really the right reader to say whether Brooks did a good job or not, but it put me on edge. When the final climatic moment of the novel read like a heavy-handed lesson in how Black men are still at risk of police violence even in 2019, I wondered who exactly that point was supposed to be for, and if Brooks is the one who needed to make it. So, I felt very mixed as I finished this book. There's a lot to admire craft-wise, and I can understand why so many readers were impressed by it. But I honestly I don't recommend it, unless you want to read it in a book club setting and have a nuanced discussion about what works and what doesn't in this novel.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson A young girl named Sophie spends her summers on an island of the coast of Finland with her very present grandmother and her rather absent father. Each chapter tells of an incident experienced through the eyes of the very young and the very old- the growth of mosses and wildflowers on the island stones; boxes and bottles of flotsam and jetsam washing to shore; a great storm; an adventure in trespassing; an unexpected visitor; a night spent outside sleeping in a tent. Without much of an overarching plot this book is still a moving picture of living very close to and in tune with the seasons and elements in a very specific part of the world. It's brief and open ended but I really enjoyed it!

Delicious in Dungeon vol 14 by Ryoko Kui As the smoke clears after the explosive ending of the previous penultimate volume, our heroes gather themselves, check on the survivors, and set out on the most collaborative challenge: cooking and eating an entire chimera body. This is a satisfying and in some ways gentler ending than I expected from this series, but I really enjoyed it!

Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä translated by Thomas Teal  In the autumn of 1963, Tove Jansson, her partner Tuulikki 'Tooti' Pietilä, and their taciturn friend Brunström set about trying to finish a small cabin on a tiny Finnish island before the onset of winter (and possible legal delays of building permits). Tove and Tooti spent their summers on the island for the next 3o years. This book contains excerpts of journal and introspective writing on the nature of the island, the sea, the changeable weather, the futility of human efforts to shift the natural environment. These writings are paired with delicate prints Tooti made of water, stones, and ocean views. I read this directly after The Summer Book and after listening to a short biography of Jansson- this made a good companion to those other texts, but might have been a bit spare on its own.

[queer-ragnelle]

So, regarding your novels, what made you write backwards? I'm so curious about it.

TL;DR I started writing in Mordred and Galahad perspective. I then became possessed by the "older" characters and went "back" in the timeline to write their origins (starting with parentified Agravaine). I did this several times until I ended up with Ragnelle/Gawain as book 1, "the beginning," of what turned into an Epic many books long.

Let me give you a timeline...

1900s: I am born and develop Arthurian brain worms.

21st century: The worms declare Ragnelle/Gawain are my favorites and I write their Wedding multiple times for fun based off what can be gleaned from Wikipedia and retellings as I have no medieval resources at my disposal.

February 2020: I think Mordred and Galahad would make neat narrative foils and write a short story about them playing chess.

March 2020: The plague. I'm furloughed from my job. Writing becomes my full-time focus. I write 60,000 words in Mordred and Galahad perspective, plotting their story to be a trilogy.

June 2020: I'm back to work but I'm still writing. With money and curiosity at my disposal, I begin hoarding Arthurian books. Local quirky secondhand bookstore owner had an Arthurian fixation in his youth—I clear his shelves. He asks if I'm a medievalist major and I have to break it to him I'm just a High School drop out at the mercy of the Tell-Tale knights chattering in my head. I learn more lore. I splurge to buy the Vulgate cycle. I'm forever changed.

Late 2020: Reading medlit and retellings and watching all the movies super charged the brain worms. The Vulgate especially. I develop an obsession with circumventing the Orkneys/Welshmen blood feud with the power of gay sex. (Joan Wolf did it first in her 1988 book The Road to Avalon with Agravaine/Lamorak.)

January 2021: Historical research shows that Islam didn't exist yet during the 5th/6th century I'd been writing in. I order Zoroastrianism by Mary Boyce to make sure I'm depicting Ragnelle and Gromer's religion properly. But it's nbd their page time is minimal as background characters right? ....right?

2021 continued: The Agravaine/Lamorak brain worms take on a life of their own as I'm hospitalized and bedridden. Chronic pain and isolation become my themes. I write endlessly on my phone from bed. 2/3 novels are completed and readable straight through with a third book in pieces. These are currently at a combined total of nearly 140,000 words. (Plus the notes file with scenes I haven't moved yet...whoa.)

Late 2021: I rediscover old Ragnelle/Gawain stuff and decide to write about their wedding. Again. But this time with legit sources. Except Ragnelle isn't some ambiguous character of color, she's now very specifically Persian [Iranian] Zoroastrian. So the whole thing takes place in Persia and research goes crazy. Someone gives me their college log in so I can download and hoard essays and textbook PDFs. I do beta-read trades with people in facebook groups (bad bad idea) and yet...

End of 2021: I get sample edits from various editors including one guy who insulted my "lack of education" and said emulating J. R. R. Tolkien's old style didn't work anymore and I should take inspiration from The Hunger Games....for my queer romance in Persia. Right. Anyway I pay the $100 for the pages edited so he'll go away and continue searching for my unicorn editor....

2022: Ultimately facebook group scouting finally yields results as I stumble upon a fellow Ragnelle/Gawain enthusiast who would become my editor!! Editor says I have to cut the giant book into thirds, so what is now book 1 ends up chopped.

2023: I'm still revising book 1, now titled The Moonlit Knight, with my editor. All the while I'm drafting book 2, sporadically cheating to write in other books including an Elaine and Perceval book that appeared out of no where, and scouting out beta readers. One beta reader came via a tumblr mutual who connected me through instagram. A second beta reader discovered in a discord server. Another beta reader from a different discord server. So on and so forth.

Early 2024: Beta reading continues, until I have readers for every angle I require; queer people of all flavors, Zoroastrians, Arthurian enthusiasts, Jewish readers, people with DID knowledge etc! Slowly but surely I work through revising the book with all these wonderful people to a final 95,000 words!

