a path covered in brambles & darkness

Briar. They/their pronouns. Queer. Nonbinary. Over 21. See 'About' for more info.

[lapsed-bookworm]

Call For Submissions: July/August 2026

The Gender Exploration Carnival is one of several blogging carnivals – an event where a host blog puts out a theme for the month, participants create content and share the links with the host, and the host posts a round-up at the end of the month. For more information, you can check out the FAQ page.

In July and August of 2026, I'm self-hosting the Gender Exploration Carnival with the theme "Gender in Canon – Movies." The idea of gender in canon is intentionally broad here and can cover a character within a canon, worldbuilding details of a particular work, design choices, role casting, or other details that evoke thoughts about gender. This doesn't have to be a review or positive recommendation, and any submissions don't have to be a minimum length.

The deadline for submissions is 11 pm EDT [UTC-4] on 30 August 2026. I will post the round-up around 5:30 pm on 31 August and will accept late submissions until then. You can submit an anonymous entry for this month by emailing [email protected] (the post will be self-hosted on WordPress), or you can leave a link to your submission in a reblog or reply on this post. If you have a separate idea for a theme in 2026, please leave a comment on Volunteer As Host.

[lhoandbehold]

The full saga of Margie and the Nuns (so far). Realised I never compiled these in one place.! Also, bonus Margies!

[json-derulo]

I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.

"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!

The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.

Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup

[vaspider]

"Meet people where they are" is Activism 101, and people seem to be allergic to seeing that this is exactly that.

"Bean Soup Rhetoric" is a very good concept.

[rederiswrites]

There really really ought to be a book about how the staple crops of different civilizations shape and influence those civilizations, and I really want to read it.

[alexseanchai]

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (three are alcohol, three have caffeine) are not quite that, but may still be of interest?

[rederiswrites]

I read Salt back in the day and it's so so good, second the rec. I have heard of 6 Glasses and not read it but I am sure I would probably love it. Gotta see if the library has it. Thank you!

[pandorasquillandquotes]

Gonna throw Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert in the ring here! You'll never see the modern world the same way again.

[vaspider]

A Short History Of The World According To Sheep by Sally Coulthard blew my mind. So many things are tied to wool and sheep and weaving and so many words and phrases are tied to wool, people have no idea.

Example words which come from textiles/weaving, if not specifically wool (go look them up!): subtle, shoddy, tabby, Brazil, rocket, twit, warped, going batty, on tenterhooks, text...

[foxofninetales]

I'll throw in a rec for Pickled, Potted, and Canned by Sue Shephard - a very interesting look at food preservation and how the availability of different types of food preservation shaped cultures and cuisines.

[electronsprotonscroutons]

Sweetness and Power is this but for the topic of sugar

[magneticdeclination]

The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past might also be up your alley. It's about "forgotten" foods and staples. They talk about different types of wheat, sauces, veggies, etc and a little about the cultures from whence they come

[doctornerdington]

Also: Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser. One of my favourite books.

[bitchwhoyoukiddin]

DO I HAVE A SERIES FOR YOU. University of California Press has a gift for you and it is a 80+ book series on food studies. There are even some that are open access (legally free), but the rest are in libraries.

I also highly recommend Frostbite by Nicola Twilley. It’s about the impact refrigeration has had/is having on food preservation and culture, globally. It was one of my favorite books of this last year.

[calystarose]

Also, The Rice Theory of Culture https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1172&context=orpc By Thomas Talhelm

[machine-saint]

the fundamental tension between wanting to dissociate modes of dress from gender and people wanting to use modes of dress to signify their gender so they don't have to play the Pronoun Game

[jadagul]

There was a trans girl I used to follow on tumblr, who I think is no longer here but might have just changed her name and I lost track

who commented on how it was easier to pass in Utah than it was in San Francisco. In Utah people were like "wearing a dress, has earrings, must be a girl, check!" Whereas in SF people would pass her on the street and say "hey man, nice dress!"

[crazycatsiren]

You know what?

My ancestors would have wanted pasteurization, vaccines, antibiotics, disinfectants, birth control, psychiatric medications, pain management, anesthesia. My ancestors would have wanted to be able to keep their loved ones around longer, and not lose them too early/too soon to childbirths, injuries, bacterial infections, mental illnesses, and diseases that are curable and/or preventable in our modern day life.

Modern medicine saves lives.

[yarrowthewitch]

In fact, we know they did want these things, because they invented them. They gave them to us out of generations of struggling to understand and make use of nature itself. "Ancestral knowledge" includes the unglamorous things like germ theory, the functioning of the immune system, and how to manufacture lifesaving vaccines. It's not just magical or mystical or remote, it's present in our lives at every moment. It's the reward of human connection: the sum total of human discovery and the boundless ingenuity of human invention, surrounding us at all times with absolute miracles made banal by their familiarity.