Mid 2024: But now...it needed a cover. I commission a tumblr mutual and work for weeks with them on that, still editing/revising and having betas read book 2, Sunshine's Lady, which is currently almost 132,000 words long and half edited/beta read.

September 2024: I still haven't published. lol. But the process takes a long time and has a lot of moving parts!

So why do I actually recommend this method? Well, this has been hugely helpful to write foreshadowing. Forgetting for a second the blueprint drawn from Arthurian Legend itself, I know how my story with my version of the characters is going to go, so I can set all of that up way in advance. It's all well and good to know (spoiler) Arthur dies at the end, but it's never been about the conclusion so much as the journey there and the unique perspective of whichever character the author has chosen to focus on. I mean, Godfrey Turton's The Emperor Arthur is Pelleas point of view. He's instrumental at the battle of Camlann. It's the same with Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles and our one-handed friend Derfel, the reasoning for which isn't revealed until book 3. The world is your oyster! Fixate on your special character and set that shit up and pay it off!!!

Knowing what you're writing toward is extremely helpful during the drafting process. Even if it's only vaguely shaped it'll develop detail as you revise. Other than Derfel's missing hand, the best example of this I can think of is in Realm of the Elderlings series by Robin Hobb. It has a huge fanbase on tumblr for a reason, it's just an insane amount of set up you're not even aware of until the impact slams into you many books later and you're left going, "Whoa.....it was there the whole time." Mind blowing. I want have half as much narrative resonance as that.

Another thing that came of this is, since I wrote Agravaine/Lamorak first, and I'm obscenely Ragnelle obsessed, she pops up in their pov as a hag, only for them to not realize she's one and the same as Gawain's bombshell wife they "meet" later. I wrote this as the lads first, but it's extra funny now that, actually, the reader will experience Ragnelle's perspective first. Hottie uncursed Ragnelle does know she met them before, but feigns otherwise. So it's very fun to see the same encounters happen a second time a few books later. Agravaine is like, "Okay granny whatever. Bye... :^/" and Lamorak is like, "That granny was weird but I like her! :^)" meanwhile the reader is like, "AHHHHH! I KNOW HER!!! YOU FOOLS DON'T KNOW HOW IMPORTANT SHE'LL BE AHHH!!!" At least, that has been the beta reader reaction, which is gratifying. Even better, the books can be read out of order, so actually if you read Agravaine/Lamorak before Ragnelle/Gawain, it works in reverse, too. So if the reader knows who Agravaine is from reading his perspective, when Ragnelle or Gawain runs into him, the reader will realize who he is before it clicks for the point of view character. I had a lot of fun developing all of this across the series for multiple characters, it certainly happens more than once.

Wow that was long but I hope it makes sense and gives you an idea how it all went down. Thanks for taking an interest and I hope you enjoy my books when they're out. Take care! :^)

[very-grownup]

So a couple years ago, I fell into watching Chinese dramas and because my posts about the most recent one garnered some curiosity, here are the dramas what I have watched.

Hikaru no Go

DID YOU KNOW. DID YOU KNOW. THAT IN 2020 THERE WAS A CHINESE DRAMA ADAPTATION OF HIKARU NO GO AND IT IS AMAZING AND MADE ME CRY ALL OVER AGAIN? It is faithful in spirit while making understandable alterations both for the setting and to avoid managing child actors for the entirety of the series (there are about six episodes with Hikaru/Shi Guang as an elementary school student before a time jump to high school).

If you are unfamiliar with Hikaru no Go I recommend becoming familiar with Hikaru no Go, my first and still one of the best sports manga. It's what Takeshi Obata was the artist on before Death Note and my hot take is that Obata post-Hikaru no Go is mid at best.

Hikaru no Go is a sports series about the most normal boy finding an antique go board that houses the soul of an ancient go master who died too young and with go regrets, so he bullies/guilts the boy into helping him play go so he can see or play a divine go move. In the process he acquires a rival/stalker in the form of the genius son of a go master. It's amazing and the drama absolutely does it justice.

The heart of the series is the relationship between Hikaru/Shi Huang and Fujiwara no Sai/Chu Ying.

It's just a fucking good series.

The Untamed

According to one description on imdb, this is about two friends solving a series of murders. This is technically true, although it neglects to mention a few details.

Sixteen years after doing a whole lot of demonic blood magic shit and dying because of it, hated by society, Wei Wuxian (Xiao Zhan) is brought back from the dead by more super demonic blood magic and is recognized by his noble and esteemed peer/friend Lan Wangji (Wang Yibo) and trying to deal with why Wei Wuxian has been brought back from the dead leads to their investigating a series of murders that result in their becoming entangled in wider political schemes stretching back twenty years.

It's got weird pacing, prolonged flashbacks to explain a lot of the relationship dynamics, and basically an entirely self-contained sub-story that brings the main plot to a grinding halt. There are creatures and CGI effects of interesting quality. There are amazing wigs. There are piles of corpses. There's physical torture and emotional torture and some doomed love stuff and sword fights and musical instrument fights and a donkey and chicken theft and brotherhood and what you're willing to sacrifice for your goals and what goals you're willing to sacrifice for and it is based on a novel that ends in the protagonists raw dogging on the side of the road.

That part's not in the show.

Douluo Continent

Ignorant country boy Tang San (Xiao Zhan) finds himself involved in the world of martial arts and magic after discovering a hidden talent and ends up in the group of fellow martial artists who are all weird or unorthodox or hiding crucial bits of their backstory like girl who is actually a rabbit and immediately decides Tang San is her best friend/husband (Wu Xianyi), guy who needs to become powerful enough to kill his older brother (Gao Taiyu), girl who rejected an engagement to the would-be brother killer and wants to fight him (Liu Mei Tong), guy who wants to ditch martial arts to become a great actor (Liu Run Nan), and girl who is too rich to be here (Ding Xiaoying). They learn together, they grow together, they fight monsters and embark on a tournament arc, and there's an overarching mystery about Tang San and his weak but simultaneously super powerful spirit summoning.

Even though the best technique is clearly the one where the boy in question can summon a sausage that you eat and heals you.

It's very much of a specific genre that can be pretty samey, but Douluo Continent has a charming cast that makes up for its predictable plot beats.

It does end on a cliffhanger that is possibly resolved in the sequel series where ... all the main characters were recast with, I'm guessing, slightly less pricey actors. Such is the way of things.

Word of Honour

Do you like knowing what's going on? Then get the fuck out of here, Word of Honour is not for you. Real ones want to be immediately submerged into chaos and confusion and secret identities. You want Mr Bones' Wild Ride in plot form. Why has former superassassin Zhou Zishu (Zhang Zhe Han) abandoned the sect of assassins he created to live in wandering drunk anonymity as he slowly dies? Why is Wen Kexing (Gong Jun) stalking him aside from poorly censored horny desires? Is Wen Kexing actually a ghost? Can any of the impressionable youths attaching themselves to Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing be stopped from their very poor choices in role models? What is up with this legendary hidden armoury and why do Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing seem unable to escape the conspiracy around it? HOW HARD IS IT TO GET WOLONG'S FAMOUS NUTS?

Not recommended for people who constantly want to know what's happening or why X is doing Y, but great if you want to watch with someone and then after an episode, walk your dogs and try to figure out what's going on and what's going to happen (you will be wrong).

Advance Bravely

What if the most ridiculously unrealistic and unhinged slashfic by a teenage girl who doesn't fully understand anything was adapted into a drama series where censorship means everything must be painted with a special "no homo" brush? You get Advance Bravely which is the most incoherently homoerotic thing I've ever watched. No one thinks you should watch Advance Bravely and you watch Advance Bravely and you agree but sometimes you just have to watch a beautiful trainwreck where the protagonist explains his lack of a girlfriend with erectile dysfunction and the series climax involves his being, essentially, trapped in a well.

Love Between Fairy and Devil

DO YOU WANT TO GO FULL SHOUJO MANGA FANTASY?

Innocent fairy Orchid (Yu Shuxin) just wants to strengthen her immortal spirit and pass the exam that would let her serve in the palace of the fairy capital so she can catch glimpses of the War God Chang Heng (Zhang Ling He) who she is hopelessly in love with. Instead, an attempt to help her crush causes her to bumble her way into the high security spiritual prison that has held Dongfang Qingcang, the Moon Supreme (Dylan Wang), for 30,000 years.

DO YOU LIKE BIG NUMBERS BECAUSE YOU WILL GET TO SEE SOME BIG NUMBERS IN TERMS OF TIME SPAN AND AGES.

Because of some plot magic, Orchid and the Moon Supreme swap bodies and loophole out of prison, much to her distress. Their fates are tied together and Orchid becomes more familiar with the wider world and the politics between the realms and how much the fairy realm's supreme ruler fucking suuuuuuuuuuuucks while Moon Supreme finds himself having feelings again after they were tortured out of him in a mystical coffin prison as a child.

Moon Supreme's closest friend is a dragon. Orchid's closest friend is an opportunistic snakeoil saleswoman. There's a pissy younger brother and a bitchy but honourable love rival. There are secret origins and reincarnation and hidden identities and the way it alternates broad comedy and melodrama and sweet romance may give you whiplash.

I just love a bodyswap, you guys.

Sailor Moon vibes but Mamoru is actually interesting and becomes likeable.

Guardian

Okay so the best thing about Guardian is not only that it's a censored adaptation of a novel with a same-sex romance, but that /the entire premise/ is altered for television purposes.

The novel is steeped in Chinese folk religion and the Underworld is real and mythical creatures secretly walk among us.

In the show?

ALIENS, BABY.

Ghosts? THOSE AREN'T REAL BECAUSE HUMANS DON'T HAVE SOULS, THEY'RE JUST ENERGY BEINGS.

It's so ridiculous it's endearing.

Anyway, it's about bros solving mysteries with a Monster of the Week vibe until it becomes about possibly the end of the world and alien domination and evil twins.

Mysterious Lotus Casebook

IT'S TIME TO SOLVE CRIMES. IN ANCIENT CHINA.

Quack doctor Li Lianhua (Cheng Yi) is just trying to live a quiet life with his dog and his horse-drawn house. Fang Duobing (Joseph Zeng) just wants to gain admittance into the martial art cop organization that's carrying on the legacy of his dead teacher, Li Xiangyi, who was maybe never actually his teacher and also wasn't killed ten years previously by Di Fei Sheng (Xiao Shunyao), the head of an evil martial arts sect who is also not dead. Not nearly as many people as people think are dead! Identities are cleverly hidden behind pseudonyms and various levels of mask!

Crimes are solved and Li Lianhua is very tired about the whole thing. It's an unwilling buddy cop sort of thing until it becomes about youthful hubris and the sins of the past and also one woman's determination to conquer the world and give it to the man she loves, even if he doesn't want the world and also doesn't love her. We love a woman who takes what she wants and if necessary cuts a man's tendons and imprisons him in a torture pool so his blood can't clot until he agrees to be her wife, don't we, folks?

Folks?

Story of Kunning Palace

The scheming empress Jiang Xue Ning (Bai Lu) dies and wakes up, eighteen-years-old, at the point in her life where she's on the verge of making the start of the decisions that lead her to the Very Bad End. She is going to make different decisions this time and prevent the things she regrets and avoid becoming the empress at all costs.