If we reject modern medicine, then we reject all the labors and trials our ancestors went through for us; we reject our very nature.

Please, for your ancestors' sake: vaccinate your kids, and take your goddamn medicine.

[roboticchibitan]

Ok that is a CREATURE and a FRIEND. It's like a little elephant that holds happiness. I love it.

Also I am so so so behind on teapot ratings I have seen y'alls tags and asks and mentions and I appreciate every one of them. I will get to them I just have medical things taking up all my bandwidth rb.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m kinda surprised that nalbinding isn’t as popular as crochet and knitting tbh because it has an even lower barrier of entry tools wise and unlike crochet and knitting it makes fabric that you can cut.

I guess it’s because it’s slower or something.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Nalbinding aka needle binding is when you use yarn and a big sewing needle to make fabric btw

It also has a lot of different kinds of stitches you can do that make different densities of fabric.

Some people even make rugs.

[thewolfwaitsbelow]

I feel like part of it might be casual people are generally aware of the existence of crochet and knitting, even if they don’t know very much about either, but have never heard of nalbinding

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I ordered a big bone needle for myself to try it out and that should be arriving soon.

I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.

It seems like the sort of thing that would be popular even if not as popular as crocheting and knitting, considering the low barrier of entry.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You also don’t need a bunch of different sized needles for nalbinding or whatever. The size of the stitch is controlled either completely freehand or by pulling it against one of your fingers. Most people who have a lot of nalbinding needles seem to either have tried out wood, bone, and metal ones to see which kind they liked or they enjoy carving wood or bone and like making their own needles as an extra hobby.

It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.

Maybe the lack of accessories also makes it unpopular idk. People do like collecting things in their nests.

[the-color-of-sound-is-space]

I've been wanting to do so, I cannot find anyone who can teach me, and any books I can find on it are Ass in the Visual Learning department. Otherwise I'd be making the hell outta some nalbinded fabric

[what-even-is-thiss]

I found this channel by a nice man who makes up close tutorials

Happy Needlebinding

I create videos on YouTube to learn people how to needlebind using two fingers and your thumb. Needlebinding helps people to relax, relieve

[what-even-is-thiss]

I thought this would be kind of a niche post to make but I was quickly reminded that I’m on tumblr, the website full of gay people with one billion hobbies.

[what-even-is-thiss]

So my bone needle actually came this evening (yay!) and I’ve started trying this for real. It clicks in my brain way easier than crochet does. I’ve gotta work up the muscle memory but I think I can do this.

The downside as a beginner is that undoing mistakes is more time consuming than with knitting or crochet. You’ve gotta like sew your mistakes out backwards. Disadvantages of making a really sturdy fabric I guess.

I like the feel of this bone needle though and don’t think I’ll be trying the wooden or metal ones.

Also I think I’m gonna have to get good at doing Russian joining if I decide to get good at nalbinding because I don’t have wool yarn and the ends won’t felt together if it’s not at least 50% wool. A small price to pay for using big bone needle though.

Anyways curse of new fiber craft be upon ye.

[stitchnknit]

For anyone interested in trying it but doesn't want to order a big bone needle. You can give it a go with any large tapestry needle. Just know that because your needle is somewhat smaller the process may be a bit more fiddly.

[genderkoolaid]

its crazy that people try to act like dividing the nonbinary community based on agab is natural. i can tell you as someone assigned female, there are many times i have felt much more connected & related to nonbinary people assigned male than binary trans men. of course it still DOES impact things but nonbinary people across assigned sex frequently have much in common in terms of experiences and needs. we are not automatically more similar to binary trans people of our assigned sex. sometimes nonbinary people's whole sense of self does not in fact revolve around our relationship to binary people.

[seekingstars]

HOW’S THAT HOUSE THAT RAISED YOU? - Lev St. Valentine

[merps]

[Transcription:

How's that house that raised you?

There's a method to growing rhubarb called "forcing" where it's raised in total darkness and tended to in brief intervals of candlelight. The plant thrives only because it's looking for an absent sun, and extends so fast you can hear the growing pains. Forcing can weaken the crop but if done correctly can yield a sweeter, more desirable result. Not everything needs to be an allegory. All the same, I am aware that there are things that have happened in my formative years that I have no words to describe and that only God's eyes have seen.

Lev St. Valentine

/End transcription]

[todays-xkcd]

I can't believe Candles of Vienna caved to commercial pressure and added the Goku expansion.