What you need to know about Story of Kunning Palace is that Bai Lu could have chemistry with a rock and she inadvertently collects a bisexual harem. Her end game love interest is Xie Wei (Zhang Ling He), the man who killed her, an advisor to the emperor, music teacher, double or triple agent, and sufferer of vampire snow madness and a fear of cats, whether adorably fluffy or badly CGI'd. But she's in love with noble civil servant Zhang Zhe (Wang Xing Yue), a pure and hardworking man who she seduced into betraying his principles, leading to his imprisonment and probable death. However, her childhood friend Yan Lin (Zhou Jun Wei) is in love with her and previously she rejected him VERY HARSHLY after his family fell into disfavour due to political machinations and Jiang Xue Ning had cemented the likelihood of her marriage to the next emperor. Also there's Princess Le Yang (Liu Xie Ning), who Jiang Xue Ning made an enemy of after the Princess fell in love with her when Jiang Xue Ning was crossdressing and did not take the reveal of her true gender well. Xue Shu (Elisa Ye) is an unfavoured daughter of a scheming lord who was the only truly loyal person Jiang Xue Ning knew as empress. ALL OF THESE PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE WITH JIANG XUE NING and you look at Bai Lu and go 'yes, that makes sense'.

It's mostly about the politics and scheming and Jiang Xue Ning trying to find a way to have a stable, satisfying life without betraying everyone she knows and standing on a pile of corpses, but the love shape Jiang Xue Ning isn't fully aware she's in is comparable in complexity to the plots between ministers and lords and dowager empresses and cousins and rebels.

The choices the characters make are maybe not always the best choices, but DAMN are they a good time.

Story of Kunning Palace is also one of the only times I have begged a character in a show to take a particular action and then she DID IT and fuck it was satisfying.

The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty

IT'S TIME TO SOLVE CRIMES. IN ANCIENT CHINA. AGAIN. BUT WITHOUT MARTIAL ARTS.

Tang Fan (Darren Chen) is a low-ranking government official and detective genius who loves food and hates routine work, but loves a fucked up crime. Since he spends most of his money on delicious food, he writes trashy porn under a variety of pseudonyms to pay his rent. Sui Zhou (Fu Meng Bo) is an imperial guard and ex-soldier with PTSD who has no time for nonsense but loves the passionate pursuit of justice and food. He's also From Money and has a very empty house that Tang Fan whines his way into after they solve a case together. Everyone is manipulated by dangerously powerful eunuch Wang Zhi (Liu Yao Yuan) who is the enemy of basically everyone, except for Tang Fan, who has the political and social awareness of a rock.

An amiably pathetic man solves a variety of mysteries, from murder to complex imperial assassination plots and also this really complicated one involving diluting the purity of silver currency, and also the executive producer is Jackie Chan.

It's missing the romance subplot that I understand is in the source novel and also apparently there's an overarching plot involving a cult?! which we don't get here, but there's lots of bombs which are almost as good as a cult, maybe? (They're not.)

Divine Destiny

This is the one we're currently watching and the ride that this show is. How many plots can be crammed into one show? How many ridiculous but true things can I say about this show?

Ji Ruochen (Ma Tianyu) is an orphan who dreams of martial arts adventures. Raised by a couple who run a Crime Inn, one day a customer robbery goes very wrong when the customer turns out to be the latest incarnation of Yin Feng, the Banished God (Marius Wang). Ji Ruochen accidentally kills the Banished God and his foster parents promptly take the body into the desert and dump it down a cliff, but not before taking a necklace made from a piece of Gu Qing, the Blue Stone Goddess (Xuan Lu), which is supposed to let her recognize the Banished God in their final incarnation. Accidentally stealing the Banished God's identity, Ji Ruochen finds himself a hotly desired commodity by the cultivation sects who are all eager to have the Banished God as a disciple for prophecy reasons. He goes with Zhang Yinyin (Angelababy), a feisty, argumentative girl who has had to work extra hard because her spirit was contaminated by a demonic root planted by the evil nine-tailed fox who is poorly imprisoned in a cave anyone can access.

MEANWHILE some dudes with amazing moustaches and a penchant for laughing in delight at their own evil have found the body of the Banished God and done some questionable mystical shit to put him in a new body and nurture a grudge against Ji Ruochen for stealing his identity.

THEN Gu Qing meets Ji Ruochen and like everyone else assumes he's the Banished God and she falls in love with him (Gu Qing having been a literal rock spirit who cultivated to immortality under the guidance of the Banished God, who followed her into the mortal realm and a cycle of 100 incarnations after Gu Qing accidentally Did A Crime) but then falls in love with HIM.

ALSO Zhang Yinyin is always at risk of succumbing to the temptation of using the demonic fox power that is within her even though that will literally turn her into a demon but maybe it's worth it if a woman who is actually a goddess who is actually a rock is making eyes at the junior you brought into the sect and are in love with and you want to be more powerful than her?

ALSO what's the mysterious power that let Ji Ruochen kill the Banished God in the first place?

IS the woman seeking revenge for the death of the Banished God's mortal incarnation his sister or his cousin or his "cousin"?

WHY is the only love language of immortals stalking?

There's a homunculus and a baby snake demon who is the most precious angel in the world and so many evil dudes delighted in how evil they are and TWO GOOD AND ALIVE PARENTS and a pair of comical monks who have a special attack with a name they have to shout out every time they use it.

Oh and the imprisoned fox demon may have an ex who just hangs out on a rock in something called the Endless Ocean wearing a mask and playing go against the homunculus he made.

And there's an ancient master who lives in an ice mountain and eats memories of love.

Also some people might be secret demons.

There's some weddings.

There's a tiny woman with an ice sword who brutally murders so many dudes.

Do you like CGI birds?

Do you like giant mechanical CGI birds that are for riding purposes?

There's a desert hermit who has a son who is a giant tortoise.

So many things are going on and terrible decisions are constantly being made and it's over a week before I can watch another episode and it's driving me mad. WHAT WILL BE THE FALLOUT OF THE MOST RECENT BAD DECISIONS?

[thelonelyshore-if]

How does TV broadcast work in Easthaven ? Do they get regular channels ? If so, does the fog have to work extra hard to keep people from noticing discrepancies between their town and the modern world ? Is it annoyed when they watch TV ? Do big events (sports/politics etc) go unoticed by citizens ?

Easthaven has a teeny tiny radio slash tv station that does local broadcasts. They share stuff like results from last night's high school track meet or when a couple announces their engagement. Local news.

Other than that, there is no TV. Only movies. The citizens of Easthaven could name the president, maybe, but couldn't tell you when an election is. If it's pointed out how weird it is that nobody in town has ever voted in a general election the fog smoothes it over.

For sports, high school and, like, beer leagues would be the extent of people's knowledge. Nobody in town knows what the superbowl is, for example.

When it comes to discrepancies, the fog leads people to assume anything too beyond its scope is made up for the movies. Something like star wars and a movie about modern teens from the 2020s would be seen as more or less equally fictional.

Just movie magic. Aren't people so creative?

[justalia]

hello alia

I have a situation with law of assumption.. I was wondering if you could give some advice, anything is okay.

it might be long, but I like your vision on things so I thought you were the best to ask this to:

I’ve been into manifestation since middle school like back in 2018 and it was a wild ride because I didn’t know how to apply it, so I was on the loop.

then i discovered Neville on 2020 and tried to apply his teachings and I kinda had some “tiny” manifestations but never the ones that I wanted.

in 2023 i fell in love with this sort of Instagram influencer (and this is going to be really embarrassing to confess ngl) and I had a huge crush on him, so I tried to manifest him.

i became so obsessed over law of assumption, the terms of 4D/3D, Edward Art, I was into every single corner of the internet reading and filling my brain with this philosophy.

i can’t describe to u how obsessed I became for this guy, like I replied to his stories (not in a crazy way) but since he never replied or had an interaction with me I became obsessed , like, I had PANIC ATTACKS over him. I cried and became obsessive over a guy that never interacted w me.

My day fully depended on what happened mentally w him, and it became so horrible that I developed a limerence… it was awful

So I stopped trying to manifest him, and my life got better.

Then I met another guy, and same thing happened (not as crazy but kind of obsessive as well), and then I “gave up” and then I tried again w another dude and got the same result.

That same year, I got bullied by people at high school so I was always trying visualize and affirm like crazy that people liked me and never rejected me, but of course nothing happened. So I became depressive as well.

I stopped trying to manifest. I stopped reading about it, and my mental health was better!

Now, with me saying all of this, im not discarding the existence of law of assumption or conscious creation AT ALL. As I said before, I know it happens because it happened to me. I unconsciously brought some things into my life that I’ve imagined before, but only that. Never the things that I actually deeply want.

2024 arrives and I wanted to give it another shot, but my brain didn’t not wanted me to feel the “wish fulfilled” because i feel like it’s protecting me from feeling “delusional” and “hopeful” from things again. I can feel fulfilled for a while and then this sort of chest pressure comes again and my brain convinces me to give up.

No matter how hard I try to feel the best for me on the inside, my brain rejects it and tells me “what if you end hopeful again” what if that doesn’t happen?”. And that feels engraved to my being

So I honestly do not know if there’s any hope for me when it comes to bringing things into my life. I’ve always wanted the best for me, and I don’t know if I should keep trying to get rid of that belief but I sincerely don’t know how.

Since I applied the law incorrectly it feels like I don’t even know how to do it no more lmao

It’s sad because i can imagine such beautiful things but my mind only gives me the chance to feel them as a dream not as a reality no more.

i used to imagine myself with guys a lot but I wasn’t fulfilled at all, you know?? so I screwed the ability to consciously create for myself.

I could have anything but my brain is like “nope. you’re imagining. Stop doing it.” Like as an attempt to protect myself.

The sad part is that I like a guy, I follow him on insta and I replied to him something random on one of his stories and I was like “what if I fulfill myself” and tried to change the inner man but nothing worked.

Is there any chance? Can I do something to fix this at all?

Because if I can’t, I will give up and stop exhausting myself. But I do want to trust in myself, I feel like I can do better… but how? how can I change the inner man when I feel so hurt by life?

i hope you read this and if you know what I can do, please do. I like your views

Have a nice day Alia, and I’m glad you’re combing back ♡︎

i say give up.

i say stop trying to “change the inner man”.

i say look within and discover who you really are.

find the who.

who is this inner man? is it an higher being an abstract entity? who is it?

find who you are, notice who you are and all your struggles will stop, the feeling delusional, the hopelessness will stop.

find who you are and there will be no desire no more.

[thecurioustale]

A Supreme Court Ruling that Should Not Be Enforced

I think the Chevron Defense ruling last week is the most dangerous decision by the Supreme Court this year, as it will immediately begin to disrupt the the entire federal executive's ability to function and will directly lead in the coming years to the dismantling of environmental protections, worker protections, regulatory oversight, and much more.

But today's ruling on presidential immunity is, by far, the most unconstitutional ruling of this term, and one of the most breathtakingly unconstitutional rulings I have ever seen or learned about by the US Supreme Court. It is up there with Citizens United (corporations are people), Plessy vs. Ferguson (segregation in schools), and Dobbs (stripping people of acknowledged constitutional rights).

I understand the need for individual officeholders to have blanket immunity from civil litigation (so you sue the organization, not the person) and even some qualified criminal immunity for that officeholder's official activities. But what the Supreme Court did today, in its 6–3 ruling, is declare that the US president need only declare or construe or even simply believe that they are acting in an official capacity, and, therein, they are immune from all criminal liability unconditionally.

The President of the United States is now above the law. Full stop.