Types of Board Game [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

Types of Board Game

[Under this header text, the comic contains 8 panels. Each of them is labeled at the top with a short description of the board game being played and features (from left to right) Cueball, Ponytail, Megan, and White Hat sitting on chairs around a table trying to play it.]

Boring Megan: Each turn, roll a die and move your token. Turns proceed clockwise around the table until we get bored and go home.

Abstract Cueball: Each turn, you can place any number of red triangles or blue squares on a hexagon, or move any hexagon to a...

Hyperspecific Theme Ponytail: It's October 2, 1814. The Congress of Vienna convenes. You are each in charge of distributing and lighting candles for the opening ball, which was held at these three locations...

Overcomplicated White Hat: It's a cross between *Twilight Imperium* and *Cones of Dunshire,* but implemented entirely in category theory. Every cone is a monad, and...

Cooperative Megan: We're working together to sort these decks of cards using only hand gestures. After that, we'll silently organize my junk drawer.

Branded Cueball: You can play as Phoebe, Chandler, Monica, Rachel, Ross, Joey, or, due to an ill-advised tie-in, Goku.

Party Ponytail: Each of the cards in your hand has a bad word on it. On the count of three, yell the...

Social Deduction Megan: Remember, per our *Find the Secret Murderer* house rules from last week, discovering that a player had committed a real-life murder does *not* count.

[todays-xkcd]

#I am reminded of the war games following specific battles that can be argued to be real time strategy board games #not because all the pieces move at once; but because the game takes roughly as long to play as the actual battle took (via @faolonfiendrender)

[projectiondepartment]

[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly.  There’s a boy in you about three years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl.  The child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like:  “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”  You live with this child, but you don’t know it.  You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy  At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy  You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.  Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you. 

/end id]

[autistichalsin]

The test for allyship isn't how you treat an oppressed person who is your friend, family, spouse. It's how you treat an oppressed person you absolutely can't stand who is vile and loathsome in every way.

Do you gender trans people correctly even when they're being absolutely terrible people? Do you refuse to use the r-slur against someone who suicide baited you but is neurodivergent? Do you refuse to snark at a mentally ill person who is being genuinely unpleasant, "go take your meds!"

Do you allow members of marginalized groups to be terrible people without judging their entire demographic for it? One of the most invisible yet vital forms of privilege is the right to be terrible people as an individual rather than as a group. Do you acknowledge that there are bad people in every group, that it doesn't make their group less worth fighting for? Or do you shake your head if you happen to get mistreated by some who belong to a group and insist the entire group is awful and not worth your allyship?

Oppressed people can see how you treat those of us you like, but do you still treat the worst of us with the basic dignity you treat the worst of other groups with?

[genderkoolaid]

good post on how using masculine words ("dude" "bro") can be misgendering and shouldn't be brushed off as gender neutral slang! now do one on how the exact same thing happens with the use of feminine terms ("girl" "sis") in queer spaces

[skaldish]

To get out of the habit of thinking of the Norse or Irish gods as being "gods of" stuff, try to think about what their occupations are instead.

Are they a chief or a king of something? Are they a protector of humanity? Are they skilled at magic and therefore could be considered a wizard, mage, or magician? Are they a warrior? Are they an entertainer? Are they a teacher?

And if you want to play this on advanced mode: Don't try to define the gods' occupations according to what they do in their myths. Think about what they do in relation to us and our societies right here and now, and in relation to the real world.

[skaldish]

I know it's easy to blame Christianity for this, but if you want to put the blame anywhere, put it in the fact we overly-rely on the Greeks and Romans for "how to do polytheism." Just because they had "gods of stuff" doesn't mean everyone else did.

[closet-keys]

it's sad to me that cis people never apply their "loved one with a wanted-pregnancy" script to medical transition. like cis people often indicate they don't know how to react to hearing about medical transition, but a huge portion of that social script is directly applicable.

tell someone "congratulations!" tell them "I'm so happy for you. I know you've been trying for a really long time." ask them "do you need help with anything?" throw them a party with loved ones where you all give them some gifts in acknowledgement of how expensive it is. celebrate how far along they are. take photos with them so they have a record of being loved while their body changes. allow them to voice fears and doubts and anxieties about how it'll go, and reassure them that they'll get through the intense medical procedure coming up & you'll be there for support no matter what. let them tell you about the gross parts and laugh together. really listen to them when they talk about how amazing and profound it is that the human body can do this. share in their excitement for beginning a new stage of their life.

If there are complications, comfort them and help them navigate what's next. If they lose access suddenly due to finances or criminalization, treat it like a miscarriage and hold them while they grieve.

[faustique]

did you get the dream i sent you?