For years I have wondered where we should draw the line on lawless behavior and extremism from our courts, especially the US Supreme Court. The thing about our rule of law is that you have to accept the outcome of court cases; if you don't you are basically calling for violent revolution whether you realize it or not, and at an absolute minimum you are calling for chaos and unrest.

I have always asserted that Neil Gorsuch's votes on the Court should not be recognized, as his appointment to the Supreme Court was the result of a power grab by Mitch McConnell. But of course as more time passes this becomes more and more unlikely. And Kavanaugh and Barrett's appointments I have no choice but to accept as legitimate, so even if Gorsuch were not counted this ruling would still have been a significant 5–3 majority.

Citizens United was real close for me to delegitimizing the ruling majority on the bench at the time, and the more recent Dobbs ruling actually crossed my personal line and made all of the justices who signed it unfit to hold their offices, but I figured that it would still be better to resolve the problem by passing a federal abortion rights law when Democrats next have the opportunity and continuing to try to flush the fascist judge problem out of the judiciary through maintaining control of the White House and Senate and appointing new judges over time.

But this ruling, now, raises the possibility by at least an order of magnitude that our constitutional system of democracy and rule of law in America will be dismantled by the next sufficiently extreme or unscrupulous Republican president, be that Trump himself or whomever else.

Just to give you an idea of the landscape that we now live in, Joe Biden could, at this moment, order military special ops teams to assassinate Donald Trump. Hell, he could do it himself: He could walk up to Trump and pull the trigger. And he would be completely immune from criminal prosecution for it now or ever. And that's just the beginning.

If not corrected, this will be used someday to overthrow our democracy. And by then it will be too late for us to do anything about it through peaceful means.

In 2020 I worried that, even if Biden won the presidency, it would just be four years of calm before the real storm began. At the time I wasn't thinking about another Trump presidency but rather the committed fascists high in his party who want to succeed him. Cruz, DeSantis, the usuals. Trump is a buffoon with very little self-control, but a lot of these other people are smart cookies. In 2024 my worry remains relevant: We are one step closer today to handing the fascists our country.

If I were the president at this moment, I would declare this ruling invalid. Because it is. Not only does it have no basis in the Constitution, but it upends some of the most fundamental assumptions of our Constitution and our whole legal regime. I would go before the public and say "This ruling is illegal. This ruling gives me the power to assassinate anyone I want; to run criminal enterprises from the Oval Office; to commit fraud and extortion and embezzlement of your money as taxpayers; to imprison my political opponents, shut down the free press, and forcibly remove from office any judge or police officer with the gall to rule against my actions or try hold me accountable. This ruling makes me a king. That is what makes it illegal. As the leader of the executive branch of our government, I have a duty not to enforce an illegal and unconstitutional ruling, and I am directing all federal agencies to similarly disregard it. Neither I nor any other US president should be placed above the law."

And believe you me, I would be tempted to go a lot further, including appointing six new justices on the Court and no longer recognizing the old six. But for the sake of the country and the way we do things in this country I would limit myself to the above action of refusing to recognize this one ruling.

I understand that this opens a Pandora's box. That's how the fascist resurgence in this country has worked: Republicans will do something completely unreasonable (like gumming up judicial nominations), forcing Democrats to break norms just to get the people's business done (like eliminating the judicial filibuster), which Republicans then turn around and exploit to their advantage (as by using their time in power to appoint whomever they want to the courts). But I think this is the way it has to be. We can't let this ruling stand. The other problems—Citizens United, Dobbs—can be fixed through legislation. This one can't, except maybe by a law that specifically declares that a president is not above the law, which I'm not sure would itself be constitutional. In any case, another problem with that is that fascists are selective in their application of the law. They have no problem ruling in favor of conservatives, but will never permit that exact same legal reasoning to then benefit their ideological enemies.

But yeah, this is bad. The Chevron ruling will begin to erode our federal executive in horrible ways, and this immunity ruling sets the stage for nightmarish conduct by a future president.

I didn't watch the debate the other day, or any of the analysis after the fact. I know who I am voting for, and, on some level, I didn't want to have to watch Biden's inevitably uncharismatic performance. And then everyone started melting down and crying that the sky was falling, so I went and watched a short clip of Biden's worst moments, and I get it. That performance goes beyond the stutter that often wrongly gets conflated with dementia. But in this case he clearly lost his train of thought and he did it on-stage in front of millions of people. That's a rough day.

I still don't think the mate is senile. I have seen plenty of people have the meltdown that he had, and I have had that meltdown myself. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. But even if Joe Biden were hunched over in a wheelchair drooling out the side of his mouth, I would still vote for him, and gladly. Because not voting for him is a vote for Trump, and I would not vote for a candidate who spent the whole debate lying and who himself is a traitor, an egomaniac, a convicted felon, a con artist, a failed coup plotter, and an ethically bankrupt, intellectually stunted manchild. And because, moreover, he has run a good administration. He has good people around him, and can be ably succeeded by Vice President Harris if needed. When you vote for a president you are voting not just for an individual but for a team, and that team's ethos, and I have no doubt which team, which ethos, I support. We are asking the wrong person to drop out of this race.

Anyway! President Biden is going to speak to the public tonight about this court ruling. I don't know what he will say. I don't expect anything meaningful a la refusing to enforce the Court's ruling, but it sure would be nice. President Trump should be prosecuted for his alleged crimes on January 6 (which is the trial most directly impacted by this ruling), crimes of which Trump is unambiguously guilty and which are "alleged" only in the blindfolded eyes of Justice for the sake of due process. America needs this accountability, or we will suffer terribly for want of it in the future.

[absolutebl]

10 High Quality & Cinematic BLs

Ones that are very well made with a tight narrative and no cringey dialogue. For example: Old Fashion Cupcake or His. Japan knows what tf it’s doing, okay? You don’t come from a tradition that gave us Kurosawa and fail at broad scope cinematography. 

High Quality & Cinematic BLs + Comfort & Joy 

These are the ones that I love even though they’re artsy, but they also end happily and didn’t hurt me too much.

1. Old Fashion Cupcake 

(Japan 2022 Viki)

This show had me from the moment they broke the egg yolk with the chopsticks in the opening credits for episode one. It’s about a younger man with a long cherished crush on his boss (ten years older and going through a mid life crisis) who decides to save and seduce said man with pancakes. It’s wholesome, comforting, sexy, and a very necessary narrative about still having hope, interests, and openness to affection at any age. It’s coming of age/queerness packaged in a subtle critique of expectations around masculinity and love and loneliness... and it’s beautiful. Full review.

2. Restart After Come Back Home 

AKA Risutato wa tadaima no ato de (Japan 2020 grey)

Atmospheric study in rural Japan meets complex family dynamics built on a romance framework of city boy meets country boy. It’s beautiful and icy sweet. Slow moving in places but ultimately worth your patience. Full review here.

3. Life: Love on the Line 

AKA Life Senjou no Bokura (Japan 2020 Viki) 

This is a beautiful movie and a good BL, if a bit adult and gut wrenching at times. Goes through young love, break up, and reunion - but it’s actually a saga of self acceptance. You want the director’s cut. Like His, LLOTL is an exploration of suppression and the limits we impose on ourselves when we’re dishonest about who we love. In high school, serious and self contained Ito fell in love with Nishi, the manic pixie dream boy of the dream he didn’t know he had. Nishi, emotionally and mentally fragile, struggled to fit into the world. Ito, however, found it all too easy, except for the whole - ya know - gay thing. This movie is about Ito’s willingness to sacrifice not just himself but his love (and even Nishi himself) to social and familial expectations and the misery that results. It has a hard fought happy ending that then follows them through the rest of their lives in a (slightly unnecessary but welcome) epilogue montage.

4. A Tale of Thousand Stars 

(Thai 2021 GMMTV YouTube)

With great casting and cinematography this drama nods at BL tropes but manages to elevate them (and itself) with a strong mature story concept about a spoiled rich kid who gets a heart transplant and becomes a teacher it order to pay out survivor’s guilt. On the way he falls in love with a local park ranger and contends with his own classism and escapist tendencies. Everyone seemed to perfectly suit their roles and GMMTV made the most out of its stable. Combined with excellent production (and post production) values, 1000 Stars is without question GMMTV’s most mature, charming, and smart BL series. I think it should go down as one of the top BLs of all time. I feel safe recommending this one to friends and non BL watchers.

High Quality & Cinematic BLs + Work & Angst 

These are ones that I watched but were really difficult for me for personal reasons. Some may not have happy endings. I tend to call these moody arthouse smackdoodle. They like to pretend that "ambiguous" is somehow unique and special rather than bog standard commonplace for narratives of this type. Hold onto your psyche, these dramas will test you. But they very well done. 

5. His the movie 

(Japan 2020 Viki)

His is about being a grown adult and still struggling with coming out as gay. It addresses the consequences of life choices disingenuous to identity. Nagisa turns up on Shun’s doorstep with his precocious daughter in tow. This is a touch confusing to Shun since they were each others first love. Shun has retreated from society, rejecting the world before it can reject him, already brokenhearted because without Nagisa he never had a reason to fight. Nagisa went the opposite way, tried to pretend to be something he was not and ended up with a daughter he adores and a wife who hates him. This movie is beautiful and the setting is unique and interesting but I'm not wild about the ending.

6. I Told Sunset About You 

(Thai 2020 grey) 

I don’t have a ton to say about ITSAY because I’ve never managed to finished it. This one was too close to my own queer journey and it seriously messed with my head about 2/3 of the way through, so I stopped watching to protect myself. However, I can tell you that the production values are unreal for Thailand, using a soft lens, diffuse lighting, and a nostalgic atmosphere, paying close attention to framing, and forgetting neither background nor close-focus expressive detail. It’s a remarkable piece of work. I caught no mistakes in makeup, wardrobe, body positioning, reflection, or boom mic placement - so they clearly had continuity eyeballs during filming and on final product (which most Thai BLs don’t spring for). So yeah, the filming, directing, and acting is insanly good, but what’s really stand out in ITSAY from a film perspective is their smooth as butter invisibly perfect editing. Post production on this series must have been a BEAST.

7. Your Name Engraved Herein

(Taiwan 2020 Netflix)

This movie is fantastic but it is also seriously depressing, it’s a self acceptance journey, but if you wanna wallow in high quality acting and serious gay drama, this’ll do it. 

8. Goodbye Mother AKA Thua Me Con D 

(Vietnam 2019 Netflix)

Like YNEH or Dew, this is a great movie but it deals openly with homophobia, bashing, family trauma, and social acceptance. 

9. His the series 

AKA His - Koisuru Tsumori Nante Nakatta AKA I Didn’t Think I Would Fall In Love

(Japan 2019)

Boy goes to visit his absent father, ends up kinda homeless on the beach, gets adopted by local family, falls in love with the boy working and living with them. Lots of long drawn out glances. 

10. I Want to See Only You

AKA Kimi no Koto Dake Mite Itai (Japan 2022 grey)

This is a beautiful piece of cinema well acted, about two boys who are opposite personalities and grew up together. Gifted and serious Sakura (Kura Yuki from His the series) and outgoing eccentric manic pixie dream boy, Yuma. It is very pretty and this is the kind of atmospheric elegantly performed BL that only really comes from Japan (complete with dead fish kisses - what you though Korea invented them? oh no). For me it was lovely but slightly unmemorable. Full review here. 

More Like This From Japan 

The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese AKA Kyuso wa Chizu no Yume wo Miru (Japan 2020) - obsession, cheating, breakup, reunion, then break up again, explicit.

Does the Flower Bloom? (Japan 2018) - May/December romance about an artist student, the house he inherits from his dead parents. and all the people around him who are obsessed with him, including an older man.

Junjou: Pure Heart (Japan 2010) - I shoudl probably rewatch this one, it’s been a while. 

Silhouette of Your Voice AKA Hidamari ga Kikoeru (Japan 2017) - It’s not as good as any of us wanted given the beautiful glory of the original manga (I Hear the Sunspot). Also it doesn’t really end happily. Disappointing. 

Eternal Yesterday AKA Eien no Kino (Japan 2022 Gaga) - After Mitsuru’s cheerful outgoing boyfriend Koichi is killed but stay’s walking around, everyone else begins to forget about him. Mitsuru recalls their romance while trying to understand what’s going on, hold onto his love, and come to terms with loss and identity. Sad and creepy but somehow still beautiful, Japan spending all its pennies on pain. 

Darker BLs and more thoughts on Moody Arthouse Smackdoodle here. 

Tangential blogs posts:

10 Best Uses of Cinematic Storytelling in BL

Top 10 Highest Production Values in Thai BL  

Some Noodling on BL Production Houses & Studios

This post the result of an ask from @theklutzymaniac, updated end of 2022. 

(source) 

[mariacallous]

K-12 education has captured its share of headlines over the last few years. Schools—and, specifically, local school boards—became a lightning rod for anger about the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the first weeks of the pandemic, Republicans accused Democratic leaders of being too slow to reopen schools. That accusation gained potency as evidence mounted that schools hadn’t been the vectors of COVID-19 transmission that experts initially feared. Sensing vulnerability, Democrats became reluctant to engage on K-12 issues, and Republicans such as Glenn Youngkin showed that Democrats wouldn’t put up much of a fight if education became a battlefield for culture war conflicts. The result was a dizzying, maddening stretch where schools were embroiled in controversies over critical race theory and transgender students’ rights when education leaders needed to focus on pandemic recovery.

Now, as memories of the pandemic recede, the politics of education are changing. Democrats are talking more about schools, emboldened by the selection of a former schoolteacher, Tim Walz, as Vice President Harris’s running mate. Republicans, for their part, have harnessed discontent with public schools into an aggressive push for private school voucher programs that threaten America’s public education systems.

The platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties, along with the education-related portions of Project 2025, provide a glimpse of where K-12 education might be headed.

The Democratic platform

The Democrats’ 2024 platform is light on specifics, with more attention to the current administration’s accomplishments and the would-be Harris administration’s support for some broadly defined goals (e.g., reducing chronic absenteeism). To some extent, the lack of specifics stands in contrast to both the Democrats’ 2020 platform—which, for example, pledged a tripling of Title I funds for high-needs schools—and more detailed 2024 proposals for early childhood education (e.g., free, universal pre-K) and higher education (e.g., free community college). 

The 2024 platform does contain relevant, specific ideas outside of its “Education” section. For example, Democrats propose rebates for school districts that purchase electric school buses—an idea grounded in research on the harms of students’ exposure to toxins. They also offer specific proposals to reduce gun violence (amid a scourge of school shootings) and to strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ children and students of color (frequent targets of culture war attacks).

Notably, some of the platform’s clearest statements on education describe what Democrats oppose. That includes private-school voucher plans and policies hostile to transgender youth that have become increasingly popular among Republican leaders.  

The Republican platform

Republicans’ 2024 platform is also light on policy specifics. The platform has a few ideas that have long been cornerstones of GOP education politics. That includes ending teacher tenure—an idea that would require local or state action and confront fierce opposition from teachers’ unions.

The platform has language about resisting political indoctrination in schools—while seeming to propose some indoctrination of its own. This includes proposals to “support schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization” and “promote Fair and Patriotic Civics Education.” Along similar lines, former President Trump recently described a bewildering plan to create a credentialing body to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children.”

Substantively, the most important part of the Republican education platform might be its support for universal school choice. In about a dozen states, Republicans have recently created or expanded education savings account (ESA) programs that make public funds available to pay for private school or other educational expenses. Critics of these programs—myself included—argue that they violate our basic traditions, benefit the wealthy at the expense of others, and are not well supported by research.

Project 2025

If the Republican platform is light on policy proposals, Project 2025 certainly is not.

Along with my colleagues Rachel Perera and Katharine Meyer, I recently wrote a more detailed piece that analyzes Project 2025’s education proposals. Project 2025 proposes severe cuts to the resources and protections available to the country’s poorest, most marginalized children. For example, it proposes to eliminate the Head Start program (for young children in poverty), discontinue federal Title I funding (for schools that serve low-income children), and kneecap IDEA (federal legislation that supports students with disabilities). It’s especially harsh on transgender children, with proposals aimed at reorienting civil rights enforcement around “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” and stripping Title IX protections from transgender students.

In other words, Project 2025 sets its sights on the programs that serve America’s neediest students. It would essentially terminate the federal government’s long-running role in addressing inequities that arise in locally governed school systems.

Notably, many key Project 2025 proposals would require an unlikely degree of congressional cooperation. This includes some of the highest-profile proposals, such as eliminating the U.S. Department of Education (a vaguely defined idea that’s unlikely to materialize in its most extreme form). Still, a second Trump administration could enact some Project 2025 proposals unilaterally. That includes rolling back civil rights protections and replacing civil servants in the U.S. Department of Education with political appointees after reinstating Schedule F.

Taking stock

It’s fair to say that Democrats’ plans for federal education policy are modest. Democrats aren’t proposing a markedly stronger role for the federal government. On K-12 education, Democrats remain in a mostly defensive posture as they offer a more “conservative” agenda that protects against the GOP’s increasingly radical efforts.

Just what those GOP plans might be—and just how radical they are—depends on whether the true Trump administration plan is the Republican platform, Project 2025, or some combination of the two. That remains to be seen.